Adventures in Writing and Publishing

Hosted by SFU History.

Adventures in Writing and Publishing

Guest Speakers: Luke Clossey & Ilya Vinkovetsky (SFU History)

SFU Burnaby Campus

8888 University Drive | AQ 6229 (6th floor, Academic Quandrangle)

Attend online if you can't make it in person!

Please join SFU’s Department of History for the second event in our new Public Lectures Series. Continuing on our theme of trying new things, for this event we are presenting two mini-lectures from historians who have recently published exciting new research in their fields, and done so in non-traditional publication spaces.

Luke Clossey will present "The History of Academic Humour and the Nature of History" about is research into parody and humour, and touch on his recent experience publishing in an Open-Access format.

Ilya Vinkovetsky will present "Pausing along a Long and Winding Road", about his recently published encylopedia article in Oxford Reserach Encyclopedias, and his work with the Journal of Modern History.

In-person venue seating is limited - please register for a spot on Zoom if in-person tickets are sold out!

Abstracts:

"The History of Academic Humour and the Nature of History"

Luke Clossey

Are historians funny?  This mini-lecture uses the history of intellectual humour to explore some of our discipline’s underlying assumptions and overbearing expectations.  We’ll watch our medieval and nineteenth-century ancestors pivot towards ever-messier visions of the past, and then consider more recent examples of intellectual humour and their relationship to history today.

"Pausing along a Long and Winding Road"

Professor Vinkovetsky will talk about how his study of colonialism in North America led to a study of imperial collaboration in Inner Asia. The Eurasian transportation networks and China-Russia border trade are the conduits. The peoples of the Qing and Romanov empires, and the spaces in between, are the actors.

About the guest speakers:

Born at the edge of the Colorado Desert, Luke Clossey has studied and taught world history at SFU since 2004. Clossey's research program seeks to spotlight, and challenge, the modernist and Eurocentric values and assumptions that underlie our common sense today. Rather than reinforce our current sensibilities, his work argues for the use of history--especially pre-colonial, traditional, Indigenous, and non-Enlightenment histories--as a source of "new" old solutions to contemporary problems.

Ilya Vinkovetsky was born in Leningrad (present-day St. Petersburg), and left the Soviet Union at the age of ten. He attended high school in Texas and university in New England. After wandering the earth in the guises of interpreter/translator and camp counselor/outdoor educator, Vinkovetsky went to the University of California, Berkeley, where he received training in both Russian and North American history. Vinkovetsly's research is directed to examining the culture, commerce, politics, and colonial practices of nineteenth-century Russian Empire.