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Speakers): Alexei Yurchak, University of California, Berkeley

Sponsored by Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies

The talk with focus on the project of continuously preserving Lenin’s body in the Mausoleum, a peculiar branch of biomedical science that emerged around that project, a unique form of ‘Leninist sovereignty’ to which this political and scientific project was linked, and the current fate of this project.

ALEXEI YURCHAK is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and an affiliated professor in the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his Ph.D. in cultural and linguistic anthropology from Duke University in 1997 (after having received a graduate degree in physics from Russia). Some of his interests and areas of expertise include: political institutions and ideologies in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia; the processes of post-socialist transformation; the interface between language, discourse and power; comparative studies of socialism and liberalism; anthropology of art and aesthetics; urban geography and anthropology of space. He is the author of Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, 2006), which won the 2007 Vucinich Book Prize for the most important contribution to Russian, Eurasian, and East European studies from AAASS.