Conference Report, 2002

CONFERENCE “MASS CULTURE: AN AMERICAN EXPERIENCE”
December 6-13, 2002, Moscow
Supported by Grant No. S-RS500-03-GR-005

The conference took place at the Moscow State University, Department of Journalism. Over 120 participants from 86 Universities of 35 cities took part in the section and plenary meetings during the week. Young and distinguished scholars came from various parts of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus to present their papers and discuss problems dealing with Mass Culture of the USA and its influence upon the existing trends in World culture. Two participants arrived from the USA, though three more people (two from the USA and one from Italy) were not able to come due to a sudden change in a process of visa issuing.
In 2002 the grant gave the researchers from such distant cities as Chita and Kemerovo an opportunity to be present at the meetings in person.
70 papers were presented at the meetings of 7 sections:
1. Journalism.
2. The Nineteenth Century – to the Twenty First: Portent Problems.
3. Contemporary Prose and Culture.
4. American Drama.
5. Ethnic Literatures in the USA.
6. Women Studies.
7. Interaction of the American and World Culture.

For the sixth time there was a traditional Round Table Discussion:
“Imprints: Image of America and Image of Russia” (coordinator Prof. Yassen Zassoursky) and for the first time there was a new one organized – “Fantastic in the Arts” (coordinator Ph. D Larisa Mihaylova) which was met with vivid interest and attracted 25 participants.
All the participants got the Program and the collection of Conference Materials with Abstracts and short variants of 62 papers printed in Russian and English.
This year there was a calamity – a fire at the printing office where we gave our materials to publish. It happened on the 29th of November, 2002, and we had only several days left before the beginning of the conference left. It entailed spending some extra resources to make the preprint copy again and urgently print the materials but the book was still produced in time and everybody was provided with it.
Some extra time went to mailing the reimbursements for the tickets which we received from the participants only by the end of March, 2003.

Larisa Mihaylova,
Conference Secretary