BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0 PRODID:-//Talks.cam//talks.cam.ac.uk// X-WR-CALNAME:Talks.cam BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:The Hughesovka Research Archive: A Donbass Symphony - Dr Victoria Donovan\, St Andrews DTSTART:20181016T160000Z DTEND:20181016T173000Z UID:TALK111955@talks.cam.ac.uk CONTACT:53971 DESCRIPTION:Within the collections of the Glamorgan Archives is housed a p eculiar stockpile of personal documents\, photographs\, and belongings rel ating to a relatively little-known episode in the history of South Wales: the outmigration of Welsh industrial labour to the mining settlement of Hu ghesovka in Southern Russia (now Eastern Ukraine) at the end of the ninete enth – beginning of the twentieth century. \n\nThis collection\, the *Hu ghesovka Research Archive*\, offers glimpses of British migrant life on th e Russian steppe\, a destination that many hoped would provide a means of personal enrichment and upward mobility at a time of industrial contractio n and depression in South Wales. The letters home and memoirs\, written fo r the most part by women who\, as scholars of migrant epistolarity have sh own\, were often responsible for maintaining transnational “webs of affe ction and obligation\,” are the focus of this paper. These documents rev eal the diverse strategies deployed by individuals to negotiate cultural i dentity in emigration: from ethnographic commentary that draws on the trad itions of nineteenth-century travelogue writing to shore up a sense of col lective self thrown into flux by the act of crossing national borders\; to the narration of everyday mundanities that lend the writings an oral qual ity\, an intimacy and intensity\, which\, as a form of speech act\, help e nforce family discipline and sustain social networks at distance.\n\nAlong side her academic research\, Dr Donovan will also discuss her public engag ement project\, ‘Enthusiasm’. This innovative\, interdisciplinary one- day arts event brought together musicians\, members of the community\, arc hivists and historians to take a radical look at a little-known historical episode that links Merthyr and the South Wales Valleys to the Donbas in U kraine and asks how the legacy of this past continues to resonate in our s ocial\, cultural and political landscape today. \n\nAs part of the Enthusi asm project a new soundtrack to Dziga Vertov’s 1931 film _Enthusiasm: Th e Donbass Symphony_ was commissioned from Welsh composer Simon Gore (film provided courtesy Austrian Film Museum). The full\, hour-long performance was premiered at ‘Enthusiasm’ in Merthyr Tydfil on 1st July 2017. An e xcerpt from the performance can be viewed "here":https://vimeo.com/2387882 87/60b445064c. A film screening of Vertov’s _Enthusiasm_ with the origin al soundtrack will take place on Thursday\, October 11\, at 6pm in the Rai sed Faculty Building\, Room 142 (MML Faculty\, Sidgwick Site).\n\nThis tal k is the second in a series of events focusing on the entanglements of his tory\, memory and identity in Central and Eastern Europe\, sponsored by th e Cambridge Committee for Russian and East European Studies (CamCREES). Th e event will be hosted by Tadek Wojtych\, a PhD student in the Faculty of History researching politics of history and memory in Central and Eastern Europe.\n\n*Dr Victoria Donovan* (St Andrews) is a cultural historian of R ussia whose research explores local identities\, heritage politics\, and t he cultural memory of the Soviet past in twenty-first century Russia. She has published research articles in Russian and English-language journals\, including _Antropologicheskii forum_\, _Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie_\, _ Slavonica_\, and _Slavic Review_. She is currently finalizing her monograp h ‘Chronicles in Stone: Preservation\, Patriotism and Identity in the Ru ssian Northwest’. She is leading several impact projects at the Universi ty of St Andrews and was selected as one of the BBC/AHRC New Generation Th inkers. In this role\, she has been developing topics from her research fo r radio and television.\n\n LOCATION:Latimer Room\, Clare College END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR