Piret Peiker participated in the international ASEEES (Association of Slavic, Eastern European and Eurasian Studies) Annual Convention, held in San Francisco, 23.11.– 26.11. 2019, with “Belief“ the convention topic of the year.

Peiker gave a presentation titled “If You Believe in Yourself, Then You (Will) Believe In the People“, and a talk as part of the round table discussion “A Nation Adrift: The 1944-1945 Wartime Diaries of Miksa Fenyö“ .

The first presentation took as its starting point the lines of one of the most popular songs of the Estonian anti-Soviet “Singing Revoltion“ and the conception of time expressed there, employing it to discuss the intellectual history of collective-individual relationships in Estonia. The round table focused on the edited volume of the same title, comprising the diaries of a Hungarian political and cultural figure of Jewish origins, a leading promoter of literary modernism in Hungary before and during the interwar period.

Piret Peiker discussed the exhibition “The Conqueror’s Eye: Lisa Reihana’s In Pursuit of Venus”  (KUMU art museum, Tallinn, Estonia, 20.09.2019-26.01.2010, curators Linda
Kaljundi, Eha Komissarov, Kadi Polli) in her newspaper review “What Characterises the Conqueror’s Eye?“  in the cultural section of the Estonian daily “Postimees”

The exhibition under review comparatively combines the video installation by the New
Zealand artist Reihana and a variety of materials on the Russian and Baltic German
representation of the “peoples of the Empire“ from the Baltic Sea to the Far North. Piret
Peiker’s review analyses the comparison, explicating the work in the field of Postcolonial Studies and highlighting the role of the non-linear depiction of time both in Reihana’s work and in the conception of the exhibition as a whole.

Piret Peiker and Ksenia Shmydkaya also took the students of their Postcolonial Studies
seminar (part of the international MA programme in Literature, Visual Culture and Film at TLU) to see the exhibition, the tour accompanied by one of curators, Dr. Kaljundi.

Ksenia Shmydkaya participated at the Herstory Re-Imagined. A Conference on Women’s Lives in Biographical Fiction and Film, that took place at Centre for Life-Writing Research, King’s College London, on 16-17 December 2019. Her paper was entitled “Stanisława Przybyszewska: a case of posthumous victimization.”

On the 21 of November, Tommaso Giordani presented a paper entitled:

Republic of Letters vs Nationalized intellectuals? Some methodological reflections on a case study

In the workshop “The Republic of Letters in history: Renaissance, Enlightenment, Modernity” held at the University of Copenhagen.