Princeton 2026 Slavic Graduate Student Conference

The 2026 Princeton Slavic Graduate Conference focuses on the relationships between people and the State when synthesized through literature, art, and media. Our conference invites participants to think broadly and critically about subjects’ and citizens’ relationships to their states, and the cultural processes that underlie and emerge from them. In what ways are state narratives not merely endorsed or rejected but also deconstructed, reorganized, and transformed by art and media? How do different media open up these relationships to reconfiguration and novel conceptualizations? What is specific and what is global about the relationship between state and form in the contexts of Eastern Europe and Eurasia?

Inspired by work on these questions by scholars such as Maria Zalambani (Institut braka v tvorchestve L.N. Tolstogo) and Ilya Kliger (Sovereign Fictions), this conference hopes to foster further discussion on the dynamics that inform state fictions, their formation, and their evolution. We welcome papers that explore these questions both on the level of artistic representation and as part of broader social and material phenomena.

View full program here. 

Co sponsors: UCHV, REEES, Humanities Council, Comparative Literature, PIIRS, Interdisciplinary Doctoral program in the Humanities