Tartu Conference on East European and Eurasian Studies
Keynote Speaker
Kate Brown is the Thomas M. Siebel Distinguished Professor in the History of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the author of several prize-winning histories, including Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium (Oxford 2013). Her latest book, Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future (Norton 2019), translated into seven languages, won the Marshall Shulman and Reginald Zelnik Prizes for the best book in East European History and the Silver Medal for Laura Shannon Book Prize. Manual for Survival was also a finalist for the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pushkin House Award and the Ryszard Kapuściński Award for Literary Reportage. She is working on a history of urban self-provisioning called “Tiny Gardens Everywhere: A Kaleidoscopic History of the Food Sovereignty Frontier.” (Photo by Annette Hornischer)
The keynote will be moderated by Łukasz Mikołajewski, sociologist and intellectual historian, Assistant Professor at the Institute of Applied Social Sciences (University of Warsaw), and co-founder of the Research Centre for LGBT+ History and Identities. He is author of the monograph Disenchanted Europeans: Polish émigré writers from Kultura and postwar reformulations of the West (Peter Lang, Oxford 2018), based on his doctoral research at the European University Institute (Florence). Recently, together with Piotr Laskowski, he co-edited the anthology Queer in Poland. Autobiographies (Heinrich Boell, Warsaw 2024).
Keynote Lecture
“Tiny Gardens Everywhere: A Kaleidoscopic History of the Food Sovereignty Frontier”
Five-thousand Parisian farmers grew vegetables for two million Parisians at the turn of the 19th century. Black residents of Washington, DC paid down on their homes during the Great Depression by maintaining vegetable gardens on their urban lots. Soviet citizens won the right to garden in the midst of the great famine of 1933. Soviets farmed urban peripheries to produce most of the food people ate while Soviet collective farms failed. These stories have been missed in plain sight because they do not coincide with ideas of progress or neat categorizations dividing urban from rural. Cities ran and working classes got paid by means of a vegetable-powered wealth. The history of self-provisioning cities points to stories of urban commons and mutual aid societies that undermine narratives of global capitalism.
