Past Events Archive

The Voice(s) of the People? Literature and Film between Democracy and Populism The workshop “The Voice(s) of the People? Literature and Film between Democracy and Populism” will offer a space for talks, close readings, and discussions of contemporary and canonical texts addressing the role of literature and film in their relationship to …read more

Keynote address for the Graduate Student Workshop “100 Years Later: The Russian Revolution and its Consequences” …read more

There are more violent conflicts, civil wars, crises around the globe than ever since WW ll. New powers are testing their strength, established powers are inward looking. Global and regional governance, from the UN to the Brettonwood institutions, to NATO and EU, are under pressure. Autocrats, even in NATO and …read more

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What happened to the great Central European luxury commodity of the eighteenth century, porcelain, when formerly mercantile firms had to compete in a (relatively) open market with mass producers of ceramics? How did the porcelain firms’ painters and modelers deal with the reality that consumers now wanted inexpensive imitations of …read more

After decades of state-building success, Austria-Hungary collapsed totally and utterly in 1918. For many years, historians have argued that this ramshackle empire was an anachronism, unfit to live among modern nation states in the twentieth century, and therefore it was destined to fall. But such thinking ignores the dynamics unleashed …read more

»Aufklärung ist der Ausgang des Menschen aus seiner selbst verschuldeten Unmündigkeit.” Dank prägnanter Verknappung bewahrt Kants Diktum seine hohe Attraktivität in der anhaltenden Debatte um die Frage, was unter Aufklärung zu verstehen ist. Spätestens seit Adornos und Horkheimers Dialektik der Aufklärung kommt hierbei auch immer eine Vernunft- und Kulturkritik zum …read more

Prof. Dr. Ortrud Gutjahr (Universität Hamburg) Aufklärungstheater: Lessings Dramen und Hamburgische Dramaturgie NOTE: This course only meets for 5 Fridays (09/1-09/29/2017) from 1-4pm in 282 Dwinelle Hall. Gotthold Ephraim Lessings Schauspiel Nathan der Weise (1779) gilt als das deutschsprachige Drama der Aufklärung schlechthin. Und dies nicht nur, weil es bis heute das am …read more

Against the backdrop of current debates about science and populism, Peter Strohschneider, President of the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG) re-examines Vannevar Bush’s ideas on the public role of science as developed in the 1945 report to the President of the United States, “Science, The Endless Frontier.” Bush was …read more

Imagination, Phantasie und Einbildungskraft sind Begriffe, die sich auf ein Vermögen beziehen, dessen Status immer schon zwiespältig ist. Einerseits bildet die Produktivität der Imagination als Vorstellungskraft – neben dem Vermögen des Gedächtnisses und der Vernunft – eine Bedingung der Möglichkeit aller Erkenntnis und Abstraktion, andererseits ist sie in ihrer relativen …read more