Yuliya Komska
I study the cultural Cold War (and, more recently, the wartime era) from a range of interdisciplinary perspectives, from geography to visual, literary, and media studies. My monograph "The Icon Curtain: The Cold War's Quiet Border" (U of Chicago P, 2015) is the first book-length cultural history of the Iron Curtain and one of its least-studied landscapes.
With Irene Kacandes, I co-edited a collection of essays "Eastern Europe Unmapped" for Berghahn Books (2017). For Palgrave Pivot, I co-wrote a short polemical book "Linguistic Disobedience: Restoring Power to Civic Language" (2018).
I am at work on two longer books now. One is a biography of Margret and H. Rey, the creators of the "Curious George" children's book series; it zooms in on the gaps between their life and art. The other queries transatlantic Cold War radio's iconography in the 1950s and its meaning for making the kind of propaganda that's still being missed.
Address: Hanover, United States
With Irene Kacandes, I co-edited a collection of essays "Eastern Europe Unmapped" for Berghahn Books (2017). For Palgrave Pivot, I co-wrote a short polemical book "Linguistic Disobedience: Restoring Power to Civic Language" (2018).
I am at work on two longer books now. One is a biography of Margret and H. Rey, the creators of the "Curious George" children's book series; it zooms in on the gaps between their life and art. The other queries transatlantic Cold War radio's iconography in the 1950s and its meaning for making the kind of propaganda that's still being missed.
Address: Hanover, United States
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Co-edited with Irene Kacandes, Dartmouth College.
and apprehensions about language loyalty did not bode well for the large numbers of literary submissions from American minorities and the many fresh-off-the-boat European refugees. Can Houghton Mifflin’s wartime archive—in particular, the so-called editorial blanks (papers recording the receipt of each manuscript, reader reviews, and the verdict)—count as a substantive repository of monolingualism at this critical point in history? More broadly, what can this archive’s World War II-era content tell us about the interdependencies between language, race, and trade publishing?
Co-edited with Irene Kacandes, Dartmouth College.
and apprehensions about language loyalty did not bode well for the large numbers of literary submissions from American minorities and the many fresh-off-the-boat European refugees. Can Houghton Mifflin’s wartime archive—in particular, the so-called editorial blanks (papers recording the receipt of each manuscript, reader reviews, and the verdict)—count as a substantive repository of monolingualism at this critical point in history? More broadly, what can this archive’s World War II-era content tell us about the interdependencies between language, race, and trade publishing?
This term, the course will zoom in on three environments that German-speakers attempted to shape while being shaped by them: the forest, the mountains, and the zoo. They are culturally prominent examples, with many fascinating facets to explore from many unconventional angles. They afford opportunities for telling a less valedictorian story of Germanophone environmentalism (which often highlights the protest movements of the 20th and 21st c., occasionally to the exclusion of all else): over time, the intricate overlaps between nature and belonging and eventually, nation and nature have resulted in racist or xenophobic exclusion of people and in exploitation of animals. Understanding these pitfalls is crucial to devising an inclusive vision of environmentalism.