Announcement: Dr. Julia Mickenberg gives talk on American artists in Soviet Russia

This Friday, January 30, our very own Dr. Julia Mickenberg will share her work with the Modern Studies group at UT Austin in a talk titled, "Missions to Moscow: Vision and Veracity in Margaret Bourke-White and Lillian Hellman's Wartime Portraits of Soviet Russia."Dr. Mickenberg had the following to say about her talk:

 My talk will discuss photojournalism, memoirs, radio documentaries, unpublished writings, and screenplays by Margaret Bourke White and Lillian Hellman concerning the Russian front during World War II, particularly Hellman’s screenplay for North Star (the highest-grossing wartime film about Russia) and Bourke White’s photo-memoir, Shooting the Russian War. Both women were core actors in the Popular Front, and both have attracted intense interest as historical figures. Both were criticized by prominent members of the anti-Stalinist Left for their politics and for their apparent dishonesty, lack of integrity, and/or opportunism. Through archival and textual analysis I'll use World War II as a framework and Bourke-White and Hellman as  lenses for considering the way in which World War II temporarily revived and also predicted the un-sustainability of a Soviet-influenced left-feminism in the United States.

The event will take place in Battle Hall 1.101 at 1:30pm. Hope to see y'all there!

Faculty Research: Dr. Julia Mickenberg Featured on 'BackStory'

We're pleased to share the news with you that Dr. Julia Mickenberg is featured in a discussion about the history of US - Russia Relations for BackStory, a nationally-syndicated public radio program affiliated with the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. Dr. Mickenberg discusses her research relating to women's suffrage in the early 20th century.Here's a summary of the episode, which you can listen to in full here.

In the past year, the White House and the Kremlin have sparred over Syria, the Winter Olympics, and now, the crisis in Ukraine. It can be tempting to view these events through the familiar lens of the Cold War, but in this episode, the History Guys probe the deeper history of our relationship with Russia — and discover moments of comity as well as conflict.They’ll discuss Alexis de Tocqueville’s famous prediction in the 1830s, that the United States and Russia were “two great nations” that would each come to “hold in [their] hands the destinies of half the world.” And they find long-term connections and comparisons between the countries over time. From Civil War-era analogies between freeing American slaves and freeing Russian serfs, to early 20th-century debates over women’s suffrage, Americans have often looked to Russia as a counterpart, if sometimes a cautionary one.