Back in the BSSR: Power, Protest and Meaning through Belarusian Rock and Popular Culture
Speaker:
Maria Paula Survilla
30 Jan 2007
2:00 PM
Gold Room, Memorial Union
Maria Paula Survilla is an associate professor of music at Wartburg College and president of the North American Association for the Advancement of Belarusan Studies. Her research interests include the role of contemporary music in the construction of personal and national identities in post-Soviet Belarus. She began fieldwork in Eastern Europe in 1989 and was funded as a Fulbright-Hayes scholar in 1993. She is the author of Of Mermaids and Rock Singers: Placing the Self and Constructing the Nation through Belarusan Contemporary Music (2002).
This lecture was made possible in part by the generosity of F. Wendell Miller, who left his entire estate jointly to Iowa State University and the University of Iowa. Mr. Miller, who died in 1995 at age 97, was born in Altoona, Illinois, grew up in Rockwell City, graduated from Grinnell College and Harvard Law School and practiced law in Des Moines and Chicago before returning to Rockwell City to manage his family's farm holdings and to practice law. His will helped to establish the F. Wendell Miller Trust, the annual earnings on which, in part, helped to support this activity.