A faculty seminar in the Whitney Humanities Center’s Humanities/Humanity program. Utopia after Utopia is a collaborative effort at establishing a deeper and more trans-national understanding of these emergent aesthetic and political movements. We look to the post-socialist world for models of how to move past historical disappointments and reimagine the possibilities for engaged art in the twenty-first century. This event will consist in a series of workshops and presentations by both Yale faculty and invited guest participants. The first day of the seminar will be devoted to present-day aesthetic developments in Eastern Europe and in Russia, while the second day will focus on critical reflections on the genealogies of these current developments. Day one will involve multimedia presentations as well as film screenings, with the express purpose of expanding our shared sense of the breadth and variety of these emergent movements. Events might include a conversation with the documentary filmmaker Maxim Pozdorovkin (Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer, 2013), a conversation and film screening with the Polish queer cultural historian Krzysztof Tomasik, readings of poetry by the founders of the St. Petersburg-based journal Translit, or screenings of performance art by Marina Abramovic, as well as a new wave of feminist artists from the spaces of the former Yugoslavia. On the second day of the seminar, we plan to engage, among others, with Maria Janion’s call for Slavic neo-paganism, with Agnieszka Graff’s writings on the asynchrony of Eastern European feminism and protest culture in relation to the Western world, and with the recently published Circling the Square: Maidan and Cultural Insurgency in Ukraine. In preparation for these discussions, we will come up with a shared list of more basic literary, visual, and historical sources that we will all read or watch in advance as background for examining these recent works.