News & Events

Past Events Archive

  • The Absent Presence of Race in Postwar Germany, Oct 20

    This talk considers why it has been so difficult to apprehend certain kinds of “difference” in postwar Germany. Specifically, it asks why the category of “race” has been missing from postwar German public discourse. The talk probes the meanings of the terms “Rasse” and “race” as a starting point for …read more

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  • Poetics of the Wound: Re-Reading Goethe and the Romantics, Oct 13

    Nicole Sütterlin argues that notions of physical injury, Christian-catholic stigmata and particularly psychological trauma are a defining element in German literature around 1800. Thus Goethe’s classical manifesto Über Laokoon (1798) strikingly emphasizes Lakoon’s wound as a source of artistic harmony. While Goethe’s high classicism stops just short of introducing an …read more

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  • Hitler’s Compromises, Oct 4

    Under Hitler’s rule the Gestapo brutally repressed political resistance. Yet Hitler also made tactical compromises in order to maintain his authority and consolidate power within the Reich. Brutality against the Jews typically escalated in a pattern of what has become known as ‘cumulative radicalization’. At the same time, Hitler intervened …read more

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  • What were they Fighting For?, Sep 27

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  • Tactility and Community, Sep 22-23, 2016

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  • Populism, Immigration and Discrimination, Sep 22

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  • Tactility and Community, Sep 22-23

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  • After Hybridity: Grafting as a Model for Cultural Translation, Sep 21

    “All translation” Walter Benjamin states in his essay The Task of the Translator, “is only a somewhat provisional way of coming to terms with the foreignness of languages.” The notion of cultural translation as it was developed by postcolonial studies attempts to cope not only with the foreignness of language, …read more

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  • Cinema Beyond Europe, Sep 19

    Joining attention to aesthetic experimentation with a focus on sociopolitical concerns, this talk will offer a discussion of the ways recent cinematic and artistic works engage Europe’s increasingly diverse and complex relationship to migration. With a focus on projects that explore the sociopolitical tensions that have surrounded migration in Europe …read more

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  • Refugees at the European Gates, Aug 30

    Migration to Europe for reasons of survival (esp. from Syria and Afghanistan) and for economic reasons has vastly increased since 2014. The massive movements are a challenge and also a test for the willingness of the (mostly affluent) European countries to deal with the issues on a political, a humanitarian …read more

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