Archiving Socialisms: Material and Intellectual Legacies
Description
Socialism has left traces — some concrete and obdurate, others spectral and elusive. These endure not only in architecture and infrastructure, but also in affective communities, and collective imaginings, as well as within intellectual and cultural legacies found in literary artifacts, periodicals, film, print media, and other forms of knowledge production. Through these channels, political imaginaries circulated, subjectivities were shaped, and socialist discourse was structured across diverse regions. These material and intellectual inheritances have outlasted the political projects that created them and have actively shaped contemporary realities and subjectivities, influencing how we remember and imagine the past in the cities, landscapes, and social worlds that this ideology has formed. Yet, despite their persistence, too little effort has been dedicated to systematically archiving, classifying, and studying these inheritances. Without such sustained attention, much of their complexity risks being overlooked or lost.
This seminar invites contributions that explore socialist and post-socialist experiences —not as a linear continuation or abrupt rupture, but as overlapping and interpenetrating temporalities. We are particularly interested in recovering neglected histories.
Particular attention merits the case of Cuba, where, although socialism remains officially in place, a pervasive sense of ending marks the present—what might be called living in post-history—and where narratives remain to be researched and brought to light. Comparative perspectives from Eastern European, Soviet, Sino-socialist, and other global socialist experiences are welcome.
Themes and questions may include, but are not limited to:
- Persistent material legacies: infrastructures, landscapes, buildings, monuments, and technologies that resist erasure or repurposing.
- Intellectual and cultural archives: literature, periodicals, film, print media, and other disseminated forms that circulated socialist imaginaries, shaped subjectivities, and mediated political and cultural discourse.
- Archives of subjectivity: everyday life under socialism and post-socialism; subjects who lived, live by, in, and out of socialism.
- Hauntology and spectral politics: socialism as ghost, echo, or unfinished project.
- Narratives and counter-narratives: how socialist pasts are remembered, contested, reimagined, or commodified.
- Institutional residues: archives, pedagogical forms, bureaucratic procedures, political languages.
- Global entanglements: comparative and transnational perspectives on socialist and post-socialist conditions.
We seek conceptual, theoretical, and archival approaches from fields including cultural studies, anthropology, history, political theory, architecture, art history, and literary studies. Papers may engage with specific case studies, cross-regional comparisons, or conceptual frameworks that illuminate how socialism endures, mutates, and is archived —materially and imaginatively.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Juntian CAI is currently an MA student at the New School for Social Research, New York, majoring in philosophy. His research interests include Marx and Marxism (especially the critique of political economy), critical theory (especially Adorno), and media studies (especially political economy of media), with recent conference presentations in North America and Europe.
Speaker Bio
Dr. Tiffany Yun-Chu Tsai is Director of the Chinese Program and Associate Professor of Chinese in the Department of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures at The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina. Her research, Cannibalism as Pathology: China’s Modernity in Crisis, examines the rhetoric of “enemies of the state” behind the discourse of cannibalism and demonstrates that this discourse’s thematic evolution reflects China’s traumatic modern experiences.
Speaker Bio
Matilde Veglia is a PhD student in the Department of Romance Studies at Cornell University. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Philosophy from the University of Bologna (Italy) and a Master’s degree in Ethnic and Migration Studies from Linköpings Universitet (Sweden). Her research focuses on the relationship between aesthetic production, political practices, and cultures of resistance within the Italian context.
Speaker Bio
Amy Barenboim is PhD candidate in the department of English & Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Her dissertation, "Shadow Internationlisms: African Diasporic Literature and the 'Jewish Question,'" addresses Black internationalist writing about the geopolitics of anti-Semitism and Jewish nationalism, from the German-Jewish Refugee Crisis and the partition of Palestine, to the Suez Crisis and Soviet Jewry Movement.
Papers
Speaker Bio
I am currently an Assistant Professor of German at Colgate University. I have published a book chapter on Paul Celan’s reception of Osip Mandelstam. My article on Sasha Marianna Salzmann’s critical exploration of memory and language is currently under review for a special issue in Monatshefte. My book project, Accessing the Soviet Past Through German-Language Literature, studies the recent output by younger German-language authors with a post-Soviet background.
Speaker Bio
Valentina Glajar is Professor of German Studies and Honorary Professor of International Studies at Texas State University. She has written and coedited several books on German-language literature from Central and Eastern Europe, including The Secret Police Dossier of Herta Müller (Camden House, 2023), which received the 2025 George Blazyca Prize from the BASEES. She is currently engaged in a project on Romanian spies in the service of American Intelligence from the 1940s and 1950s.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Jacqueline Loss, Professor of Latin American Literary and Cultural Studies at UConn, is author of Dreaming in Russian: The Cuban Soviet Imaginary and Cosmopolitanisms and Latin America, and co-editor of The Cambridge History of Cuban Literature, Caviar with Rum: Cuba-USSR and the Post-Soviet Experience, and New Short Fiction from Cuba. Her work appears in Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies and Asymptote. She curated Selected Pages (2022) and is completing the documentary FINOTYPE.
Speaker Bio
Marta Hernández Salván is Associate Professor in Hispanic Studies at UC, Riverside where she specializes in contemporary Caribbean cultural production. Her monograph Minima Cuba:Heretical Poetics and Power in Post-Soviet Cuba explores the exhaustion of the allegorical and melancholic rhetoric of the Cuban Revolution. She is co-editor of Asedios a lo increado:Nuevas perspectivas sobre Lezama Lima. She’s currently working on a monograph about censored films from the 60s, affect, and space.
Speaker Bio
María Isabel Alfonso studied Literature at the University of Havana and earned her Ph.D. in Romance Languages from the University of Miami. Her research focuses on cultural policies and the dynamics of exclusion and legitimization in the Cuban literary field, themes she explores in Ediciones El Puente y los vacíos del canon literario cubano (Editorial Veracruzana, 2016). Alfonso is also the director of the documentary Rethinking Cuban Civil Society (Icarus Films, 2019).
Papers
Speaker Bio
Katya Lopatko is a PhD candidate at UC Santa Barbara studying 20th century European film, literature and culture and its global connections. She is particularly interested in the cultural production of global socialisms during the Cold War period, and her dissertation project traces the international contacts made at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in 1960s Czechoslovakia, particularly relating to the emergence of decolonial and Third Worldist film practices.
Speaker Bio
Michele Hardesty is Associate Professor of U.S. Literatures & Cultural Studies at Hampshire College. Her work appears in boundary 2, Critical Quarterly, The Monthly Review, Archive Journal, Radical History Review, and edited volumes including Neocolonial Fictions of the Global Cold War (2019) and Transforming the Authority of the Archive: Undergraduate Pedagogy and Critical Digital Archives (2023). Hardesty is affiliated with Hampshire in Havana Program.