Alan Liu has written about the changing task for humanists: “Where once the job of literature and the arts was creativity, now, in an age of total innovation, I think it must be history.” Slavic scholars who treat the Soviet period may have a special perspective on history, its distortion and its recovery. Ann Komaromi will talk about how uncensored publication in “samizdat” facilitated the recovery of history in the Soviet Union. How might that work be related to our own mission as digital humanists? What might we recover of lost or marginalized history, and how could DH projects help bridge the divide between institutionalized history and grass-roots or citizen-led efforts?
Ann Komaromi is Associate Professor and Graduate Coordinator at the Centre for Comparative Literature, University of Toronto, as well as the coordinator of their Literature and Critical Theory Program.