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August
- December
August
French Perceptions
of Religion in America: From Voltaire to Regis Debray
Denis Lacorne
August 30, 12.00, IGS
Harris Room, 119 Moses Hall
Sponsored by French Studies
September
The "Old British and Irish
Histories": Where Do We Go From Here?
Dr. Jane Ohlmeyer, Professor
of Modern History, Trinity College, Dublin
This talk will reflect on the historiographical debates
around what we once called the 'New British and Irish Histories'
and suggest alternative routes forward (i.e. using a 'three
kingdoms' approach as a way of promoting comparative history,
history that is multi-centered and encourages multi-disciplinarity
and that looks to the 'wider worlds' of Europe, the Atlantic
and Empire).
Monday, September 12, 2005, 4 pm, Geballe
Room, Townsend Center for the Humanities
Sponsored by the new Irish Studies International Speaker Series.
Co-sponsored by Center for British Studies, Consul General
of Ireland, Western Institute for Irish Studies, Department
of History, Celtic Studies.
Contact: Heidi
Sutton
Workshop with Professor
Jane Ohlmeyer
Revisionism: Debates on Irish History
Tuesday, September 13, 3-5
pm, 201 Moses Hall
Readings: J. G. A. Pocock, “British
History: A Plea for a New Subject,” Journal
of Modern History 47:4 (1975): 601-21; Nicholas Canny, “Writing
Early Modern History: Ireland, Britain, and the Wider World,” The
Historical Journal 46:3 (2003): 723-47. (Linked files
are .pdfs)
Sponsored by the new Irish Studies International Speaker Series. Co-sponsored
by Center for British Studies, Consul General of Ireland, Western Institute
for Irish Studies, Department of History, Celtic Studies.
Second
Annual Berkeley-Vienna Conference
Monday-Tuesday, September
12-13, 2005
Read
more...
Contact: Heidi
Sutton
Germany Elections: Monday Afternoon
Quarterbacking IES will hold a "Monday Afternoon Quarterbacking" session
on the German elections. Professors Gerald
D. Feldman, Professor of History and Director of IES, Christina
von Hodenberg, Professor of History and German, J.
Nicholas Ziegler, Professor of Political Science, Michael
Minkenberg, Professor of Political Science, Viadrina
University, Frankfurt/Oder, Christine Schoefer, Journalist,
and Tobias Schulze-Cleven, Political
Science, UC Berkeley, will participate.
On Sunday, September 18, Germany's Social Democratic
Party and Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder will face the conservative
CDU/CSU frontrunner Angela Merkl, with opinion polls showing
the gap narrowing. The latest grim unemployment figures put
Germany's jobless total at above five million but with a slight
rise in the growth rate of the economy. Conservatives have
put the sensitive topic of a flat 25% income tax on the political
agenda, and Chancellor Schroeder has excluded himself from
any grand coalition, should one emerge.
Germany's social insurance system — indeed its entire
socio-economic model calls for an overhaul, but this is a hot
potato in the election campaign. Should Merkl win, what will
happen to the Greens? Will she reduce tensions with the United
States? And what will Joschka Fischer — still the most
popular politician in Germany — do next? Panelists will
discuss these issues and more, as they assess the election
outcome and Germany's future.
Monday, September 19, 12 Noon, 223
Moses Hall
Climate Change: The International
Perspective
Sir David King, Chief
Science Advisor to Her Majesty's Government, Professor of
Physical Chemistry, Cambridge University
in conversation with Sandy Tolan, Director, Project
on International Reporting, Graduate School of Journalism, and Michael
Pollan, Professor, Graduate School of Journalism
Thursday, September 15, 6:00 pm, Maud
Fife Room, Wheeler Hall
Contact: Julie Taddeo
Center for British Studies Fall
Reception
The Center for British Studies hosts its annual
Fall Reception to kick off the new year.
Thursday, September 22, 5-7:00 pm, Morrison
Room, Doe Library
By invitation. RSVP by September 7 to Julie
Taddeo
8th Annual Marie G. Ringrose Lecture
Beyond the Myth of Sicily: The Sicilian Roots of the Anti-Mafia Struggle
Jane Schneider, PhD Program
in Anthropology, Graduate Center, CUNY
Thursday, September 22, 6 pm., Geballe
Room, Townsend Center, 220 Stephens Hall
Co-Sponsored by the Italian Studies Program
Graduate Seminar
Jane Schneider, PhD Program in
Anthropology, Graduate Center, CUNY
Friday, September 23, 2005,
10:00 am. - 12:00 noon, 6331
Dwinelle Hall
All graduate students are welcome to attend the
seminar with Jane Schneider. Students can receive copies
of recommended reading for the seminar either in the
Italian Studies Department (6303 Dwinelle Hall) or electronically.
To receive an electronic copy, please email tamao@socrates.berkeley.edu
Mellon Consortia Conference on British Studies
The first Mellon Consortia Conference on British
Studies takes place on the Berkeley campus, in conjunction
with the Center for British Studies at University of Chicago
and British historians at Yale University. This conference
will revisit debates about economic modernization. Plenary
speakers include Gareth Stedman Jones (Cambridge), Deborah
Valenze (Barnard) and Robert Brenner (UCLA)
Program (.pdf
file)
Friday-Saturday, September 23-24, Geballe
Room, Townsend Center for the Humanities
Read more...
Contact: Julie Taddeo
Potsdamer Platz by Ludwig
Kirchner
New Course offered through
UC Extension
The Art and Architecture of Berlin
Berlin is a city of dynamic tension, alive with fresh impulses and
bursting with new culture. Tension is the hallmark of its history and has given
rise to its uniquely creative and distinctive spirit. Through arts and architecture,
this course examines Berlin's evolution from medieval beginnings to a dynamic,
modern city. The art and culture of Berlin changed as the city did: imperial
pretensions clashing with urges for modernity during the Weimar Republic; the
perversion of culture during the Nazi years; and its emergence as the battleground
of competing cold war ideologies divided by its famous wall. Now, a vital,
modern Berlin is the capital of a reunified Germany, with ongoing reconstruction
creating islands of ambitious contemporary art and architecture.
Birgit Urmson was born and educated in Germany,
studied art-history and classical archeology at the universities of Munich,
Vienna and Paris. After moving to California she finished her studies with
an MA in art-history and an MA in environmental design from the University
of California iat Berkeley. She worked in the field of independent film,
produced and directed among others, a documentary on her family during
the Nazi period for German TV and co-directed an international Women-in
Film film festival.
Saturdays, Sep 24 -Oct 22, 10.30
am- 1.30 pm
95 Third Street, San Francisco, the new South of Market UC extension center
near MOMA.
To enroll call (510) 642 4111 or via the web www.unex.berkeley.edu/enroll
IES Fall TeaStudents, Faculty, Friends and Staff
are All Welcome!
Our informal tea time is a good opportunity for friends and colleagues to get
together for good conversation and a good cup of tea.
Tuesday, September 27,
3-5 pm, 201 Moses Hall
Religion and the Politics
of Multiculturalism in Western Democracies - A Comparative
Approach
Michael Minkenberg, Professor
of Political Science, European University Viadrina, Faculty
of Social and Cultural Sciences
This lecture addresses the issue to what
extent and how religion has been a factor in shaping immigrant
integration policies in Western democracies, both with regard
to the religious legacies of the host countries and the (predominantly
Muslim) religion of immigrant groups. It raises the issue how
the growing complexity and cultural diversity of Western countries
in the face of new immigration waves affects the functioning
of democracies and in particular the politics of immigration
and multiculturalism from the 1990s to the present.
Thursday, September 29,
4-6 pm, 201
Moses Hall
October
Research Seminar on Politics
and Institutional Change in Europe
Patrolling the Boundaries: Courts, Rights, and
Citizenship in Europe
Lisa Conant is Associate Professor
of Political Science, University of Denver, University
of Denver, and author of Justice Contained: Law and
Politics in the European Union, published by Cornell
University Press in 2002. She has engaged in research
on the comparative study of law and society as a Jean
Monnet fellow at the European University Institute and
a fellow at the Berlin Program for Advanced German and
European Studies.
Citizenship in European democracies is transforming as alien rights approximate
those of national citizens and welfare-state reforms restrict social rights
for everyone. The European Court of Justice and European Court of Human Rights
contribute to these changes by patrolling who enjoys rights traditionally available
to nationals alone. Departing from conventional limits of solidarity, European
judges have extended social rights beyond the national community in ways state
leaders neither anticipated nor welcomed. Yet justifications to include or
exclude individuals from social rights increasingly reflect a shift toward
a “transnational civil citizenship” that rewards economic activity
in markets and relationships of dependence within traditional families, potentially
threatening social protections based on need and citizenship status alone.
Wednesday, October 5, 2:00 pm, 201
Moses Hall
Discussion: Germany after
the Election: A New German Policy? with Dr.
Jörg Himmelreich
Dr. Jörg Himmelreich is a
transatlantic fellow at the German Marshall Fund in Washington,
DC. He is examining U.S., EU, and Russian policy opportunities
for U.S.-European cooperation in the Caucasus region. Dr.
Himmelreich comes to GMF from the German Foreign Office,
where he served as a policy planner in 2004. In that
capacity, he developed proposals for German and EU policies
toward Russia, and other states of the former Soviet Union.
He also worked with the DaimlerChrysler Board of Management,
focusing on political and economic relations in Russia, Central
Asia and Eastern Europe.
Thursday, October 6, 12:30, 207
Moses Hall
More information: Johannes Biermann
Culture and Politics Colloquium Series
The Heritage of Culpable Thought: Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida
as Philosophers of the Post-War Period
Heinz Bude, Professor of Macro-Sociology
at the University of Kassel.
Habermas and Derrida who finally, after a long phase
of distanced understandings and misunderstandings, discovered
one another as brothers in the spirit of Europe are the
two most important thinkers of the postwar era. One has
determined our thinking about the general and the idea
of reason in society; the other has played a fundamental
role in defining how we conceptualize the reality of the
Other and the conditions for resposibility in a world of
rogues. They both pronounce their loyality to that generational
context of a time that has broken time.
They share a conciousness of our time, which for them
is a time after the Holocaust, after the Gulag and after
the atom bomb. They are both familiar with the totalitarian
temptations of Marxism and have experienced the illusionary
pacification of liberal democracy. But they also realize
that "Marx' specters" cannot be banished with the final
question about the "end of history", just as "the West" cannot
veil its lack of moral standards by waging war against
the metonyms of terror. How do they speak to us today?
Is their generation still our generation?
Thursday, October 6, 4 pm, 201
Moses Hall
Sponsor: Goethe Institute in SF
Allies at War: America, Europe and the
Middle East
Dr. Philip Gordon of the Brookings Institution
The U.S.-led war in Iraq created some of the deepest divisions
in the history of the Western Alliance. But Iraq is not
the only Middle Eastern issue that divides the allies. On
Israel-Palestine, despite ostensible agreement on the “Road
Map” for peace, Americans and Europeans have significantly
different views of the causes of the conflict and on what should
be done in the wake of Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza.
On Iran, U.S. and European governments are unified in
their commitment to stopping nuclear proliferation, but
they have very different views of the best way to accomplish
that goal. More broadly, President Bush’s agenda
of promoting freedom in the Middle East as a means of eliminating
the sources of Islamic terrorism has met with lukewarm support,
if not outright rejection in many European capitals. What
are the main causes of these different perspectives on the
Middle East? Can the U.S. and Europe overcome their differences
and work together on a common strategy given their shared overall
goals and interests? Does it matter if they do?
Friday, October 7, 12:30 pm, 201
Moses Hall
"History without Events":
Marx, the Middle Class, and The Changing Tactics of Historical
Materialism, Dissertation Workshop)
Mark Allison is a Ph.D. candidate
in the Department of English. His dissertation is
entitled Wandering Between Two Worlds: The Victorian
Concept of History and the Problem of 'Middleness.'
This paper argues that the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte introduces
a crucial innovation in Marx’s thought: a radically revised conception
of the bourgeoisie. This new understanding of the middle class casts
light on several of the most controversial concepts in theoretical Marxism--class
consciousness, the role of the state, the falling rate of profit. More
importantly, it encourages us to interpret Capital’s silence on the subject
of revolution as neither a rhetorical gambit nor a symptom of diminished faith,
but as a theoretically informed adjustment in the tactics of historical materialism.
October 11, 4 pm, 201
Moses Hall
Sponsor: Center for British Studies
Irish Poetry Reading
Greg Delanty and Liam Ó Muirthile
Greg Delanty was born in Cork in
1958. His collections are Cast in the Fire (Mountrath,
The Dolmen Press, 1986); Southward (Dublin, Dedalus,
1992); American Wake (1995); The Hellbox (Oxford,
The Oxford University Press, 1998); The Blind Stitch (Manchester,
Carcanet Press, 2001); and The Ship of Birth (Carcanet Press,
2003). He lives in Vermont, USA.
Liam Ó Muirthile was born
in Cork in 1950. His poetry collections include Tine Chnámh (Sáorséal Ó Marcaigh,
1984), which was awarded the Irish-American Cultural Institute
Prize; and Dialann Bothair (Gallery, 1992). Tine
Chnámh was produced in the Project Theatre, Dublin,
in 1993, followed by Fear an Tae at Andrews Lane Theatre,
Dublin and An Taidhbhearc, Galway in 1995. His novel Ar
Bhruach na Laoi (Comhar, 1995) won the Duais chuimhneacháin
Sheáin Uí Éogeartaigh. He is a member
of Aosdána, and lives in Dublin.
Friday, October 14, 11-12:30, Maude
Fife Room, 315 Wheeler Hall
From Object to Things:
How to Represent the Parliament of Nature?
Bruno Latour, Centre de
Sociologies de l'Innovation, Ecole Nationale Superieure des
Mines de Paris. Bruno Latour is a philosopher and sociologist
working in Paris. He has written many books one more relevant
for this lecture Politics of Nature and he has curated Ico.
"Things" are controversial assemblages of entangled issues,
and not simply objects sitting apart from our political passions.
The entanglements of things and politics engage activists,
artists, politicians, and intellectuals, and have been simulated
in the artificial setting of an exhibition in Germany that
has just ended. This talk will debrief and discuss this exhibit.
Monday, October 17, 7:30 pm, 101
Morgan Hall
Note: The film Making
Things Public will be shown from 6:30-7:30
pm, 101
Morgan, as well, prior to the lecture.
Sponsors:
Science, Technology, and Society Center
The Department of History
Art, Technology and Culture Colloquium
Townsend Center for Humanities
French Studies Program
The Stem Cell Initiative Humanities GROUP Team Award
The Department of Anthropology
The Department of Social Medicine at UCSF
The Art of Poetry
Kai Nieminen, Poet & Translator from Finland discusses and reads his
poetry and talks about the art of translating poetry.
Tuesday, October 18,
11 am in English, 1 pm in Finnish,
Kai Nieminen is an invited
poet, reading at the San Francisco
International Poetry Festival, 2005.
Finnish Studies Program
Europe's
Globalization Trap
Harold James, Professor of
History, Princeton University, was educated at Cambridge
and was a Fellow of Peterhouse before moving to Princeton.
His books include a study of the interwar depression
in Germany,
The German Slump, 1986, and an
analysis of the changing character of national identity
in
Germany, A Germany Identity 1770-1990,
1989. His most recent work is
The End of Globalization:
Lessons from the Great Depression, 2001. He
co-authored a history of the commercial bank
Deutsche
Bank, 1995, which won the Financial Times Global
Business Book Award in 1996 and wrote
The Deutsche
Bank and the Nazi Economic War Against the Jews,
2001. He is a member of the Independent Commission
of Experts investigating the political and economic
links of Switzerland with Nazi Germany and of commissions
to examine the roles of Deutsche Bank and Dresdner
Bank. In addition, he is Chairman of the Editorial
Board of
World Politics.
Thursday, October 20, 4:00 pm, 201
Moses Hall
Turn of the Tide? World War II in
German Historiography 60 Years After
Dr. Jörg Echternkamp, Institute
for Research in Military History, Potsdam
Thursday, October 24 4:00
pm, 201
Moses Hall
France and the EU: Where
to go after the Non?
Christian Deubner, Chargé de
mission (questions européennes et franco-allemandes),
Centre d'Etudes Prospectives et d'Informations Internationales,
CEPII
Tuesday October 25, 4 pm, 201
Moses Hall
Where You Stand Depends on Where you Get
Hit:
U.S. and European Counter Terrorism Strategies
Jeremy Shapiro, Director of Research, Center
on the United States and Europe Fellow, Foreign Policy Studies, The Brookings
Institution
Tuesday, October 25, 12:00 noon, European Studies
Seminar Room, 223 Moses
Hall
Part of the Research Seminar on Politics and Institutional Change in Europe
November
Blair,
Prime Ministerial Power and Iraq
Rod Rhodes is Professor of
Political Science and Head of Program, Research School
of Social Sciences, Australian National University. He
is an authority on policy networks, governance and British
government. He is Australia’s foremost expert on
the comparative study of public policy and administration.
His most recent books include: Understanding Governance (1997);
and Interpreting British Governance (2003).
November 1, 4 pm, 201
Moses Hall
Sponsor: Center for British Studies
Co-sponsored by IGS
French-German Relations
and Europe, after the French NO to the EU Constitution
Michele Weinachter, Chair of the
German Department at the University of Cergy-Pontoise France
Wednesday, November 2, 12:00
noon, 201 Moses Hall
French Studies Program
The New Governance:
Interpreting Situated Agency
A Workshop with Professor Mark Bevir (Pol Sci, UCB),
on
"Interpretation and Its Others" and Professor R.A.W. Rhodes (Research
School of Social Sciences, Australian National University) on "Everyday
Life in a Government Ministry"
This talk focuses on the debate about the ‘Blair Presidency. I ask the
deceptively simple question, ‘'how do we understand the relationship
between the prime minister, ministers and the rest of Westminster and Whitehall?’ The
prime minister wins, loses and draws as one might expect given the volatile
nature of high politics. Prime ministerial practice is equally varied. And
the best way to understand this volatility and variety is through decentered
studies of the beliefs and practices of politicians and civil servants.
Thursday, November 3, 4 pm, 201
Moses Hall
Co-sponsored by IGS
CANCELLED
IES Roundtable
A (New) German Government? A discussion
with Professors Nick Ziegler, UCB Political Science, and
Thomas von Danwitz, University of Cologne and Boalt School
of Law, and Gerald Feldman, Professor of History and Director
of IES.
Professors Ziegler, von Danwitz, and Feldman will
discuss the crisis in the formation of a new German government
and the domestic, European, and international policy implications
of potential cabinet formation, its chances for implementing
successful economic reform, its relationship to the EU, and
possible changes in German foreign policy.
November 8, 12:30 p.m., 201
Moses Hall
Professor Ziegler teaches European
politics, comparative political economy, German Politics, and
political ideologies in UCB's Political Science Department
and is a leading expert on the politics of economic reform
in Germany.
Professor Dr. iur. Thomas von Danwitz,
D.I.A.P. (ENA, Paris) holds the Chair for Public and European
Law at the University of Cologne and specializes in Media and
Communications Law.
Professor Feldman, a leading expert in German
and European History, is Director of the Institute of European Studies and
the Jane K. Sather Professor of History UCB, and is a leading expert in
German and European History.
Dissertation
Workshop
"Take the Word Morale Out of Its
Italics": The Emergence of a Military Concept
Daniel
Ussishkin is a PhD Candidate
in the Department of History, UC Berkeley, and is completing
his dissertation titled "Morale: Social Citizenship and
Democracy in Modern Britain," which charts the history
of 'morale' from the 18th century until the aftermath
of the Second World War.
Abstract: This
chapter demonstrates that during the 19th century, and
especially from the 1870s onwards, increasing attention
was paid to the moral forces involved in battle. By paying
attention to both the continental and the peculiarly
British colonial trajectories, it argues that 'morale'
very slowly emerged as a concept that brought together
old and new concerns under a new intellectual management.
This concept, 'morale,' will acquire its position
as central to our understandings of human collective
action only in the 20th century.
Anti-Semitism
in France
Esther Benbassa, Professor of Jewish Histrory
and Culture at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Sorbonne, Paris
Esther Benbassa tells the intriguing tale of the social, economic, and cultural
vicissitudes of a people in diaspora. With verve and insight, she reveals the
diversity of Jewish life throughout France's regions, while showing how Jewish
identity has constantly redefined itself in a country known for both the Rights
of Man and the Dreyfus affair. Beginning with late antiquity, she charts the
migrations of Jews into France and traces their fortunes through the making
of the French kingdom, the Revolution, the rise of modern anti-Semitism, and
the current renewal of interest in Judaism.
November 9, 2005, 12.30 pm, 201
Moses Hall
Co-sponsored by Jewish Studies and French Studies
Culture and Politics Colloquium Series
Thomas Masaryk: Philosopher and Politician
Jan Sebestik, Directeur
De Recherche CNRS, Paris
Thursday, November 10, 2005,
4:00 pm, European Studies Seminar Room, 201
Moses Hall
Blessed
are the Meek: Leniency and Mercy in Sámi Legends
Thomas DuBois,
University of Wisconsin, Madison
Monday, November 14, 2005,
4:00 pm, 6415 Dwinelle
The Department of Scandinavian
Languages and Literatures
Finnish Studies
A Sociology of Computer
Demos: Going Public in Science and Technology
Claude Rosental, Permanent Researcher at the
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in France. His main current
research topics are the Historical Sociology of Public Demonstrations
and the Sociology of Logic. He is the author in particular of Certifying
Knowledge: The Sociology of a Logical Theorem in Artificial Intelligence and "Fuzzyfying
the World: Social Practices of Showing the Properties of Fuzzy Logic" in
M. N. Wise (ed.), Growing Explanations: Historical Perspectives
on Recent Science.
Claude Rosental will analyze the social conditions and uses
of computer demos (public demonstrations of software and hardware).
His talk will be based in particular on empirical observations
he has conducted in the past 13 years among researchers in
AI and engineers in the Bay Area, as well as within the framework
of major Research and Development Programs of the European
Commission. He will show how demos constitute a key element
in the processes that bind the making and the marketing of
science and technology. In the light of this analysis, the
recent development in the use of demos will appear as a historical
opportunity to understand why demonstrations should not be
apprehended in the limited terms of an opposition between proof
and persuasion (or apodeixis and epideixis). Studying such
social phenomena will also allow to explore contemporary forms
of scientific capitalism and of demo-cratic regimes: regimes
that seem to provide power not so much to the masses (demos)
than to the demonstrators.
November 15, 2005, 223
Moses Hall
Sponsors:
Science, Technology, and Society Center
French Studies Program
Department of Sociology
The Godly Child’s “Power
and Evidence” in the Word: Orality and Literacy in
the Ministry of Sarah Wight
Michael Mascuch,
Chair, Department of Rhetoric, UCB
Mascuch examines the functions and effects of orality and literacy in the representation
of the extraordinary experience of the fifteen year-old female “child” Sara
Wight who, in 1647, after at least four years of profound anxiety about her
spiritual condition as the “chief of sinners,” collapsed blind,
deaf, and motionless, spending three months in bed. Despite her physical incapacities
Wight remained conscious and discursive throughout her convalescence; she spoke
avidly and at length about her spiritual condition with a multitude of bedside
visitors, both high- and low-born. Her conversations were written down verbatim
and published by the then-Baptist minister Henry Jessey, in a book entitled, The
Exceeding Riches of Grace Advanced by the Spirit of Grace to an Empty Nothing
Creature, Mistress Sara Wight, which appeared in seven editions between
1647 and 1658. In the experience of Sarah Wight we encounter a powerful and
historiographically undervalued alternative to the Reformation’s own
preoccupation with writing, and literacy in general, as the cornerstone of
true religion.
November 16, 2005, 4 pm, 201
Moses Hall
Sponsored by the Center for British Studies
Lecture Series:
Facing Global Hot Spots
Subliminal and Surreptitious Spiritual Foundations
for Divergent Attitudes toward Biotechnology in America,
Europe, and Asia
Dr. Lee M. Silver, Professor
in the Department of Molecular Biology and the Woodrow
Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton
University. He also has joint appointments in the Program
in Science, Technology, and Environmental Policy, the Center
for Health and Wellbeing, the Office of Population Research,
and the Princeton Environmental Institute, also at Princeton.
Thursday, November 17, 2005, 12:30 pm, 223
Moses Hall
Co-sponsored by the Institute of International Studies
The
Goethe-Institut San Francisco in cooperation with the
Institute for European Studies and the German Department
at UC Berkeley, the Department
for History at the University
of San Francisco and with the support of the Heinrich-Böll-Foundation,
North America, presents:
IS
THERE A NEW ANTI-SEMITISM? European
and American Perspectives Colloquium
Following
the events of 9/11 and escalating with current Middle
East tensions, a polarization is taking place in the US
between critics of Israel on one side and supporters
of the Sharon administration and the religious right on
the other. At the same time, progressive circles in the
USA and Europe have grown increasingly critical of the
negative ramifications of Globalisation, the military
intervention in Iraq as well as the politics of Israel. It
was, and still is remarkable that, in their line of reasoning,
the progressive critics in several European Countries,
including Germany, sometime blur the borders between criticism
of Israel and Anti-Semitism. Particularly after the wave
of anti-Jewish hostilities and acts of violence in Spring
2002 there is talk about a “new” Anti-Semitism
in Europe. This development is viewed with concern in
the USA, where, at the same time, the question “what
is and what is not Anti-Semitism” has become a
subject of intense debate
on University campuses. The half -day colloquium
will address this complex framework of a seemingly new
kind of Anti-Semitism, which has developed in recent years.
Judith
Butler,
Department of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature,
UC Berkeley
Andrew R. Heinze, Department of History, University
of San Francisco
Werner Bergmann, Center for the Research on Anti-Semitism,
Berlin
Detlev Claussen, Department of Sociology,
University of Hannover
Leon De Winter, Author and
Filmmaker, Netherlands (not yet confirmed )
Russel Berman, Department
of German Studies and Comp. Literature, Stanford University
Moderation: Robert Alter,
Department for Comparative Literature and Jewish History
Friday,
November 18, 2005,
1-6 pm, Geballe Room, Townsend Center for the Humanities,
UC Berkeley
For more information call Ulrich Everding: 415.263.8760
Cinecittà Refugee
Camp, 1944-1950
Noa Steimatsky, Yale University
Monday, November 21, 2005, 5:00 pm, 160 Dwinelle
The Department of Italian Studies, Italian Studies Program,
and the Film Studies Program
The
SS, Foreign Exchange Controls, and the Despoliation
of the Jews, 1935-1941
Dr. Ralf Banken,
University of Frankfurt a.M. & Cologne, Research
Fellow, United States Holocaust Museum, Washington,
D.C.
November 29, 2005, 12 pm, 201
Moses Hall
Cosponsored by Jewish Studies
National Socialist Robbery
of Precious Metals, 1933-1945: The Role of Degussa and the
Case of Poland
Dr. Ralf Banken, University
of Frankfurt a.M. & Cologne, Research Fellow, United
States Holocaust Museum, Washington, D.C.
November 29, 2005, 4 pm, 201
Moses Hall
Cosponsored by Jewish Studies
FIRE
ALARM:FRENCH, EUROPEAN & AMERICAN
REACTIONS TO FRANCE'S CIVIL UNREST
Participants include Jonah
Levy, Associate Professor of Political
Science, Halem Bazian, Lecturer in Near Eastern Studies and
Ethnic Studies, and Zachary Shore, Fellow at the Institute of
European Studies
November 30, 3:00-5:00 pm, Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall
Townsend Center for the Humanities
French Studies Program
Cosponsored by the Religion, Politics and Globalization
Program
Dissertation
Workshop: Ryan McDermott, "Reading from a Distance:
Walter Pater, Codedness, and the Moment of Identification"
Ryan
McDermott is
a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English. His
dissertation is entitled The Gay Hermeneutic:
Victorian Genealogies of Homosexuality and the Practice
of Reading.
Abstract:
As part of a larger work that explores the formative
role of reading in the emergence of Victorian homosexual
identities, this paper begins with a consideration of
the relationship between hermeneutics and early forms
of gay world-making in the work of Walter Pater. Against
the phenomenological backdrop of Paterian impressionability,
it examines the role that readerly identification played
in what Christopher Nealon has recently called “feeling
historical”—an interpretive strategy taken
up by Pater and other gay Victorian writers and
readers to reanimate historical forms of (mainly Greek)
same-sex desire. Taking
Pater’s dialogic correspondence with his (putatively)
gay readers as a cue, this essay elaborates on the affective
and identificatory transactions that take place within
the penumbra of what critics have only inadequately
theorized as the gay “code of reading.” This
paper complicates such a proposed semiotic by taking
a closer look at readerly dynamics that cut across the
idea of codedness itself—namely, the hermeneutic
distance between reader and text that is "traversed" in
the “moment” of readerly identification. As
a formal strategy of world making, gay reading would
seem to duplicate Pater’s own efforts to theorize
historical forms of feeling in the coded language of
homosexual experience.
November 30, 2005,
4 pm, 221
Moses Hall
Center for British Studies
December
Portuguese
Studies Student Social
Maria Elvira Callapez, Postdoc in Department
of History of Science and Technology
Members of the executive committee and West Coast Director of PAPS (Portuguese
American Post-graduate Society)
A social event for anyone on campus interested in learning more about grants,
scholarships, and all things Portuguese happening on campus.
Thursday, December 1, 2005, 3-5:00 pm, 221
Moses Hall
Finnish Movie
Night (in English)
Kuutamolla (official English title Lovers
and Leavers, literally
In the Moonlight), 2002, 119 minutes, Comedy-Drama
Aku Louhimies, Director
Finnish language with English subtitles
A lonely film-buff looks for love in Helsinki, advised by her cooky mother, sexually
liberated friend, and an outwardly perfect but mismatched married couple. Love
turns out to be too good to be true when she ends up with a dashing, up-and-coming
director. Features several major Finnish stars including Peter
Franzen and Laura
Malmivaara.
Read more: http://www.matilarohr.com/en/press/lovers_and_leavers.html
Thursday, December 1,
2005, 7 pm, B-4
Dwinelle Hall
Finnish Studies Program
Don
Quixote in History Coloquium
Celebrating the 400th anniversary of the publication of the first part
of Don Quixote, the Center for Spanish Studies hosts an afternoon colloquium
on Friday, December 2, 2005.
It features as principal speakers three of the leading scholars
of Spanish Renaissance and Baroque history and literature: Mary
Gaylord, the Sosland Family Professor of Romance Languages
and Literatures at Harvard University, who will speak on "Don
Quixote's New World of Knighthood"; David
Quint, Professor of Comparative Literature at Yale
University, whose topic is "The Genealogy of the Novel from
the Odyssey to Don Quixote"; and Mary Elizabeth
Perry, Adjunct Professor of History at Occidental College
and Research Associate for the UCLA Center for Medieval and
Renaissance Studies, whose topic is "Moriscos and the Politics
of Religion in Early Modern Spain."
Friday, December 2, 2005, 1 pm, Howard
Room in the Faculty Club.
All events are free and will
be open to the public.
