The KU Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies (CREES) is thrilled to welcome NYU Professor Eliot Borenstein on Thursday April 27th. Dr. Borenstein will give a talk at 7pm in Forum B of the Burge Union. His talk is titled "Mischief Managed: Harry Potter, Satan, and Russia's War in Ukraine."

How have thirty years of moral panics about so-called cults, "Satanic" entertainment, and the "lavender menace" of the LGBT community fed into the Russian media and state frameworks about the war in Ukraine? And how do fantasy and science fiction condition the way we perceived conflicts in the real world?

Eliot Borenstein is Professor of Russian & Slavic Studies at New York University. His most recent books include Plots against Russia: Conspiracy and Fantasy after Socialism (winner of the 2020 Wayne S. Vucinich brook prize and the 2020 AATSEEL book prize), and Meanwhile, in Russia…: Russian Internet Memes and Viral Video (2022). His next two books, Marvel Comics in the 1970s: The World Inside Your Head and Soviet-Self-Hatred: The Secret Identities of Postsocialism, are being published by Cornell in May and June.