CEERES of Voices: Julia Alekseyeva - "Soviet Daughter: A Graphic Revolution" - Hillary Chute

CEERES of Voices presents Julia Alekseyeva on Soviet Daughter: A Graphic Revolution. She will be joined in conversation by Hillary Chute.

Presented in partnership with CEERES and the Department of Comparative Literature.

At the Co-op

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About the book: Soviet Daughter provides a window into the life of a rebellious, independent woman coming of age in the USSR, and the impact of her story and her spirit on her American great-granddaughter. This is the story of Julia Alekseyeva and her great-grandmother Lola, two extraordinary women swept up in the history of their tumultuous times. Born in 1910 to a poor, Jewish family outside of Kiev, Lola lived through the Bolshevik revolution, a horrifying civil war, Stalinist purges, and the Holocaust. She taught herself to read, and supported her extended family working as a secretary for the notorious NKVD (which became the KGB), a lieutenant for the Red Army, and later as a refugee in the United States. Interwoven with Lola's history we find Julia's own struggles of coming of age in an immigrant family in Chicago and her political awakening in the midst of the radical politics of the turn of the millenium. At times heartbreaking and at times funny, this graphic novel memoir unites two generations of strong, independent women against a sweeping backdrop of the history of the USSR.

About the author: Born in the former USSR and raised a proud citizen of Chicago, Julia Alekseyeva is an author-illustrator as well as an academic. She holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Harvard, and currently teaches in the Film Department at Brooklyn College. Soviet Daughter: A Graphic Revolution is her first full-length graphic novel. She has lived in Kiev, Chicago, New York City, Paris, Cambridge, Kanazawa, and Yokohama, and currently lives in Brooklyn with her partner.

About the interlocutor: Hillary L. Chute’s new book is Why Comics? From Underground to Everywhere, out from HarperCollins in December 2017.  She has taught at the University of Chicago and Harvard University and is Professor of English and Art + Design at Northeastern University.  She is also the author of Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form (Harvard UP), Outside the Box: Interviews with Contemporary Cartoonists (U of Chicago P), and Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics (Columbia UP), as well as Associate Editor of Art Spiegelman’s MetaMaus (Pantheon). She has written for publications including Artforum, Bookforum, The New York Review of Books, and Poetry.