Fulbright Humanities Colloquium Series Features Research on Tzarist Russia and Jewish Pogroms

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The Humanities Program in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences inaugurates its 2017-18 series with Russian language and literature scholar Nadja Berkovich. Professor Berkovich will present "Integrative Journalism: Bogoraz's Silhouettes of the Gomel Pogrom." The presentation will take place from 4-5 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 19, in CHEM 144.

Berkovich's talk examines Vladimir Bogoraz's "Silhouettes from Gomel: Sketches" (1904), which he wrote based on his ethnographic and journalistic investigation of the participants in the Gomel pogrom of 1903. Bogoraz visited Gomel a year after the pogrom and witnessed the trial of the defendants. With his sketches, Bogoraz challenged the assumption of the tsarist regime that this was a pogrom against Russians. On the contrary, the victims were Jews. Berkovich approaches the controversy of Gomel by examining two sources of analysis: the indictment, produced by the tsarist government, and Bogoraz's journalistic interviews of the defendants, victims, and bystanders, which he titled "Silhouettes from Gomel." By giving voice to the Jewish defendants, he showed that the violence was against Jews. During the trial, he also exposed a Russian judge and, ironically, a state Rabbi, who subscribed to a Spencerian notion of evolution.

Berkovich earned her doctorate in Slavic languages and literatures at the University of Illinois, a Master of Arts in Russian literature at Boston College, and a Bachelor of Arts in English and Russian philology at St. Petersburg Pedagogical Herzen University. She heads the Russian program in the Department of World Languages and Cultures. Berkovich is currently working on a monograph entitled Spanning an Empire: Literary Ethnography from 1845-1914. Berkovich's approach to scholarship draws from the methodologies and insights of literature, cultural anthropology, history, and Jewish Studies.

The Humanities Colloquium Series features new humanities research by UA faculty members. The presentation is open to the public.