Prof. Angela Brintlinger has received a Fulbright grant to travel to Warsaw, Poland in the Spring 2013 semester, to teach and conduct research for her project “World War II, Afghanistan, and Chechnya in Soviet and Post-Soviet Culture.” She will spend five months both teaching and researching at the University of Warsaw’s Center for East European Studies, and also plans to travel throughout Poland in order to seek out colleagues with similar interests at Polish universities.
 
Prof. Brintlinger describes her larger project as follows:
 
“War was a central experience of the Soviet 20th century. If the Revolution and Civil War were the "founding" moments for Soviet culture, and Stalin's terror and World War II its most defining events, then the war with Afghanistan was a fatal step that helped bring the Soviet Union down. Since the 1980s, though, Afghanistan has not been nearly as central to Soviet and post-Soviet cultural production as World War II, which continues to fascinate Russian readers and viewers to this day. Afghanistan carries a stigma in representation similar to that experienced by veterans of the American war in Vietnam; the war ended in defeat, and the many veterans returned downtrodden and damaged by their experiences.”
 
During her stay in Warsaw, she proposes to map the post-Soviet military landscape as reflected in the literature and film of the 1980s to the present. She is looking to understand the relationships between authors, directors, and audiences as they struggled to depict the complexities of war while also themselves functioning in variants of repressive political regimes.