The Great Experiment Conference
February 10 & 11, 2012
211 Dickinson Hall
Conference Organizers:
Robert R. MacGregor and Ksenia Tatarchenko, Ph.D. Candidates in the History of Science Program, Princeton University
Conference Sponsors:
Center for Collaborative History, Davis Center for Historical Studies, the Graduate School, Department of History, Program in Russian & Eurasian Studies and Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Princeton University
PROGRAM
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 2012
3:00 - 4:30 p.m.
Opening Address and Talk by Loren Graham
"Lonely Ideas: Russia's Trap"
4:45 - 6:30 p.m.
Transforming the Soviet Environment
Comments: Michael Gordin
Pey-Yi Chu, Ph.D. Princeton, Harvard, Davis Center,
“Mapping Permafrost Country: Visualizations of Frozen Earth in Russian History”
Gregory Ferguson-Cradler, Princeton, HOS,
“Fisheries, Fishing and Climate Change in the Soviet Caspian Sea, 1935-1950”
Mieka Erley, Berkeley, Slavic Lit,
"Land beyond Reclamation: Soviet Agricultural Utopia and the Asian Desert"
Elena A. Kochetkova, European Univ. St. Petersburg, History,
“The Soviet Forestry and Technologies in 1953-1964: Transfer and Implementation”
SATURDAY: FEBRUARY 11, 2012
8:30 - 10:00 a.m.
Computing and Innovation
Comments: Slava Gerovitch
Benjamin Peters, Ph.D. Columbia, Tulsa University, Communications,
“Technological Utopianisms in Early Soviet Networks”
Alexey Golubev, Univ. British Columbia, History,
“Communism in one Garage Laboratory: Invention and Amateur Engineering as a Utopian Project of the Soviet Technical Intelligentsia”
Zinaida Vasilyeva, Univ. of Neuchâtel, Anthropology,
“The Invention in Planned Economy”
Ksenia Tatarchenko, Princeton University, History of Science
Making (a) Place for the Soviet Programming: Back to the Future (1968-1988)
10:30 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.
Open and Closed Technologies
Comments: Asif Siddiqi
Benjamin W Sawyer, Michigan State University, History,
“Soviet State Institutions and the Pursuit of Foreign Technology in the Era of NEP, 1921-1928”
Anna Geltzer, Ph.D Cornell, STS,
“The Wild West in the Communist East: Soviet drug development in oncology”
Victoria S.Donovan, Ph.D University of Oxford, University of Exeter,
“Dreams and Nightmares: The formation and transformation of the Soviet technical elite in the post-war period”
Toshihiro Higuchi, Ph.D Georgetown University, CISAC Stanford
“Fallout Victims of the World, Unite! Radioactive Fallout and the Reconstruction of Biological
Sciences in the Soviet Union”
1:00 - 2:30 p.m.
Engineering the Soviet Society
Comments: Serguei Oushakine
Maya Haber, UCLA, History,
“Utopian Scientific Methodologies: Searching for the Seeds of the Future in the Soviet Present, 1943-1958”
Anton Yasnitsky, Ph.D University of Toronto, York University,
“Nietzschean Project of Creating a Superman: Vygotsky’s Integrative “Peak Psychology” of Cultural Development”
Susanna Weygandt, Princeton, Slavic Lit,
“Early Soviet Plasticity in the Sciences and Theatrical Arts”
Diana Kurkovsky West, Princeton, Architecture,
“Microregions, MicroUtopias; the 'Mathematization' of Soviet Urban Planning Under Khrushchev”
3:00 - 4:30 p.m.
Round Table Discussion