The Yale Slavic Colloquium invites you to join us for a presentation and discussion with Mieka Erley, Assistant Professor of Russian and Eurasian Studies at Colgate University. Her talk, entitled Chekist as Author: Plotting the Soviet Carceral Zone from Belomor Canal to Vakhsh, will take place on Wednesday, March 7th in WLH 207 at 3.30 PM.
Mieka Erley is Assistant Professor of Russian and Eurasian Studies at Colgate University. She studies the cultural history of Russia and Central Asia in the imperial and Soviet periods, with a focus on the relationship between cultural production and knowledge production in the social and natural sciences. Her current book is a cultural-environmental history of Russian soil entitled Black Soil, Red Earth: Russian Soil and the Landscapes of Socialism. The work examines evolving material-discursive practices around soil in Russia and its borderlands from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, considering soil as a natural-historical agent, a subject of scientific knowledge, a medium of social exchange, and a site of cultural mythmaking. Her work has been published in Slavic Review and Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie (NLO).