News & Events
Lecture
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The Republic of Arabic Letters: Islam and the European Enlightenment
Time: - 6:00 PMDate: Location: 3335 Dwinelle Hall
Speaker: Alexander Bevilacqua
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a pioneering community of Christian scholars laid the groundwork for the modern Western understanding of Islamic civilization. These men produced the first accurate translation of the Quran into a European language, mapped the branches of the Islamic arts and sciences, and wrote Muslim history using Arabic sources. The Republic of Arabic Letters reconstructs this process, revealing the influence of Catholic and Protestant intellectuals on the secular Enlightenment understanding of Islam and its written traditions. Drawing on Arabic, English, French, German, Italian, and Latin sources, Alexander Bevilacquas rich intellectual history retraces the routesboth mental and…
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Making Immigrant Knowledge from Collective Memories: Watching the Process Unfold in Spain
Time: - 8:00 PMDate: Location: 220 (Geballe Room) Stephens Hall
The voices and spaces of immigrants come together to form collective memories. This, in turn, constitutes an important basis of community knowledge. Evelyn Hu-DeHart reflects on this process with the example ofBarcelona, where she currently teaches about new Chinese immigrants. Her research examines the distant history of Chinese in the Spanish Empire, first in Manila in the 16th century, then in Cuba in the 19th century. Keynote Address for the Conference Migrant Knowledges: Concepts, Voices, Spaces on April 20 & 21, 2018 at GHI West, the Pacific Regional Office of the German Historical Institute Washington DC.
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The Question of Judeo-Arabic: Nation, Partition, and the Linguistic Imaginary: CMES Distinguished Visitor Lecture
Time: - 6:30 PMDate: Location: 340 Stephens Hall
Professor Ella Shohat, 2018 CMES Distinguished Visitor, will deliver a lecture on “The Question of Judeo-Arabic: Nation, Partition, and the Linguistic Imaginary.” This lecture examines linguistic belonging as invented within national and colonial itineraries. More specifically, it explores the genealogy of the concept of Judeo-Arabic language and its axiomatic definition as a cohesive (specifically Jewish) unit separate from Arabic, and classifiable under the historically novel rubric of isolatable Jewish languages severed from their neighboring dialect/languages. Does the notion of Judeo-Arabic correspond to the designation by the speakers of that language themselves or rather to a paradigm influenced by post-Enlightenment Judaic…
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Post-Nazi Germany and the Myth of American Influence
Time: - 7:00 PMDate: Location: 201 Moses Hall
Drawing on the author’s recent book, Lions and Lambs: Conflict in Weimar and the Creation of Post-Nazi Germany (2017), this talk will challenge older explanations of postwar German liberal democratic reconstruction and offer a new interpretation rooted in under-explored sources from the Hitler era. Noah B. Strote is an Associate Professor of European History at North Carolina State University. He earned his PhD from the Department of History at UC Berkeley in 2011.
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Czechoslovak Exile After 1948: Activities, Problems, and International Cooperation
Time: - 5:30 PMDate: Location: 270 Stephens Hall
Speaker: Martin Nekola
The exile after the coup in 1948 and the fate of Czechs abroad, who sought the return of freedom and democracy to their homeland, enslaved by the Communists, are an integral part of our modern history. However, this phenomenon is still neglected and the general public has only fragmentary information about it. Researchers are still unable to agree on the intensities of individual waves of emigration between 1948-1989. The most likely figure would be probably 250,000 people in total. The estimate of Czechoslovak State Security at the end of 1948 states 8614 refugees. Their first steps in the free world…
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Lecture in German: “Populärer Realismus. Vom International Style gegenwärtigen Erzählens.” Ein Vortrag von Prof. Moritz Bassler (Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität)
Location: 282 Dwinelle Hall
Speaker: Prof. Dr. Moritz Baßler
Populärer Realismus. Vom International Style gegenwärtigen Erzählens In der Gegenwart hat sich international ein leicht lesbarer, gut übersetzbarer Erzählstil durchgesetzt, der Literatur nicht als Sprachkunst im engeren Sinne praktiziert (der Murakami-Kehlmann-Knausgård-Ferrante-Komplex). Der Vortrag fragt, welche Rezeptionsformen und Stilgemeinschaften diesen Populären Realismus tragen. Vor allem aber spürt er den Verfahren vermeintlicher und tatsächlicher Sinngebung nach, die dieser Literatur bleiben, von reiner Unterhaltung über alte und neue Spielarten des Midcult bis hin zu offenen Erzählformen des Kalkülromans. In Zusammenhang mit der publizistischen Schreibwerkstatt Kritisch kreativ bietet der Vortrag eine Vorschau auf Moritz Baßlers neues Buch Populärer Realismus: Vom International Style gegenwärtigen Erzählens, das am 15.…