The Program in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies trains students to analyze and interpret the territory, peoples, history, languages, and cultural practices of the Eurasian landmass from a multidisciplinary perspective. The founder of the Russian Studies Program at Stetson University, Serge Zenkovsky, was a Russophone Ukrainian from Kyiv whose scholarship dealt largely with Muslim regio
ns in the historical Russian Empire, many of which are located in what we refer to problematically as Central Asia. His research focused on Pan-Turkism, an ethnic-identity movement that originated in the early nineteenth century in the Russian Empire, but had its most momentous effect in the founding of modern Turkey in 1920. When Professor Zenkovsky came to Stetson in the 1950s, there was neither a Ukraine, nor a Russia: The geographic entity was properly called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and among these republics were the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Even scholars, however, used the inaccurate shorthand “Russia” to refer to the “other” superpower. Since the McCarthy era had tainted any association with Russia, the specialists who formed our national organization named it the somewhat ridiculous and long-winded American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies. (American, to clarify that this was no front of the Communist Party!) Choosing to call ourselves Slavists was nonetheless contentious and problematic. It’s an obscure term, and moreover, of the hundreds of ethnoses in the huge expanse of the Russian/Soviet Empire, many aren’t Slavs: There are Magyars, Tatars, Turks, Mari, Samoyeds, Permians, Greeks, Chuvash, Germans, Jews…
In the early 1960s, with the Space Race and Sputnik, an agreement of the Independent Colleges and Universities of Florida designated Stetson the member institution that would focus on the “Russian” area, and the Russian Studies Program was born. In 1989, Stetson received a grant for major development of Russian Studies; it substantially increased its holdings of Russian Studies sources in the DuPont-Ball Library, renovated the current Russian Studies Center, and hired a permanent, fulltime Russian language instructor. Suddenly the region consisted of the Russian Federation and (eventually) a score of successor states. Archives were opened, censorship ended, borders became porous, and nation asserted itself against empire. These new or (re)emerged trajectories called for more varied academic specializations. As a discipline, we discovered that we needed more training in languages other than Russian to understand and analyze these new states, borders, and peoples. Russian Studies, then, has never accurately reflected what we teach and research. Our proposed program name, Stetson’s Program in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies, is necessarily long because it is inclusive and indicative of the complex matter we study. (Perhaps it’s salvaged with the catchy acronym, SPREES.) Historically, disciplines have consolidated because there was a shared intellectual agenda and a commitment to institutionalizing that agenda. Russian Studies, as an area studies discipline, was born of the Cold War need to understand—and fight—the Soviet Union. The task of all such programs, after 1991, has been to re-define not only name, but also the mission and intellectual agenda of the program. SPREES unites a historian, a political scientist, a scholar of literature, a member of the Communication Studies department, an art historian, and (starting next year) a musicologist. SPREES correctly gestures towards our expanded faculty’s nuanced pursuit of understanding border zones, ethnic identity, cross-regional studies, transnational markets, the clash and coexistence of faiths, etc. In what will now seem a perfectly ordinary and characteristic moment for our transnational, interdisciplinary program, Eugene Huskey this June gave a lecture in the western Ukrainian city Lemberg/Lwow/Lvov/L’viv about Kyrgyzstan and the similarities between civil unrest there, in 2005 and 2010, and in Ukraine over the past year. Mayhill Fowler, a cultural historian of Russia and Eastern Europe, has taught at a summer school of Jewish history in Ukraine. Katya Kudryavsteva researches the international art market from St. Petersburg to New York City and beyond. In the fall, Dr. Fowler will teach a course, Empire, Culture, Power: An Introduction to Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies, which is squarely aimed at leading students to think in the necessarily complex concepts like "empire," "East/West," and "multi-ethnicity.”
Russia and Moscow used to be Mecca for our students studying abroad. Now, more characteristic is the experience of Richard Pemberton: He began studying in Kiev in December 2014. When political events took a turn for the worse, he relocated to Odessa, where he stayed until the situation worsened there, too. He then spent a few weeks in Transnistria, a breakaway state in Moldova on the border with Ukraine that wants to join the Russian Federation. Richard left Transnistria for Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan before moving to Tbilisi, Georgia. He spent a total of a week in Russia itself, yet studied the states and peoples that made up the Russian and Soviet empires, and the questions raised by the Soviet legacy. Georgia Peters is currently studying Uzbek at Indiana University’s summer school before heading for Kyrgyzstan in August; her plans include eventually learning Uyghur and focusing on the borderland between “Central Asia” and China. Our former students carry on this broad, inclusive, and inquisitive attitude: Two of our graduates, Kristen Blalock and Claire Locker, work in the U. Embassy in Moscow. Hannah Chapman, completing her PhD at Wisconsin, studies youth movements in Kazakhstan. Paul Radenhausen lives permanently in Bishkek. Christine Jacobson, starting the MA program at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard, starts Tajik in the fall. Our name change, moreover, follows in a similar trajectory as other such programs across the US. Stetson in unique in that it is a small regional university that manages to support a program with 6 tenured or tenure-track faculty focusing on this region’s history, politics, literature and art; it is not unique in its turn to a more cumbersome, yet accurate, program name. In short, the shift from Russian Studies to SPREES reflects the next chapter in how we study and teach this region. Our students may learn Russian, as the lingua franca of the region (at times, for most), but they will graduate from our program with a nuanced understanding of why that is, the complexities of empire, and why, in fact, names matter.
