The faculty grant will support a conference commemorating the 100-year anniversary of Walter Benjamin’s Moscow Diary. Benjamin arrived in Moscow in early December 1926 and stayed for two months, keeping a detailed diary while he was there. The Diary is an extraordinary document of Benjamin’s thinking at a key turning point in his career and a fascinating record of everyday life in Moscow at a pivotal moment in its history. The conference will gather an international group of scholars to consider the ongoing vitality and relevance of Benjamin’s Diary and the multiple connections between Benjamin’s concerns and our own. Of particular interest are the artistic, intellectual and political possibilities that were present then but that have since been forgotten, what Benajmin sometimes described as “forgotten futures.”