Philosophy, in the 21st century, has changed: its practices and languages are no longer those of the previous century. A turning point has been taken by new generations and thinkers from diverse origins who, more than commenting on the old masters, are taking philosophy into new fields: health, ecology, neurosciences, security warfare, non-Western thought, trans-identities, the rights of non-human living…
Françoise Vergès is an antiracist feminist activist, a scholar, a public educator, an independent curator, and the cofounder of the collective Decolonize the Arts and of the free and open university Decolonizing the Arts. She is the author of Monsters and Revolutionaries: Colonial Family Romance and Metissage, also published by Duke University Press, and numerous books in French.
Radical Diversity is a discussion series presented by several Goethe-Institut locations in North America in collaboration with its Goethe Pop Ups, the Thomas Mann House, and the Institute for Social Justice & Radical Diversity under the sponsorship of the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung North America.
Anne Anderson has had a forty-five year career in Irish diplomacy. She joined the Department of Foreign Affairs in 1972, on the eve of Ireland's entry to the European Economic Community. She retired in 2017 from her final diplomatic posting as Ireland's Ambassador to the United States.
The Making of a Man (48 min, 2019) explores courage, cowardice and toxic masculinity across time and place (postwar France, Sweden and contemporary USA). Its point of departure is a play by Swedish writer Stig Dagerman, set in Paris reeling in the aftermath of Nazi occupation.
The German Film Office is pleased to present Western by Valeska Grisebach as part of its monthly German Movie Nights series. An intense, slow-burning thriller, Western follows a group of German construction workers installing a hydroelectric plant in remote rural Bulgaria. The foreign land awakens the men’s sense of adventure, but tensions mount when Meinhard, the strong, silent newcomer to the group,…
Johannes von Moltke is professor of German Studies and Film, TV and Media, at the University of Michigan. His most recent books include "The Curious Humanist: Siegfried Kracauer in America" and "Last Letters: The Prison Correspondence between Helmuth James and Freya von Moltke 1944-45." For registration, please email germanic@columbia.edu.
This program of documentary shorts is both a stirring introduction to the Beninese/Senegalese filmmaker Paulin Soumanou Vieyra, considered the first sub-Saharan African film director and a rich overview of the period of African independence and nation-building. Vieyra’s 1955 essay film Africa on the Seine (co-directed with Mamadou Sarr) begins on the banks of the Niger but moves quickly to Paris, “the capital…
Sex, Love, and Letters is the first study of a virtually unexplored cache of letters to Simone de Beauvoir, the brilliant, magnetic, and polarizing French feminist and philosopher from ordinary women and men around the world. This author-reader bond was fraught with misunderstanding, thwarted desire, and illusions, but also, Judith Coffin argues, emphatically reciprocal.
Join us in discussing Gráinne de Búrca’s upcoming book, Reframing Human Rights in a Turbulent Era. In recent years, human rights have come under fire, with the rise of political illiberalism and the coming to power of populist authoritarian leaders in many parts of the world who contest and dismiss the idea of human rights.