German Movie Nights: “Western”

Online

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,…

Free

Virtual Studio Visit with Ida Lorentzen

Online

See a Virtual Studio Visit with the Norwegian – American artist Ida Lorentzen in Oslo, Norway during the week of March 12 through 20! Ida Lorentzen is known for her paintings of rooms, spaces and light, with works reflecting both Nordic mystical detachment and stark American realism and filled with a deep reverence to history of places and lived life.…

Mediterranean Imaginaries and the Making of Italians

Konstantina Zanou (Columbia University) in conversation with Claudio Fogu (UC Santa Barbara) on the occasion of the publication of his book: The Fishing Net and the Spider Web. Mediterranean Imaginaries and the Making of Italians (Palgrave, 2020) The book explores the role of Mediterranean imaginaries in one of the preeminent tropes of Italian history: the formation or ‘making of’ Italians. While previous scholarship on…

Guest Lecture: Johannes von Moltke

Online

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.

Free

Virtual Cinema: Africa on the Seine, L’Envers du décor, A Nation is Born, Lamb

Online

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…

Free

Dream in Spring

Music at the Institute (MATI) Concert Series presents “Dream in Spring” Juliette Kang, violin Solomiya Ivakhiv, violin Thomas Kraines, cello Che-Hung Chen, viola Amy Yang, piano PROGRAM: Serhiy Prokofiev (1891-1953) Sonata for Two Violins, Op. 56 Virko Baley (b. 1938) Three Songs Without Words for Violin and Piano, based on settings of poems by Emily Dickinson (2001); Partita No. 3…

Carlo Ginzburg on Machiavelli and Michelangelo

Online

In his Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli compared the act of imposing new political orders on an uncivilized population to the carving of a statue from a piece of rough marble: an allusion, according to many scholars, to Michelangelo’s David. Did Michelangelo respond in some way to Machiavelli’s allusion? The University of Pennsylvania is the joint producer of this series—through the Italian Studies section…

Sex, Love and Letters: Writing Simone de Beauvoir

Online

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.

Free

Katarzyna Kobro and Debora Vogel as “Composers of Space”

This event will be held virtually as a Zoom webinar and streamed via YouTube Live. There will be no in-person event. Register here for the Zoom webinar, or tune in on YouTube Live. Please join the East Central European Center at the Harriman Institute for a presentation by Michalina Kmiecik (Jagiellonian University in Kraków). This event is part of the event series East Central Vanguard: New…

Online Nordic Book Club: Childhood by Tove Ditlevsen

Online

Read and discuss Scandinavian literature in translation as part of our Nordic Book Club, now online! Each month we select a novel from some of the best Nordic literary voices. Discussions have typically taken place the last Tuesday of the month at Scandinavia House but will now be taking place bi-weekly as an online meeting. Book club participants will all…