The Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures is proud to announce that we are co-sponsoring the following Autumn 2025 Center of Excellence Lecture Series, which will bring to campus four internationally recognized scholars whose work engages urgent questions across literature, history, art, ethics, memory, and the future of knowledge.
Be sure to add these dates to your calendar - see you there!
Nicolas Valazza (Indiana University Bloomington)
Le Livre enflammé: Fiction and the Poetics of Book Burning
Thursday, October 9, 2025
4:00–5:00 PM
Thompson Library, Multipurpose Room 165
This lecture examines literary representations of book burning in 19th-century France. Exploring how novels depict the destruction of libraries and books during times of revolution, Professor Valazza considers the symbolic, aesthetic, and political implications of such acts, thus raising questions about censorship, knowledge transmission, and the material future of the book.
André Leblanc (Högskolan Dalarna, Sweden / Visiting Scholar at OSU, 2026)
Modernity of Madame de Staël and the Coppet Group
Thursday, October 30, 2025
4:00–5:00 PM
Thompson Library, Multipurpose Room 165
This talk revisits the early 19th-century ideal of human perfectibility, across literature, politics, and science, and asks what it might still offer us today. It reflects on intercultural dialogue, democratic resistance, and the ethical foundations of humanist thought.
Bruno Cabanes (The Ohio State University)
The Ghosts of Peleliu Island: Writing Narrative Non-Fiction as a Military Historian
Tuesday, November 18, 2025
4:30–6:00 PM
Thompson Library, Multipurpose Room 165
Based on years of archival and field research, this talk explores memory and identity on Peleliu Island, a major Pacific battlefield of WWII. Combining historical scholarship, travel writing, and ethnography, Cabanes offers a layered portrait of a place marked by colonialism, war, and remembrance.
Annabel L. Kim (Harvard University)
Free Fiction: Darrieussecq v. Laurens
Thursday, November 20, 2025
4:00–5:00 PM
Online (CarmenZoom Webinar – registration required)
Professor Kim revisits a high-profile literary dispute over who has the right to write certain experiences, and what fiction should be allowed to do. Through two biographical works by the authors involved, she reflects on the politics of citation, narrative authority, and the boundaries of fiction in a polarized cultural climate.
