CU Boulder Retired Faculty Association presents:
"Dreams in Orbit: Young People’s Letters to Gagarin, Glenn & Tereshkova", a talk by Associate Professor Roshanna P. Sylvester.

How did young people in the US and USSR understand and experience the advent of human space flight in the early 1960s? How did the flights of early cosmonauts and astronauts impact young people’s senses of self and life possibilities? This talk will explore similarities and differences in letters written by Soviet and American young people to space pioneers Yuri Gagarin, John Glenn, and Valentina Tereshkova. 

The presentation will take place on February 19 at 1:00 p.m. at the University Memorial Center (UMC), rooms 415 and 417, on the main campus. Virtual attendance option is available. 

Speaker Bio:
Roshanna P. Sylvester is Associate Professor of Critical Media Practices and Digital Humanities. At CU Boulder, her appointment is split between the Dept. of Critical Media Practices and the Herbst Program for Engineering, Ethics & Society. Originally trained in Russian history (Ph. D., Yale University), Sylvester specializes in the histories of gender, technology and culture. Her first book, Tales of Old Odessa: Crime and Civility in a City of Thieves, explored identity creation and expression in the pre-revolutionary city through analysis of crime reporting in the popular press. She looks at childhood in the early Space Age in her current project: Dreams in Orbit: Girls and Space-Age Cultures in Cold War America and the Soviet Union.