Reading the Archival Revolution: Declassified Stories and Their Challenges

Note: Professor Vatulescu's book talk is a hybrid event; attendees can choose to join us in person or on Zoom. Please R.S.V.P. by clicking on the "event registration" link above. We politely encourage UMN affiliates and community members in the Twin Cities to attend in person. If you have additional accessibility needs, please contact us two weeks in advance to assure those needs can be met. 

About the Lecture: 

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, Reading the Archival Revolution: Declassified Stories and Their Challenges 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.

About the Speaker: 

Cristina Vatulescu is Professor and Acting Chair in the Department of Comparative Literature, as well as Director of the Center for the Humanities at NYU. Her first book, Police Aesthetics: Literature, Film and The Secret Police (Stanford University Press, 2010),  won the Heldt Prize and the Outstanding Academic Title Award, sponsored by Choice.  She has edited or co-edited volumes and special issues including The Svetlana Boym Reader (Bloomsbury, 2018),  an online Diacritics dossier on Teaching and Learning in an Archive Gone Digital (2020) and the Comparative Literature Studies special issue Archival Turns, Twists, and New Directions (2025). Vatulescu's most recent book is Reading the Archival Revolution: Declassified Soviet-Era Stories and Their Challenges (Stanford University Press, 2024). She is currently working on a new book project titled Arts of Attention: A Literary Seedbank.

University of Minnesota Co-Sponsors: Departments of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, English, German, Nordic, Slavic & Dutch, and Philosophy; Center for German & European Studies

External Co-Sponsors: Department of Russian Studies, Macalester College