Thirty-five presenters and session chairs convened at the Simpson Center at the University of Washington on the first Saturday in May for the 21st Annual Northwest Regional Conference for Russian, East European and Central Asian Studies (REECAS NW). Nine panels – packed with presentations ranging from teaching Russian language to heritage speakers, to literature, politics, arts, architecture, ethnicity, religion, to gender identity and women’s role in society – sparked the interest of almost 50 Conference attendees.

Over 30 Seattle area K-12 teachers learned the latest on “Global Asia: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow” this year thanks to a unique, decade-long collaboration between The Seattle Times and the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies.

Greta Starett is a first-year graduate student at the Ellison Center for Russian, East European, and Central Asian Studies. Her photos of Georgia are stunning.

Willard Sunderland, Professor of History at the University of Cincinnati, has had a long-time problem. Since graduate school, all of his scholarly energies have been directed toward finding something that no longer exists — the Russian Empire. The Ellison Center and the History Department sponsored Professor Sunderland’s visit to the Jackson School, where he gave a talk to promote his new book “The Baron’s Cloak: A History of the Russian Empire in War and Revolution.” Sunderland’s approach to analyzing the twilight of the Russian Empire, a land with tremendous cultural diversity, was to search through the space and time of a single life — that of the infamous Baron Ungern.

The concept of a “pivot” is often examined from the perspective of Russia’s interactions with China. Liz Wishnick, Associate Professor of Political Science and Law at Montclair University, explained how China views the American rebalancing of its foreign policy priorities. As Asian countries become increasingly influential on the world stage, the United States and Russia have taken more active roles as Pacific powers.

The Soyuz Symposium, an intimate conference designed to connect contemporary scholars working the fields of socialism and post-socialism, was hosted by the Ellison Center on the final weekend of February 2015. This event brought together more than two-dozen scholars from numerous disciplines to share their work on the history, social politics, and lived experiences of socialism and post-socialism throughout the European, Central Asian, and East Asian regions. The theme of this year’s Symposium was “Shifting Territories: Historical Legacies and Social Change.” Conference participants tackled these concepts by presenting their research in six panels over a period of two days.

With the memory of the Charlie Hebdo shooting still raw, the BBC ran a story about a daring satirical magazine that ran from 1906 until 1931 in Azerbaijan. The next day, Soyuz Symposium attendees, UW students, faculty and community members, gathered in Kane Hall to hear New York University’s Anthropology Professor Bruce Grant talk about the 100-year-old publication, Molla Nasreddin, and its founder, Jalil Mammadguluzadeh.

Most people are trying to leave campus as quickly as possible on a Friday evening, but in Thomson Hall, students, faculty and community members were gathering to finish the week off strong. Spearheaded by doctoral candidate Greg Shtraks and sponsored by the Ellison Center, the East Asia Center, and the Center for Global Studies, a panel on “Russia’s Pivot to China in the Context of a Burning Ukraine” brought together experts in economics and political science to examine the Sino-Russian relationship in light of the current events in Ukraine.

Jan Karski, the subject of the latest exhibit on the ground floor of the Allen Library. Karski was the Polish resistance fighter and intelligence courier who brought the first eye-witness reports out of the Jewish Warsaw Ghetto and the transit depot outside of the Bełżec death camp. Karski’s biography reads like a spy-novel and his heroic legacy speaks powerfully to the virtues of courage, tolerance, and compassion. Karski is remembered and valorized among the Polish and Jewish communities disseminated around the world, as a true hero of WWII and the 20th Century as a whole. However, many remain woefully ignorant of his efforts.

Acknowledgement, Responsibility & Forgiveness: The Socio-Psychological Processes of Intergroup Reconciliation  | A Conversation with Bosnian Psychologist & Fullbright Scholar Sabina Cehaic-Clancy