Dear Colleagues,
Well, here it is tomorrow! The new academic year is upon us, with an odd mixture of new and old. Walking around campus already feels so completely different from last year, even as it feels a lot like years before. But not quite, of course: the pandemic continues, there are a lot more masks than there used to be, and we all need to be careful. Still, I hope that this term brings us all a sense of renewed possibilities. Certainly, at REEEC, we look forward to helping our community of scholars pursue the ambitions that brought us all here: to study, to learn, to question, to debate, to understand.
As you may know, we've moved! REEEC is now located on the first floor of Coble Hall, the former location of the Graduate College. Coble is the new home of the Illinois Global Institute as a whole, and we will be joined by all of the other centers. Right now, everything is still covered in boxes. But we're happy to see you, stop on by! You can find us on the north side of the building, the right side of the Wright Street entrance. And we're looking forward to transforming this old building into a new hub for area and thematic studies on campus. It feels good to be right across from the Quad, and closer to all the energy of campus.
We have a great slate of virtual talks lined up for this Fall. On September 30th, Professor Amanda Gregg (Department of Economics, Middlebury College) will present her research on private enterprise in late Imperial Russia. Professor Sunnie Rucker-Chang (Director, European Studies, University of Cincinnati) will join us on October 14, for a presentation on "The Chinese in Serbia as 'Perpetual Foreigners.'" This talk is part of a series being organized by Gene Avrutin and Valeria Sobol, as part of their HRI Research Cluster, "Russia and the Global Color Line." Last, but not least, on November 11th, Professor Krista Goff, author of Nested Nationalism: Making and Unmaking Nations in the Soviet Caucasus, will lead a session on the uses and meaning of oral history for the study of our region. Each of these talks will kick off at 4 p.m. They’ll all be online, so we can all slowly readjust to being back on campus. But we hope to return to in-person programming in the Spring.
This lineup is simply a preview of some of the exciting programming we have planned for this year: there’s a lot more to come. For details on these and other events, please watch your e-mail boxes for our E-Weekly and consult our website. We also recently received the news that our new 2021 Title VIII grant proposal was approved. So in collaboration with our colleagues at the Slavic Reference Service, we will be issuing a new call for applications to our Summer Research Laboratory and look forward to hosting (knock on wood) another successful Lab in 2022. We will also be continuing our partnership with the Think Tank Program next summer to bring undergraduate students from underrepresented groups to the SRL and assist in their professional development in the REEE field.
Last, and most importantly, we're thrilled to welcome some new faces this Fall. Dr. Rachel Stauffer, who started her position as Visiting Project Coordinator remotely last April, is now here, in person (105 Coble Hall). Welcome Rachel! We’d also like to welcome our five new MA and MA / MS LIS students at REEEC: Alexandra Baeva, Morgan Fox, Jacob Springer, Greta Terfruchte, and Laurel Tollison. We look forward to opportunities to introduce them to you as the semester progresses.
Speaking of which: join us this Friday for an informal, outdoor reception, in the open air of Illini Grove! (4-6 p.m., on the corner of Lincoln Avenue and Pennsylvania Avenue, Urbana, IL 61801.) We'll have pizza, beverages, and lots of space and shade for conversation. And if you can't, please don’t hesitate to contact us with your thoughts and ideas and ambitions at any time: we look forward, now as ever, to working with you!
Sincerely,
On behalf of REEEC,
John
John Randolph
Director, REEEC
Associate Professor of History