On March 13-15, 2015, the Russian Studies program hosted a three-day seminar titled "Formalists, Bakhtin, and World Literature" with three leading scholars in the field of Russian literary studies. Irina Sandomirskaja (Södertörn University, Sweden) gave a lecture titled "Mikhail Bakhtin on the Aesthetics of History: Violence, Parody, Tragedy," Ilya Kalinin (St Petersburg State University, Russia) spoke on "The Theory of Literary Estrangement of Social Practices," and Galin Tihanov (Queen Mary University of London, UK) gave a lecture titled "What is World Literature? Answers from Soviet Russia."