Elena Ferrante Casa Italiana hosts this book club that meets once a month to discuss contemporary Italian books in Italian. The Club is open to anyone and its purpose is to offer the possibility to practice the Italian language. Everybody is encouraged to speak. The group suggests the books, usually by contemporary Italian authors, that reflect the changes that have…
Please join the Harriman Institute and the Bosnian-Herzegovinian Film Festival (BHFF) for a screening of the 2017 film Men Don't Cry (Muskarci ne plaču). The screening will be followed by a discussion with the film's director Alen Drljević, film scholar Dijana Jelača, and Columbia professor Tanya Domi. Bosnian language with English subtitles. Film runtime: 98 minutes. Twenty years after the conclusion of the Bosnian War, a…
Born to a Jewish family in Kiev, raised in Baku, and converted to Islam in Berlin, Essad Bey’s orientalist writings reached a huge audience in the Weimar Republic. Although his novels and essays depicting life in locales such as Azerbaijan and the Caucasus helped shape notions of a mysterious and romantic East in the German public imagination, the Muslim community…
Venice, England, and the Reformation A lecture by Diego Pirillo, University of California, Berkeley The establishment of permanent embassies in fifteenth-century Italy has traditionally been regarded as the moment of transition between medieval and modern diplomacy. This talk proposes an alternative history of early modern diplomacy, centered not on states and their official representatives but around the figure of "the…