The Ellison Center at the University of Washington

Dr. William Craft Brumfield introduces the William Brumfield Russian Architecture Digital Collection, an online resource available through the UW Library featuring over 29,000 images of Russian sites, mostly buildings constructed from the Middle Ages and the present. To access the William Brumfield Russian Architecture Digital Collection, please visit the following URL: http://content.lib.washington.edu/brumfieldweb/index.html

Dr. Brumfield also discusses "Architecture at the End of the Earth," an exhibition of his photographs from the Russian north at the University of Washington. Following Dr. Brumfield, University of Washington professors Christopher Campbell, Elena Campbell, Ivan Drpić, and Ellen Hurst provide remarks about Russian architecture and heritage.

Brumfield's exhibit and the event at the University of Washington was recently featured in Russia Beyond the Headlines. To read the article, click here: https://www.rbth.com/special_projects/discovering_russia_1/2017/05/12/russian-architecture-at-the-end-of-the-earth-draws-american-audience_761744

To access the William Brumfield Russian Architecture Digital Collection, please visit the following URL: http://content.lib.washington.edu/brumfieldweb/index.html

A professor of Russian literature at Tulane University in New Orleans, William Brumfield is the author of over forty books and hundreds of articles on Russian architectural history and is widely recognized as North America’s foremost expert on the subject.

A hundred years after his murder, Rasputin continues to excite the popular imagination as the personification of evil. Numerous biographies, novels, and films recount his mysterious rise to power as Nicholas and Alexandra's confidant and the guardian of the sickly heir to the Russian throne.

But as the prizewinning historian Douglas Smith shows, the true story of Rasputin's life and death has remained shrouded in myth. In this lecture, Smith separates fact from fiction, drawing on his extensive archival research. In his book, "Rasputin: Faith, Power, and the Twilight of the Romanovs," Smith presents Rasputin in all his complexity — man of God, voice of peace, loyal subject, adulterer, drunkard.

During two terrifying days and nights in September 1941, the lives of nearly 2,000 men, women, and children were taken savagely by their neighbors in Kulen Vakuf, a small rural community straddling today's border between northwest Bosnia and Croatia. The frenzy — in which victims were butchered with farm tools, drowned in rivers, and thrown into deep vertical caves — was the culmination of a chain of local massacres that began earlier in the summer.

Max Bergholz is Associate Professor of History at Concordia University in Montreal. In this talk, he discusses research from his book, "Violence as a Generative Force" which tells the story of the sudden and perplexing descent into extreme violence of a once peaceful multiethnic community straddling the border between Bosnia and Croatia.

In this lecture, Grazyna Szymanska-Matusiewicz discusses the changing patterns of political involvement of an important and surprisingly sizable part of the global Vietnamese diaspora — the Vietnamese from Central and Eastern Europe. While the Vietnamese American community has long been known for its anticommunist stance, the attitudes of Vietnamese communities in Central and Eastern Europe have been more nuanced.

Grazyna Szymanska-Matusiewicz is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Sociology of the University of Warsaw. Her academic interests concentrate on the Vietnamese diaspora in Poland.

MIT Professor Emeritus and former US Director of Central Intelligence John Deutch speaks about US nuclear security as part of the Henry M. Jackson/James R. Schlesinger Visitor Lecture Series.

Dr. John Deutch served as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency from 1995-1996, where he was head of the Intelligence Community (all foreign intelligence agencies of the United States). Prior, he served as Deputy Secretary of Defense (1994-1995) and Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisitions and Technology (1993-1994).

During this talk at the University of Washington, Emily Greble discusses how Sharia law came to be enshrined in the constitution of interwar Yugoslavia, a modern, European democracy, and why this is significant for understanding the transformation from empire to nation-state, legal pluralism in the modern era, and the nature of minority protections in interwar Europe.

Emily Greble, a historian of the Balkans, is Associate Professor of History and East European Studies at Vanderbilt University. Her first book, "Sarajevo, 1941-1945: Muslims, Christians and Jews in Hitler's Europe" (Cornell, 2011) examines the persistence of institutions and networks in the city of Sarjevo under Nazi occupation during the Second World War.

Maria Lipman, a Russian analyst and editor of the online journal Counterpoint, discusses Russia's past and future as the country marks the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. According to Lipman, Russia does not have a shared national narrative of this formative event of the twentieth century. Lipman discusses how the Russian government is commemorating the anniversary and talks about what a fourth presidential term for Vladimir Putin might mean for the Russian Federation.

Maria Lipman was the featured speaker for the 2017 Herbert J. Ellison Memorial Lecture at the University of Washington.

Andrei Kozyrev served as post-Soviet Russia's Foreign Minister from 1991 to 1996, having previously served as Foreign Minister of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. Kozyrev was an early advocate for increased cooperation between the United States and Russia and advocated for the end of the Cold War.

Since 2000, Kozyrev has lectured on international affairs and served on the boards of a number of Russian international companies. His most recent article, "Boris Yeltsin, the CIS, and Me" appears in the Wilson Quarterly. He is currently in residence as a Distinguished Fellow at the Kennan Institute in Washington, DC.

Kozyrev spoke at the University of Washington, where he discussed US-Russia relations since the disintegration of the Soviet Union.

The Russian Revolution was at once a symbol of hope for the oppressed and a warning sign for those in power. It fueled decades of anticommunist ideologies and policies all over the world, but it also had unlikely connections with the Pacific Northwest.

Glennys Young is a Professor in the University of Washington's Department of History and the Jackson School of International Studies. She specializes in Russia and the Soviet Union.

In this talk, Robert David Greenberg discusses controversies and unresolved issues surrounding the status of Muslim Slavs in the Western Balkans. The states that emerged from the former Yugoslavia have established new hierarchies of official and regional or minority languages. The new languages, largely considered to be mutually intelligible, co-exist within the borders of the new states, and this reality has posed significant challenges to language planners.

Robert David Greenberg is Dean of Arts and Professor of Linguistics at The University of Auckland. He is a specialist in South Slavic languages and linguistics and has worked on sociolinguistic issues in the former Yugoslavia.