As the Acting Head of the Department of Central, Eastern, and Northern European Studies, I’m excited to welcome you all to the 2024-25 academic year! I have taken over the leadership of CENES from David Gramling and will be leading the Department for the year, until Ervin Malakaj steps in as Head in July 2025.
Some of you may be familiar with who I am and what my work is, but let me introduce myself briefly for those who may not be. My name is Dr. Katherine Bowers and I am an Associate Professor in Slavic Studies in the department. I also am Director of the Centre for European Studies and I lead the Eurasia Research Cluster at UBC. My research focuses on Russophone literature and culture of the long nineteenth century; in particular I am interested in digital humanities and environmental humanities approaches. My first book Writing Fear: Russian Realism and the Gothic was published in 2022 and argues that nineteenth-century Russian realism, and by extension later Russian literature, was significantly influenced by European gothic fiction. For those of you who have taken my classes, you know that the gothic pops up in the most curious places in them. At UBC, I teach Russian, Slavic, and comparative literature and culture. Some of the classes I have developed include “European Magic Tales,” “Russian and Soviet Science Fiction,” “19th-century Russophone Women’s Writing,” and “Imagining Petersburg.” My classes critically consider works of literature and culture within their historical context.
The CENES Department is a welcoming intellectual home that focuses on the critical, the comparative, the multicultural, and the multilingual. Our department’s expertise lies in the cultures, literatures, and languages of Central, Eastern, and Northern Europe – a broad and vibrant regional expanse that has inspired our fascinating roster of classes. These include everything from multicultural Vienna to the multiethnic Russian empire, from German horror cinema to Nordic noir, from Ukrainian language politics to Arctic art and activism, and much more besides. Our popular CENS courses take a comparative approach to the region; some well-known courses we teach under this code include CENS 303 “Representations of the Holocaust,” CENS 307 “Witches: Myth and Reality,” and CENS 308 “Comics and Graphic Novels in Central, Eastern, and Northern Europe.”
We kicked off the year with our fun “Into the CENE-verse” event, which showcased our department teaching. In terms of research, this year in CENES we are hosting a lecture series called “A Series in Dissent,” which features research talks themed around “dissent” in Central, Eastern, and Northern Europe. In addition, we host faculty and visiting scholar talks, a graduate research conference, an undergraduate research conference, and other events throughout the year. We also have regular social events for students in our programs, including German Plaudertreff and Kaffeestunde, Nordic Fika, and Slavic Tea. If you’re an undergraduate who wants to learn more about what CENES offers, these events are a great place to start for interesting conversations, tasty snacks, and wonderful company.
You can find out more about all our events on our website. So please do come check CENES out and learn more about what we do!
