Memory, Power, and the Future of Slavic Studies: Reflections on the 2025 ASEEES Convention

By Alesia Mankouskaya, PhD candidate and PGTA at UCL SSEES

From November 20 to 23, 2025, the 57th Annual Convention of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) took place in Washington, DC. Bringing together scholars, cultural practitioners, and professionals from around the world, the convention served not only as a meeting ground for research exchange, but also as a barometer of ongoing shifts within the field. Longstanding debates about regional focus, scholarly responsibility, and the legacies of empire were not merely discussed but visibly reshaped in the structure and content of the program itself.

The scale of the event underscored the vitality and diversity. The 2025 convention featured over 630 sessions, meetings, and events, including six film screenings, eighteen receptions and meetings. This expansive program created a rich setting for scholarly exchange across disciplines, career stages, and institutional contexts.

The ASEEES 2025 convened under the theme “Memory,” offering a timely and searching reflection on how societies remember, forget, and contest the past. In Eastern Europe and Eurasia, regions shaped by imperial legacies, authoritarian regimes, and contested sovereignties, memory has long been a terrain of struggle. Across disciplines and historical periods, participants examined how official narratives intersect with, compete against, or silence lived and unofficial memories; how states attempt to shape historical narratives to legitimize political power; and how communities resist such efforts through literature, art, testimony, and archival recovery.

The interdisciplinary nature of memory studies was evident throughout the program, bringing together historians, literary scholars, anthropologists, political scientists, archivists, librarians, and museum professionals. In an era marked by digital misinformation and increasing challenges to shared notions of truth, many discussions highlighted the growing fragility of collective memory and the heightened responsibility of scholars and cultural institutions.

One striking feature of the 2025 convention was the sheer scale of scholarship devoted to Ukraine. By an admittedly imprecise count, more than 20 percent of the conference program were focused on Ukrainian topics. In addition, numerous roundtables, featured sessions, and comparative panels engaged Ukraine either centrally or comparatively.

This prominence reflects several important developments within the field. Research on Ukraine has emerged as one of the most dynamic and globally resonant areas within Slavic, East European, and Eurasian studies. Scholars working on Ukraine are not only contributing new empirical material but are also reshaping broader analytical frameworks for understanding empire, colonialism, war, memory, and sovereignty. It was also notable that much of this scholarship was presented by early-career researchers, including doctoral candidates, postdoctoral scholars, and those in non-tenure-track or temporary positions. Their contributions were frequently innovative, methodologically ambitious, and closely engaged with contemporary scholarly and political questions. At the same time, their strong presence drew attention to ongoing structural challenges within academia, particularly with regard to long-term employment and institutional support for emerging and reconfigured fields of study.

The convention also marked an important milestone for Belarusian Studies. This year commemorated fifty years of Belarusian presence at ASEEES, with roughly 300 Belarus-related presentations delivered between 1975 and 2025. Recent years have been especially significant. In 2024, the convention featured a record 61 Belarus-related presentations, supported in part by ASEEES’s decision to waive fees for displaced scholars. In 2025, there were 46 presentations—fewer in number, but more fully integrated into the broader intellectual landscape of the conference.

Belarusian topics were woven throughout sessions on memory studies, archives, theatre, the history of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Soviet culture, and comparative history. This pattern suggests not a contraction of the field, but a process of consolidation and maturation, in which Belarusian Studies is increasingly embedded within wider scholarly conversations.

UCL SSEES was prominently represented at the convention, both through participation in thematic panels and through the leadership of major book discussions. These sessions demonstrated how memory studies intersect with political history, social conflict, and questions of democratic legacy.

One book discussion focused on Governing Divided Societies: Habsburg Austria’s Democratic Legacy and the Czechoslovak First Republic, co-authored by Dr. Thomas Anselm Lorman, Associate Professor of Hungarian History at UCL SSEES, together with Philip J. Howe and Daniel E. Miller. Another highlighted event was a roundtable discussion of Dr. Jakub Beneš’s The Last Peasant War: Violence and Revolution in Twentieth-Century Eastern Europe. The discussion featured contributions from Melissa Bokovoy (University of New Mexico), Chad Bryant (University of North Carolina), Joshua Sanborn (Lafayette College), and Keely Stauter-Halsted (University of Illinois Chicago), and situated the book’s arguments within broader debates on social conflict, revolution, and political mobilization.

Together, these discussions reinforced one of the convention’s central insights: memory is not only about commemoration, but also about whose experiences are recognized as historically significant.

As the 2025 ASEEES convention ended, the question was not whether the field is intellectually vibrant — it clearly is—but how institutions will respond to the shifts highlighted throughout the conference. The centrality of Ukraine, the growing integration of Belarusian Studies, and the strong presence of early-career scholars all point toward a more inclusive and de-imperialized future for Slavic studies. Many of these issues were explicitly raised and debated during the convention itself, underscoring their urgency.

Memory, after all, is not only about the past. It is also about what — and whom — we choose to carry forward.