The opening of classified documents from the Soviet era has been dubbed the “archival revolution” due to its unprecedented scale, drama, and impact. With a storyteller’s sensibility, Cristina Vatulescu identifies and takes on the main challenges of reading in these archives.
Drawing on diverse work ranging from Mikhail Bakhtin to Tina Campt, the book enters into broader conversations about the limits and potential of reading documents, fictions, and one another. Pairing one key reading challenge with a particularly arresting story, Vatulescu in turn investigates Michel Foucault’s traces in Polish secret police archives; tackles the files, reenactment film, and photo albums of a socialist bank heist; pits autofiction against disinformation in the secret police files of Nobel Prize laureate Herta Müller; and takes on the digital remediation of Soviet-era archives by analyzing contested translations of the Iron Curtain trope from its 1946 origins to the current war in Ukraine. The result is a bona fide reader’s guide to Eastern Europe’s ongoing archival revolution.
This online event is co-sponsored by the Department of Central, Eastern and Northen European Studies and the UBC Centre for European Studies. This talk is part of the CENES Sawchen Lecture Series and the CES Spring 2027 Speaker Series.
Bio
Cristina Vatulescu is Professor of Comparative Literature and Director of the Center for the Humanities at NYU. She is the author of Police Aesthetics: Literature, Film and The Secret Police (Stanford University Press, 2010) and Reading the Archival Revolution: Declassified Soviet-Era Stories and Their Challenges (Stanford UP, 2024), both recognized with Choice Outstanding Academic Title distinctions and additional national and international accolades (including the Heldt Prize and the George Blazyka Prize). She has edited books and special issues including The Svetlana Boym Reader (Bloomsbury, 2018), a Diacritics dossier on archives in the digital age, and the Comparative Literature Studies special issue “Archival Turns, Twists, and New Directions” (2025). She is currently working on a new book titled Arts of Attention: A Literary Seedbank.
