Sergei Zhuk, Inventing America on the Borders of Socialist Imagination: Movies and Music from the USA and the Origins of American Studies in the USSR

Combining the methods of oral history, symbolic anthropology, and historical sociology, the talk will focus on how the notions of the “imaginary West/imaginary America” and the Soviet practices of history writing interacted with ideological orthodoxy and the centralist infrastructure of the American studies in the USSR.Sergei Zhuk is Associate Professor of History at Ball State University. His many works on Russia, Ukrainian, and American history include Russia’s Lost Reformation: Peasants and