Joan Neuberger ’75 Will Discuss the Arts in Stalin’s Russia on Sept. 19
Event Details
Joan Neuberger ’75, professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin, will give the Scholars’ Convocation Lecture on Thursday, Sept. 19. The lecture is free and open to the public.
What
The lecture is titled This Thing of Darkness: Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible in Stalin’s Russia. Neuberger studies modern Russian culture in social and political contexts, with a focus on the politics of the arts. She is the author of an eclectic range of publications and her new book, published earlier this year by Cornell University Press, has the same title as her lecture.
Neuberger will discuss Russia’s foremost filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein and his creation of the unfinished trilogy Ivan the Terrible. Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin compelled Eisenstein to produce the three-part epic to glorify the Russian past and justify state terror. It was a dangerous assignment in a dictatorship that sent many authors to forced-labor camps.
Although controversial, Part I of Ivan the Terrible won the Stalin Prize – the highest honor given by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Stalin went on to personally ban the release of Part II and Eisenstein died before finishing Part III.
“In this master work about a master filmmaker, Neuberger shines a light on all three,” wrote C.P. Lesley in a review of Neuberger’s book. “In doing so she highlights the many decisions any author must make while balancing historical accuracy against dramatic potential and character motivation against a verifiable past.”
When
11 a.m. Thursday, Sept. 19
Where
Room 101 of the Joe Rosenfield ’25 Center, 1115 Eighth Ave., Grinnell
Who
Joan Neuberger teaches classes about modern Russia, 19th century Europe, film, and visual culture, as well as undergraduate and graduate courses in public history and digital history. She also is editor of the history department’s public history website Not Even Past and cohost of the history podcast series 15 Minute History.
Additionally, Neuberger is author of Hooliganism: Crime and Culture in St. Petersburg, 1900-1914 and Ivan the Terrible: The Film Companion and co-author of Europe and the Making of Modernity, 1815-1914. She serves as co-editor of Imitations of Life: Melodrama in Russia; Picturing Russia: Explorations in Visual Culture; Everyday Life in Russian History: Quotidian Studies in Honor of Daniel Kaiser; and The Flying Carpet: Studies on Eisenstein in Honor of Naum Kleiman.