With the aid of copious images, Dr. Helena Goscilo analyzes the role of posters in the development of Soviet sport, which reflected the evolving priorities of the state's political leadership. Through exhortation and glorification posters functioned as a major means of mass communication intended to regulate Soviet citizens' amateur and professional sports activities. Accessible on a daily basis twenty-four hours a day, posters were ubiquitous. They translated official initiatives intended to consolidate national unity and power into a visual rhetoric that addressed people's aspirations to physical well-being, promoted as indivisible from their sense of civic duty and patriotism.
Professor of Slavic at Ohio State University, Helena Goscilo earlier specialized in Romanticism, contemporary Russian culture, and gender. Recently she has concentrated on visual genres, above all art and film, as evident in her Cinepaternity: Fathers and Sons in Soviet and Post-Soviet Film (2010; co- edited with Yana Hashamova), Putin as Celebrity and Cultural Icon (2012); Fade from Red: Screening the Cold War Ex-enemy 1990-2005 (2014; co- authored with Margaret Goscilo), and Russian Aviation, Space Flight, and Visual Culture (2016/17; co-edited with Vlad Strukov). Her current book-length undertakings include the monograph Graphic Ideology: The Soviet Poster from Stalin to Yeltsin, a volume on the Russian body, and a study of Polish film, cowritten with Beth Holmgren.
For more information CONTACT: Dr. Anastasiia Gordiienko | gordiienko@email.arizona.edu
