Book Discussion | Comparative Authoritarianisms
Join IPK’s Global New Right Working Group and the Remarque Institute on Thursday, April 3 (5:30-7:00 PM), to discuss the state of authoritarian governments and movements in 2025. Eliot Borenstein, a Russian & Slavic Studies scholar, and sociologist Julia Sonnevend, will examine the extreme right shifts in Russia and Hungary in recent decades. Mary Nolan, a historian who focuses on German history, will moderate the conversation.
Eliot Borenstein is Professor of Russian & Slavic Studies and Vice Chancellor and Vice Provost for Global Programs at New York University. He is the author of Men without Women: Masculinity and Revolution in Russian Fiction, 1917-1929, Overkill: Sex and Violence in Contemporary Russian Popular Culture, Plots against Russia: Conspiracy and Fantasy after Socialism, Pussy Riot: Speaking Punk to Power, Meanwhile, in Russia…: Russian Internet Memes and Viral Video, Marvel Comics in the 1970s: The World Inside Your Head, Soviet-Self-Hatred: The Secret Identities of Postsocialism, HBO’s The Leftovers: Mourning and Melancholy on Premium Cable, Unstuck in Time: On the Post-Soviet Uncanny, and Russian Culture under Putin. In 2025, the University of Wisconsin Press will publish his next book, The Politics of Fantasy: Magic, Children’s Literature and Fandom in Putin’s Russia (about Harry Potter). His three books in progress are: Marvel Comics in the 1980s,; Unidentified Russian Objects: On Soviet Melancholy; and Reading the Superhero: Ethics, Crises, and Superboy Punches.
Mary Nolan was Professor of History at New York University from 1980-2018 is now Professor Emeritus. She works on twentieth-century European-American relations, on German History, and most recently on social and economic human rights in the age of neoliberalism. She is the author of The Transatlantic Century: Europe and America, 1890-2010, Visions of Modernity: American Business and the Modernization of Germany, which won the Beer Prize for European International History, and Social Democracy and Society: Working-class Radicalism in Düsseldorf, 1890-1920. She coedited Crimes of War: Guilt and Denial in the Twentieth Century and The University against Itself. She co-edited The Routledge Handbook of the Global Sixties (2018). Recent articles include “Teaching the History of Human Rights and Humanitarian Interventions;” “Negotiating American Modernity in Twentieth-Century Europe;” “Rethinking Transatlantic Relations in the First Cold War Decades;” “Human Rights and Market Fundamentalism;” “Americanization? Europeanization? Globalization? The German Economy after World War II;” and “Pushing the Defensive Wall of the State Forward: Terrorism and Civil Liberties in Germany.” She is on the editorial boards of Politics & Society and International Labor and Working-class History.
Julia Sonnevend is an interdisciplinary scholar, a public intellectual and Associate Professor of Sociology and Communications at The New School. Her work foregrounds features of social and public life that are hard to define, yet they define us, such as “event,” “charm,” and “courage.” Sonnevend is the author of Charm: How Magnetic Personalities Shape Global Politics which was named as one of the best books in 2024 by The New Yorker, Stories Without Borders: The Berlin Wall and the Making of a Global Iconic Event, and co-editor of Education and Social Media: Toward a Digital Future. She has recently been profiled in The New Yorker, and her ideas have been featured in a wide range of media outlets, including Time magazine, The Atlantic, NPR, BBC Newshour, Teen Vogue, the Times Literary Supplement, and Review of Democracy. Her work has been published in interdisciplinary peer-reviewed journals including New Media & Society; Information, Communication & Society; International Journal of Press/Politics; Media, Culture & Society and the American Journal of Cultural Sociology. She was raised by two librarians during a jarring political transition from communism to democracy in Budapest, Hungary.