Happening @ Michigan

WCEE Lecture. Ukraine’s War in Seven Lives: Writing a People-Centered History of the Present

Danielle Leavitt, WCEE Postdoctoral Fellow, 2025-27

Since 2022, the Russo-Ukrainian war has shaken the global order—and transformed countless individual lives. Drawing on years of personal...

WCEE Lecture. AI for National and International Security: Opportunities Without Losing Control

Driart Elshani, Weiser Professional Development Fellow, Fall 2025

Artificial Intelligence is rapidly reshaping how we understand and address conflict. This talk introduces emerging tools at the intersection...

CREES Noon Lecture. Poetic Voice from a Russian Prison: Zhenya Berkovich and her Striking Protest

Anna Narinskaya, Russian Journalist, playwright, art curator, and activist

On April 10, 2023, experimental director Zhenya Berkovich and playwright Svetlana Petrichuk were arrested in Russia on charges of...

WCEE Film Series on Ukraine. Erase the Nation (2023, 56 min)

Followed by Q&A with film director and war journalist Tomasz Grzywaczewski. Moderator, Joseph Sywenkyj, Howard R. Marsh Visiting Professor of Journalism, LSA, Communication and Media, U-M

"Erase the Nation" is a documentary war film that sheds light on the tragic chapter of Russian war crimes committed against...

WCEE Film Series on Ukraine. Soldiers of Song (2024, 90 min, dir. Ryan Smith)

Musicians unite a war-torn Ukraine through song, sharing stories of resilience and hope amid the Russian invasion. A tribute to courage and...

CREES Noon Lecture. Nonalignment and Decolonial Imagination: Yugoslav Literary Encounters with the Global South

Nataša Kovačević, Professor of English, Eastern Michigan University

Yugoslavia’s pivot away from the Eastern Bloc and toward decolonizing countries in the Global South, which resulted in the founding of the...

WCEE Film Series on Ukraine. Lina (2024, 30 min, dir. Mykola Nosok & Oleksiy Oliyar)

Panel discussion: Mykola Kuleba, Chief Executive Officer, Charitable Fund "Save Ukraine"; Danielle Leavitt, WCEE Postdoctoral Fellow, 2025-27; and Nathaniel A. Raymond, Executive Director, Humanitarian Research Lab, Yale School of Public Health

This is the story of five-year-old Lina, the seventh child of a family of eight children, who is caught between the frontlines of free...

CCPS Lecture. The Trauma of Serfdom: The Psychological Legacy of Unfree Labor in Poland

Kacper Pobłocki, social anthropologist, writer, and associate professor at the University of Warsaw

Coerced labor was a defining feature of the early modern world. While Atlantic slavery has received most scholarly attention, Eastern...

WCEE Distinguished Lecture. Navigating Fragmentation: Great Power Rivalry, Trade, and Technology in the 21st Century

Jon Huntsman, former U.S. Ambassador to Singapore (1992–1993), China (2009–2011), and Russia (2017–2019)

A conversation with Ambassador Jon Huntsman, focusing on international affairs — and in particular on current issues related to Russia and...

CREES Noon Lecture. A Global Perspective on Campaigns for Reproductive Rights: Insights from Soviet and Contemporary Russia

Michele Rivkin-Fish, UNC-Chapel Hill

The first ever public campaign to defend access to legal abortion in Russia took place in 2011. Notably, Russian advocates avoided common...

CCPS Lecture. 79.89.09: Iran and Poland

Slavs and Tatars

79.89.09 looks at two key modern moments—the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and Poland’s Solidarność [Solidarity] movement in the...

CREES Noon Lecture. The Information Age Behind the Iron Curtain: Bulgarian Computers and The Society They Tried to Build

Victor Petrov, University of Tennessee, Knoxville

How did a small Balkan state become a Cold War power in the electronic field during its socialist period? During the years of late...

CCPS Lecture. East of the Atlantic. Black and White (But Not Quite)

Oliwia Bosomtwe, author

Oliwia Bosomtwe, the author of Jak biały człowiek (2024) [Like a White Man], explores the stories of people of African descent...

CREES Noon Lecture. The Last Soviet Artist

Victoria Lomasko, artist and writer

The Last Soviet Artist (n+1, 2025), finished by Victoria Lomasko three weeks before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, is a collection of...