ASU English professor selected to participate in American Council of Learned Societies 2025 summer institute

Arizona State University Assistant Professor of English Brian Goodman has been selected to participate in the prestigious 2025 Summer Institute for the Study of East Central and Southeastern Europe, convened by the American Council of Learned Societies and the Centre for Advanced Study Sofia.

Goodman, whose latest book is “The Nonconformists: American and Czech Writers across the Iron Curtain” (Harvard University Press, 2023), is also an affiliate of ASU Jewish Studies and the Melikian Center: Russian, Eurasian and East European Studies. A specialist in human rights and dissident literatures, he is one of fifteen scholars from Eastern Europe and North America convening for a two-week residency hosted by the American University in Bulgaria from June 5-20, 2025 in Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria. SISECSE participants will have the opportunity to dedicate time to their own research and writing in a collaborative and interdisciplinary setting. During the institute participants will also engage in a series of immersive discussions exploring the topic “Epistemic Mistrust: Authorship, Credibility, and Knowledge Production.”

Goodman’s research explores how antipolitical literature and ideas have been translated, adapted, and transformed in the decades after 1968 through their diffusion across boundaries of the global Cold War.

“The Summer Institute provides an essential space where scholars from Eastern Europe and the United States can come together to build new networks, learn from the diverse perspectives of their fellow participants, and make progress on their own research,” said Deena Ragavan, ACLS Director of International Programs. “ACLS is grateful to the Centre for Advanced Study Sofia for their partnership in convening leading scholars of East Central and Southeastern Europe in Bulgaria.”

The Summer Institute for the Study of East Central and Southeastern Europe is made possible by a donation from Carl and Betty Pforzheimer. The program builds on a long history of ACLS support for humanistic scholars and scholarship in Eastern Europe including the ACLS Humanities Program in Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine (1999-2010).