Tony Brown
Department of German & Russian
During the Soviet era, the word “American” officially meant reactionary, bourgeois, warmongering imperialists; when actually, among many educated Russians, the word “American” meant interesting, liberal, energetic, open-minded people. In the early 1990s, a new “non-Soviet” university, the Russian State University for the Humanities, developed a unique unit—an American Studies Center— the two-fold goals of which were (1) to expose post-Soviet Russian scholars and students to a reasonably objective view and appreciation of American history, culture, and politics; and (2) to help American scholars and students to see themselves as others see them. Over the years, the Center has held conferences, facilitated professional and student exchanges, and published conference proceedings.
The theme of a May 2013 conference in Moscow was “Urbanism as a Dimension of American Civilization.” Abstracts were welcomed from language, literature, visual and performing arts, philosophy, religion, law, social stud- ies, and anthropology. Thanks to generous travel support from the David M. Kennedy Center for International Studies at BYU and American Councils for International Education, several BYU faculty members were able to attend and present papers.
Matthew Wickman, Associate Professor of English and Director of the BYU Humanities Center, delivered a plenary address about the state of the humanities in the United States. Reflecting on the widespread idea of a “crisis in the humanities,” Wickman spoke of how this sense of crisis (whether in terms of the difficulty of conveying specialized knowledge of humanistic subjects to a general public or the prospect of tightening university budgets) is actually an old story in the humanities. It reminds humanists that they must not cease to collaborate with other disciplines in the production of knowledge. It also underscores the fact that there is an endangered quality to humanistic subject matter and that cultures, traditions, and even the humanities themselves should be safeguarded.