Cosmopolitan Spaces in Odesa: A Case Study of an Urban Context

Efraim Sicher (Be'er-Sheva, Negev)

Beginning:

Thursday, 29 June 2023 11:15

On 29 June 2023 we will welcome Efraim Sicher together with the Leibniz Science Campus (LWC) to our Regensburg Research Colloquium. He will give a lecture on "Cosmopolitan Spaces in Odesa: A Case Study of an Urban Context".

The lecture will be held in English.

Abstract:

Efraim Sicher will present the book "Cosmopolitan Spaces in Odesa: A Case Study of an Urban Context", coedited with Mirja Lecke (Regensburg), published this month. The book brings together leading scholars who shed new light on encounters between Jewish, Ukrainian, and Russian cultures, in an urban context from the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries. They debate different understandings of cosmopolitanism as they are reflected in Odesa’s rich multilingual culture, ranging from intellectual history and education to music, opera, and literature. The issues of language and interethnic tensions, imperialist center versus local patriotism, and language choice are still with us today. Moreover, the book affords a historical view of what lay behind the Odesa myth, as well as insights into the Jewish and Ukrainian cultural revivals of the early twentieth century. One of the burning issues is the relationship between cosmopolitanism and nationalism. Prof. Sicher will bring examples from the pre-revolutionary writings of Vladimir Jabotinsky and Kornei Chukovsky as a focus for discussion.

Efraim Sicher:

Dr. Efraim Sicher is Professor Emeritus at the Abrahams-Curiel Department of Foreign Literatures and Linguistics at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.

Book publication see here.

Venue:

Online via Zoom:  https://uni-regensburg.zoom.us/j/64468063747

Cooperation:

Professor Mirja Lecke, Chair for Slavic Literature and Culture of the University of Regensburg