CfP: Englightened Russian, University of Edinburgh 31.8.12- 1.9.12

[Samantha Sherry]

CALL FOR PAPERS

ENLIGHTENED RUSSIAN: THE RUSSIAN LANGUAGE SOCIETY IN THE AGE OF CATHERINE THE GREAT

The Princess Dashkova Russian Centre, the University of Edinburgh 
31 August - 1 September, 2012. 

The conference is organised in partnership with the 2012 Catherine the Great Exhibition at the National Museum of Scotland from the collection of the State Hermitage Museum. 

It is widely acknowledged that Russia in the second half of the eighteenth century was a bilingual society in which Russian speaking peasants and the largely French speaking aristocracy were divided by impenetrable social and cultural barriers. However the ideas and practices introduced during Catherine the Great’s reign were linked to changes in language ideology leading to substantial sociolinguistic and linguocultural shifts. Not only did the Russian language grow in its international exposure, following vast territorial expansions of Catherine’s Empire, its value changed as well. Catherine’s age with its cult of Enlightenment ideas appears to be a crucial turning point in the transformation of Russian to a literary, diplomatic, and educational medium. The regimes of language were adapted to service emerging Russian nationalism, affecting the common sense knowledge about Russian. The establishment of the Russian Academy headed by Princess Ekaterina Dashkova and the public!
 ation of the Russian Academy Dictionary were the highlights of Russian language management and codification, and, together with the language debates in literature and journalism, were among numerous factors and contexts of the shifting linguistic landscape towards a new Russian-oriented socium. The conference aims to bring together scholars who will collectively investigate the complex issues of the embeddedness of Russian in the social and cultural systems of Catherine’s Enlightenment.

Keeping a socio-cultural language studies focus, the conference invites a broad range of approaches and methodologies to the exploration of its key themes. Publication of the best conference papers is envisaged.

The themes for the conference include but are not limited to:

•	Sociolinguistic landscapes in the Eighteenth century Russia;
•	Russian in the social practices of bilingualism;
•	Language, class and gender during Catherine’s reign;
•	Language politics and linguistic practices of Russian Enlightenment and despotism;
•	The rhetoric of the state, the Russian language of empire and power;
•	The Russian Academy at the forefront of linguistic Enlightenment;
•	Development of linguistic ideas in the second half of the eighteenth century;
•	Language and the discovery of the Russian past: linguistic construction of memory and identity;
•	Literature and culture in the Russian language propaganda;
•	Catherine Dashkova’s contribution to the theory and practice of Russian language management;
•	Catherine the Great’s relationship with the Russian language;
•	Linguistic performance of an enlightened identity;
•	Russian language codification in dictionaries and grammars of the 18th century;
•	Codifiers of the Russian Language;
•	Linguistic tabooisation, detabooisation and ‘taboo discourses’ in the period of Enlightenment in Russia;
•	Linguistics attitudes: language mythologies, patterns of prestige and stigmatisation
•	The languages of science in the eighteenth century;
•	The role of journalism in the formation of linguistic habitus during Catherine’s reign;
•	Writing egodocuments: private letters, memoirs and diaries;
•	Translation into Russian as a gesture of Enlightenment;
•	Enlightened Russian within other semiotic systems.

We invite abstracts of no more than 300 words accompanied by a short bio to be submitted by no later than 15 May 2012 to Dashkova.Centre at ed.ac.uk.  Authors of accepted papers will be notified by 5 June and will be expected to register for the conference by the pre-registration deadline of 1 July. All participants are expected to submit a full version of their paper by August 1st 2012; the papers will be posted on the conference's website.

Inquiries regarding the conference’s topic, organization, or submission process
should be directed to Dr Alexander Kozin at <akozin at staffmail.ed.ac.uk>.

We expect to offer a very small number of limited travelling assistance for scholars coming from overseas. Application forms will be available from the conference web page. Additional information about the conference, including accommodation booking can be found at the centre's website: http://www.ed.ac.uk/schools-departments/literatures-languages-cultures/dashkova/home.  

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