Nancy Condee Is Named Inaugural Director of Pitt Global Studies Center

Nancy Condee

Nancy Condee, a professor and director of graduate studies in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures in the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Arts and Sciences, has been named the inaugural director of Pitt’s Global Studies Center, effective immediately. Condee served previously as the director of Pitt’s Cultural Studies Program, from 1995 to 2006. Most recently, she has served as the first academic director of Pitt’s Multi-region Academic Program (Pitt MAP), which is now in its second year. Condee also teaches in Pitt’s Film Studies Program.

In announcing the appointment, Lawrence Feick, director of Pitt’s University Center for International Studies, said, “Nancy is an exceptional scholar and teacher and will bring those qualities and values with her to this position. Because Global Studies is a newly funded center, in this appointment I also was looking for someone who would be able to effectively and effortlessly work across disciplines to build the program. In her interdisciplinary work with Cultural Studies and Film Studies, as well as in her very successful launch of the Pitt MAP program, Nancy has demonstrated that she has the passion and ability to pull together faculty from across the University’s departments and schools to work successfully on a common agenda. I believe that we will build our Global Studies Center into one of the best in the country under Nancy’s leadership.”

Formerly the Global Studies Program, Pitt’s Global Studies Center is part of the University Center for International Studies; Global Studies received its first-time designation as a National Resource Center by the U.S. Department of Education in August 2010. The center fosters interdisciplinary, comparative, and cross-cultural learning and research on critical global issues within the areas of the economy, health, security, and society.

Condee’s research interests focus on contemporary (post-1964) Russian culture, with an emphasis on film, literature, and popular culture. Her publications include Imperial Trace: Recent Russian Cinema (Oxford 2009), chosen for the top 2010 research award by the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, and the following coedited volumes: The Cinema of Alexander Sokurov, with Birgit Beumers (I. B. Tauris, 2011); Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity, with Terry Smith and Okwui Enwezor (Duke, 2008); Endquote: Sots-Art Literature and Soviet Grand Style, with Marina Balina and Evgeny Dobrenko (Northwestern University Press, 2000); and Soviet Hieroglyphics: Visual Culture in Late 20th Century Russia (Indiana University Press, 1995). Her writing has appeared in Publications of the Modern Language Association, The Nation, October, and Sight and Sound, as well as in major Russian and Soviet journals.

Condee has worked as a consultant for, among other entities, the Edinburgh Festival, the Public Broadcasting Service’s Frontline, the Library of Congress, the San Francisco Film Festival, the National Film Theatre in the U.K., and the Massachusetts Council on the Arts and Humanities.

Together with Vladimir Padunov, Condee directed the Working Group on Contemporary Russian Culture supported by the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council. She was chair of the board of directors of the National Council of Eurasian and East European Research from 2002 to 2006. She is currently president of the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages and also serves on the board of directors of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies.

Condee earned a PhD from Yale University in 1979, a master’s degree from Brown University in 1973, and a bachelor’s degree from Sarah Lawrence College in 1972, all in Russian studies.