LIVE from the NYPL: Stephen Kotkin | Slavoj Žižek

Co-presented with the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.

Two experts on Joseph Stalin - one a Marxist philosopher, the other a historian - come together to discuss the Soviet dictator's origins, and his painful mark on history. 

STEPHEN KOTKIN is the Birkelund Professor of History and International Affairs in the Woodrow Wilson School and History department of Princeton University, where he has taught since 1989. He is also a Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His most recent book is Stalin, vol. I: Paradoxes of Power. He has also written Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment, with Jan T. Gross; Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse 1970-2000; and Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization. Kotkin has served as vice dean of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School and is again directing Princeton’s Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies program. Outside Princeton, he was the book reviewer for The New York Times Sunday Business  section (2006-9) and has worked with George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, Rem Koolhaas, and others as a consultant. He has been the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and was a Cullman Center fellow at The New York Public Library in 2004-5. 

SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK, born in Ljubljana, Slovenia, in 1949; doctor’s thesis in philosophy and psychoanalysis. Hegelian philosopher, Lacanian psychoanalyst, and Communist political activist. Senior Researcher at the Department of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana; international director at the Birkbeck School of Law, University of London; visiting professor at the German Department, NYU. Main fields of work: a new reading of the Hegelian dialectics; exercises in critique of ideology (Communism, liberal capitalism, forms of contemporary authoritarianism and racism); cinema theory (studies on Hitchcock, Lynch, Kieslowski); music (Wagner). Author of numerous books on Hegel, Lacan, and contemporary politics and culture. The latest publications: Less Than Nothing, Event , Absolute Recoil ,Trouble in Paradise.

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LIVE from the NYPL is made possible with generous support from Celeste Bartos, Mahnaz Ispahani Bartos and Adam Bartos, and the Margaret and Herman Sokol Public Education Endowment Fund.

The Cullman Center is made possible by a generous endowment from Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman in honor of Brooke Russell Astor, with major support provided by Mrs. John L. Weinberg, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Estate of Charles J. Liebman, John and Constance Birkelund, The Samuel I. Newhouse Foundation, and additional gifts from The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, Helen and Roger Alcaly, Mel and Lois Tukman, The Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation, The Rona Jaffe Foundation, William W. Karatz, Mary Ellen von der Heyden, The Arts and Letters Foundation, Merilee and Roy Bostock, Lybess Sweezy and Ken Miller, and Cullman Center Fellows.

The 10th Anniversary of LIVE from the NYPL is sponsored by the Ford Foundation.

 

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