Visa- process

Notice: (i) you and your friends must apply for a tourist visa from a Russian Consulate from your home country;

(ii) if you need assistance, please write to Dr. Alexei Vyazmin [e-mail].

To process your visa, via a NYC travel agency, we recommend:

(iii) http://www.russia-travel.com/pages/visas.htm;

NYC Office: 224 West 30th Street, suite 701, New York, NY 10001

[phone]; [phone]/34; Fax [phone]; E-Mail: [e-mail]

Note: Travel Agency Recommendation

We recommend the following reliable travel agency:

JKT International, Inc; Contact Person: Helen Chang; Email: [e-mail]

68-48 Harrow Street, Forest Hills, NY 11375-5158; Tel.: [phone]; Fax: [phone]

Translator: Chinese-English, Ms. Yisi Chen (Jinan University, PRC; GSP, New York, USA)

Brief Notes on the Faculty

David Ludwig Martin (PhD, UCLA) is a poet, painter, scholar, and translator of Arabic and Persian poetry and philosophy. He has lived in Japan, Myanmar (Burma), India, France, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United States, and speaks Arabic, Persian/Farsi, French, German, Spanish, and Japanese. Dr. Martin has taught for over twenty years in the USA, has authored five books, a number of scholarly essays, and is the recipient of several international prizes for his original poetry.

His lecture investigates salient religious icons in the Islamic, Central Asian and Far Eastern traditions, as well as applications of ancient icons to poetic visions of the 21^st Century.

Olga Sirota (PhD, Moscow State University), the Deputy Dean (Faculty of Global Processes), Chair (Department of English), Moscow State University. Her publications include two books, over twelve scholarly essays, and twenty presentations. Dr. Sirota’s expertise includes comparative literary studies, and teaching pedagogy of Russian syntax. Her presentation reflects on the impacts of the genesis of classics of Russian culture on the contemporary Russian literature in St Petersburg.

Parvonakhon Jamshedov, ( PhD, Leningrad. Institute of Linguistics of Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Linguistic of Moscow ) is a scholar of Central Asian and Slavic linguistics and literary traditions, and professor and officer of several academic establishment and organization. Dr. Jamshdov has organized conferences in the People’s Republic of China, The United States, and The Russian Federation. He is the author of more than twenty books and monographs, and many scholarly essays.

He will focus on Zoroastrian iconography, which predates monotheism, and influenced Judaism, Greek philosophy, and Nietzsche’s ethics. These lectures clarify the basis of Zoroastrian and Manichaean iconography with an emphasis on “light motifs,” and images of demons and the savior figure.

Alexei Vyazmin, (PhD, St. Petersburg SRPh ) has been teaching, conducting research in logic, existentialism and phenomenology. He has published technical essays on the works of Husserl and presented lectures in epistemology and ontology in the Russian Federation, the United States and other countries. The salient content of his presentations include:

Nietzsche on correspondence between good, beauty and creativity. Apollo’s and Dionysus’s principles of creativity and genealogy of ethics. Dostoevsky on beauty as an accidental good and its roots in human life. Nietzsche and Dostoevsky about a lack of life’s reason and genealogy of authority. Two paths to “authentic existence”-Dostoevsky’s heroes rebel against God and Nietzsche denies God and asserts “the will to power”. Despair as a resentment and attempts to freedom. Sweet despair and reversal of decision as two components of “Russian soul”.

Natalia Pecherskaya, (PhD, Mathematics, Leningrad State University), the Rector and founder of the St. Petersburg School of Religion and Philosophy (SRPh), an expert in art and organizer of conferences, is also the editor of ten scholarly texts and the author of over fifty scholarly essays published in specialized journals in Europe and the USA. As Rector and professor, Pecherskaya has been the pivotal force in the organization of collaborative efforts on comparative multidisciplinary studies of science, philosophy and religion in both Europe and the United States. She has lectured in the People’s Republic of China, the United States, Eastern and Western Europe. She has devoted her life to educating the youth and integrating various facets of cultural, intellectual, and spiritual life and art in Russia and worldwide.

Here presentation includes an introduction to the theory and practice of Byzantine and Russian icon painting as a world of ideas, spiritual images, part of the decoration of a church, a vital element in everyday life, and a historical link between Russia and other countries. Presented icons depicts Prophets, the Virgin, Christ (Nativity, Crucifixion), Archangels, Saints will be discussed.

Rosmarie T. Morewedge (Ph.D, UCLA) is a scholar of German studies, mythology, and medieval European literature. In addition to her teaching and administrative positions in the State University of New York in Binghamton, Dr. Morewedge has presided and held offices in both national and international scholarly institutions concerned with literature, language pedagogy, second language acquisition, and German cultural studies. She is the editor/author of several books and over twenty technical essays. She has delivered lectures in Germany, the Russian Federation, the People’s Republic of China, Poland, Italy, Iran, Turkey, Egypt and other parts of the globe. Here is an outline of her presentation:

Models of social development in 18^th and 19^th c. music and literature:

1) Mozart´s The Magic Flute: (1791) Lecture with musical and visual illustrations (DVD)

Responses to the passing of the old regime through the representation of new models of modernity and individual autonomy; a movement in Europe from war (the French Revolution) to peace, the replacement of an old order with a new one; a reliance on contemporary models of Bildung, and on the clarification of confused values.

2) The Bildungsroman (or the novel of formation/coming-of-age) and development

The novel takes its impetus from Goethe's Wilhelm Meister (1795-96), and it is this novel that will be explored. Our focus will be on the clashes between the protagonist and an unbending social order; his experiences and his development (his apprenticeship, his journeys), and his integration into a new order, as he takes his place in this order, having internalized its views and expectations. Goethe's novel influenced the Bildungsroman in European letters, including Tolstoy's War and Peace, as well as in Pushkin's The Captain's Daughter.

Hwa Yol Jung, [Ph.D. (1962), University of Florida; Post-doctoral: Yale, Chicago and North Western Universities] Dr. Jung is a world known expert in a phenomenological approach to ecology based on philosophies of Daoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism. He is an author of close to ten books and hundred articles and has been teaching for over forty years in the United States, People's Republic of China and Korea. Dr. Jung has been invited to lecture on his philosophical views, especially related to Ecopiety, Transveraslity, and Sustainability in the USA, Europe, and Asia. Professor Jung is the Coordinator of GSP’s "Series in Philosophical Ecology," and "Korean Philosophical Studies."

Parviz Morewedge (PhD, UCLA) has taught over four decades in various universities in the USA, Iran, Malaysia, Canada, Turkey, UK and elsewhere. He is the editor/author of ten books and fifty essays that have been published by university presses in the USA and UK, such as Oxford, Columbia, NYU, Fordham and California. In addition, he has been Senior Research Engineer for General Motors Computer Division, and advisor in diplomacy to several missions of the United Nations. As the Director of Global Scholarly Publications, he is responsible for the publication of over 300 scholarly books and journals as well as the organization of conferences on global studies in the PRC (10 times), Egypt (twice), Turkey (Twice), the Russian Federation, and the United States (for the past 30 years). Attendees are introduced to philosophical classics as they analyze works of art. Reading short passages from a variety of texts, students study Plato (Universals, Love, the Ethics and Icons of Self Realization), and Rumi (Mystical happiness and the meaning of life).