Workshop in Leeds (England) 29 October 2010
RUSSIAN AVIATION AND SPACE: TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURAL IMAGINATION
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
([log in to unmask]) 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 on the project's website
(http://aviation.vladstrukov.com/).
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