Call for Papers
RUSSIAN AVIATION AND SPACE: TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURAL IMAGINATION
Workshop in Leeds (UK) ::: 29 October 2010
Call for papers deadline: 1 May 2010.
From Blok to Maiakovskii, from Malevich to Goncharova, and from film chronicles to feature film, Russian cultural responses to the acquisition of flight have reflected and contributed to Russian self-perception. Since the early public displays of heavier-than-air technology in Russia , flight and aviation have been important to the world’s perception of Russian and Soviet identity. Konstantin Tsiolkovskii, the internationally recognized father (along with the American physicist, Robert H. Goddard) of theoretical rocket propulsion and space flight, enabled early aviation-generations world-wide to visualize, and therefore to believe in, the possibility of actualizing the dream of flight beyond Earth’s atmosphere.
This workshop will explore the mutual influences of science and the cultural imagination in terms of aviation and cosmology. It will look at material which relates to the decades between aviation’s origins and Gagarin’s first manned space flight in 1961. It seeks to contribute to an understanding of the relationships which might exist between cultural and scientific modelling. It also seeks to explore the scientific and artistic mediums in which aviation, aero and outer-space are imagined, studied and communicated. It will focus on the centennial anniversary of the first All Russian Aviation Week” and the first “All Russian Festival of Aeronautics” in St Petersburg in 1910 (April-May and September-October respectively), and the upcoming 50th anniversary of the first space flight by Yuri Gagarin in 2011, in order to assess the cultural background and cultural impact of Russian aviation from the C20th and into the C21st.
Confirmed Key Speakers:
Professor Helena Goscilo (Chair, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Ohio State University ) “Unclouded Vision: Soviet Aviation”
Professor Julian Graffy ( School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London ) “Representation of Flight in Contemporary Russian Cinema”
Mr Aleksei Popogrebsky (Russian filmmaker, director of the award winning feature “Koktebel’” (2003); his 2010 film “How I Ended this Summer” received two awards at the Berlin film festival).
Papers are sought from a spectrum of disciplines such as Art, Cinema, Cultural Studies, History, Literature, Political Science, Science and Engineering. The themes for papers might include: ideas of aviation and flight which reveal questions of identity; flight as an expression of freedom; and flight as cinematic and aviation technology. Because much of the technology which gave rise to space flight was conceived in the same period as early heavier- than-air technology, this call includes papers which look at themes and expressions of man ’s dreams of space prior to the launch of Sputnik. Suggested categories which the papers may fall into include: Cultural and National Identity, Mythology, Invention and Exploration, Gender, and questions of Utopian and Dystopian responses to the machine age.
Please send your abstracts (300-500 words) to the organizers by 1 May 2010.
The workshop is organized by Candyce Veal (University College London), John Etty and Vlad Strukov ( University of Leeds ).
Further details are available at the project’s website.