News & Events
Lecture
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Lecture by Dr. Friederike Schäfer-“Un-/Making the Anthropocene. Exhibitions as Discursive Spaces”
Time: - 1:30 PMDate: Location: 5303 Dwinelle Hall- German Conference Room
Speaker: Dr. Friederike Schäfer, visiting scholar, Freie Universität Berlin
In her research project “Earth(ly) Matters. How Exhibition Spaces Capture Natural Environments,” Friederike Schäfer discusses how large-scale exhibitions have engaged in the discourse around the Anthropocene within the past decade. She examines how these exhibitions function as discursive spaces that conflate aesthetic experience and knowledge production, through the lens of the controversial debate on this proposition for a paradigm change in the history of Earth. This talk focuses on “Das Anthropozän am HKW“ (2013–2022, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin) and “Critical Zones. Horizonte einer neuen Erdpolitik“ at ZKM (2020–2022, Zentrum für Kunst und Medien, Karlsruhe). https://www.temporal-communities.de/research/travelling-matters/projects/schaefer-earthly-matters/index.html In collaboration…
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Lecture: Francesco Casetti- “Media, Fears, Protection”
Time: - 5:00 PMDate: Location: 142 Dwinelle Hall
Speaker: Francesco Casetti (Sterling Professor of Humanities and Film and Media Studies at Yale University)
Many contemporary media function as filters that protect us against the dangers from the exterior, rather than as tools that help appropriate the world. Consequently, mediation becomes a process in which contact with the world relies on some kind of distancing, and in which grasping reality also means recognizing the threats it may pose – threats that are, more often than not, the result of human action on the world. This lecture explores the widespread presence of protective media in our contemporary media landscape, with a particular focus on the ways they reshape our environment and elicit new forms of governmentality. …
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Felix A. Jiménez Botta | The Central American insurgencies and the Human Rights Culture War in the Federal Republic of Germany, 1979 –1990
Time: - 6:30 PMDate: Location: 201 Philosophy Hall
Speaker: Felix A. Jiménez Botta, Associate Professor of History, Miyazaki International College
Sponsor(s): Institute of European Studies, Center for German and European Studies, German Historical Institute Washington | Pacific Office Berkeley Did the human rights movement shun social justice and ignore the rise of neoliberalism in the 1970s–1980s? Using the example of human rights advocacy towards Central America in West Germany, this talk will explore conflicting visions of human rights in the 1980s, and explain why a market-conforming human rights movement emerged victorious by the end of the decade. Left-wing activists mobilized human rights rhetoric to support the Salvadoran guerrilla movement and the Sandinista state because they promised liberation and social justice.…
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Sara Pugach | Marxists and other Migrants: African Intellectual Pathways from the German Democratic Republic
Time: - 12:00 PMDate: Location: 201 Philosophy Hall
Speaker: Sara Pugach, Professor of History, California State University
Sponsor(s): German Historical Institute Washington | Pacific Office Berkeley, Institute of European Studies, Institute of Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies This paper will look at the later careers of Africans who studied in the German Democratic Republic. While I intend to write about former educational migrants who took all sorts of routes after their university or vocational training, this particular talk focuses on those students who became professors in the humanities or social sciences. I will explore the impact that their studies in the GDR had – or did not have – on their academic careers. Some of the…
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Nancy Rushohora | Memories of the German colonialism in Tanzania
Time: - 6:30 PMDate: Location: 201 Philosophy Hall
Speaker: Nancy Rushohora, Archaeology and Heritage Studies, University of Dar es Salaam
Sponsor(s): Institute of European Studies, Center for German and European Studies, German Historical Institute Washington | Pacific Office Berkeley, Center for African Studies This presentation focuses on recent research on secrets and silences on memories of German colonialism in Tanzania, specifically, the area between Rufiji and the Ruvuma River in southern Tanzania. Dated 1880’s and taking over the long-established trade connection with the Asiatic world, establishing the German colonial rule of the region was not easy. The use of violence to bring the Tanzanians to their knees resulted in more than 50 resistances that the Germans were involved in…
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Sexual Violence between Idyll and Legend: Gottfried Keller’s „Meretlein“
Time: - 7:00 PMDate: Location: 282 Dwinelle Hall
Speaker: Professor Frauke Berndt (Universität Zürich)
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Minority and Majority as Asymmetrical Concepts: The Perils of Democratic Equality and Fantasies of National Purity
Time: - 6:30 PMDate: Location: 201 Philosophy Hall
Speaker: Till van Rahden, Professor of German and European Studies, Université de Montréal
Sponsor(s): Institute of European Studies, Center for German and European Studies, UC Berkeley Department of History, German Historical Institute Washington | Pacific Office Berkeley, UC Berkeley Department of German, DAAD, Center for Jewish Studies The conceptual couple of majority/minority is viewed as a harmless way of identifying an arithmetic relationship. The idea of a dichotomy between majority and (Jewish) minority as a short hand to describe relations between ethnic or religious groups, however, is recent. In fact, as it did not exist before 1919 when in the wake of World War I the idea of democracy and the idea of the homogeneous nation-state triumphed simultaneously. Prior to…
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Mosse Lecture
Time: - 5:00 PMDate: Location: BAMPFA
Speaker: Werner Herzog
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Lecture entitled Occupied Germany & Japan after WWII from Global Cultural History Perspectives (Besatzungsalltage/senryōka nichijō)
Time: - 12:00 PMDate: Location: 201 Philosophy Hall
Speaker: Robert Kramm (Freigeist-Fellow, LMU Munich)
Sponsor(s): Institute of European Studies, German Historical Institute Washington | Pacific Office Berkeley, Center for Race and Gender, Institute of International Studies, German Department, History Department The postwar occupations of Germany and Japan were significant periods for the history of Europe and East Asia alike. They have both been thoroughly researched on their own right, yet until to date historical scholarship has hardly ever considered putting the history of both occupations into conversation, whether from comparative or entangled history perspectives. Our understanding of both occupations thus remains embedded into the national success stories of postwar Germany and Japan, and both nations’ respective relations to…
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The Museum Next Door: Living with Art in Nineteenth Century Prussia
Time: - 6:30 PMDate: Location: 223 Philosophy Hall
Speaker: Alice Goff, Assistant Professor of German History and the College, University of Chicago
Sponsor(s): Institute of European Studies, Center for German and European Studies, UC Berkeley Department of History, German Historical Institute Washington | Pacific Office Berkeley Can public art museums transform society? Those who answer yes have often drawn on an early nineteenth century German aesthetic tradition which identified art as a source of personal and collective liberation in an age of revolutionary conflict. Drawing on Goff’s forthcoming book, The God Behind the Marble (University of Chicago Press, 2023), this talk charts the material struggles that accompanied the philosophical faith in art’s transformative powers in a time of looting, secularization, and war. It argues that these struggles– between…