Daniel Rowland, an emeritus professor in UK's Department of History will give a presentation on the myths that persist about Early Russian History and new approaches to this era.

Johannes Moser plays Shostakovich's "Cello Concerto No. 1" with the Lexington Philharmonic.

Kenneth Slepyan (Ph.D. University of Michigan) is a professor of history at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky. He is the author of several publications on Soviet resistance in the Second World War, including Stalin’s Guerrillas: Soviet Partisans in World War II (University Press of Kansas, 2006).

This talk is devoted to the hard social, spiritual and human questions of contemporary Russia and their reflection in the Russian cinema. As a jumping-off point, it uses the film ELENA by Andrei Zvyagintsev, the most profound and internationally recognized film among recent Russian movies.

Gregory Kataev attended the Russian State Institute of Cinematography and is a film, television and theater director, who has directed theater and opera at the Stanislavsky Dramatic Theater, Lyubimovka Theater Festival, the Moscow State Conservatory, Tchaikovsky Concert Hall, the Moscow Art Theater and on Russian television. He has directed two feature films, My Life and Collage, and the documentary film about the dissident poet Naum Korzhavin.

Karen Petrone is Professor of History and Chair of the History Department at the University of Kentucky, and a specialist in Russian and Soviet Cultural and Gender History. She is author of Life Has Become More Joyous, Comrades: Celebrations in the Time of Stalin (2000) and The Great War in Russian Memory (2011), a Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2012. She is editor (with Valerie Kivelson, Michael S. Flier, and Nancy Shields Kollmann) of The New Muscovite Cultural History: A Collection in Honor of Daniel B. Rowland (2009); and editor (with Jie-Hyun Lim) of Gender Politics and Mass Dictatorship: Global Perspectives (2011).

Frederick Cooper is Professor of History at New York University and a specialist in the history of Africa, colonization, decolonization, and empire more generally. He is the author of a trilogy of books on labor and society in East Africa and more recently of Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa (1996), Africa Since 1940: The Past of the Present (2002), and Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (2005). He is also co-author with with Jane Burbank of Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (2010). He is currently writing about citizenship in France and French Africa between 1945 and 1960.