Recipient of the SHERA Graduate Student / Independent Scholar Travel Grant to attend the 2019 ASEEES meeting in San Francisco

Karen Kettering Discussion

The SHERA Board is pleased to announce that Dr. Yulia Karpova (Budapest) has been selected as the recipient of the SHERA Graduate Student / Independent Scholar Travel Grant to attend the 2019 meeting of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) in San Francisco, California. Her paper, "Late Soviet studio ceramics as a site of institutional critique" will be presented during the SHERA-sponsored panel “Culture as Matter.” Karpova's paper will demonstrate how a seemingly trivial utilitarian material, ceramics, provided the basis for thriving intellectual dialogues and the critique of the state-sponsored consumer culture that developed in the Brezhnev era. Taking Sara Ahmed’s notion of objects that orient people towards different possibilities and social positions, the study will explore the interdependency between late socialist material infrastructure, state cultural policies and ceramic artists’ critical voices.