Asian Studies Postdoctoral Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature Anna Oldfield presented at a conference titled "Totalitarian Laughter: Cultures of the Comic Under Socialism" held at Princeton University on May 15-18. Her presentation was titled "Laughter and the Anxiety of Ethnicity: The New Caucasian Woman in Kavkazskaia Plennitsa and Qayinana." The conference was sponsered by the department of Slavic languages and literatures at Princeton University.

Oldfield's paper compared films from Russia and Azerbaijan in order to explore the role of laughter in both relieving and revealing the anxieties of non-Russian ethnicity in the former Soviet Union, centering on the clash of "ethnic/traditional" with "Soviet/progressive" values as they are negotiated by the "New Caucasian" woman.