PLAY, TALKBACK, AND AFTERPARTY. Join us to experience TRUTH, an intriguing play by Piotr Borowski. TRUTH exposes a lack thereof: an existence fraught with the absence of the sacred, devoid of any mystery, purpose or metaphysical worth. While the main character of TRUTH is not present, the scene is preoccupied with striving for knowledge and new creation, as well as…
A book talk with Jasmin Hasićand Dženeta Karabegović, editors of the new volume Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Foreign Policy Since Independence(Palgrave Macmillan, March 2019). This book is the first to provide a comprehensive and systematic analysis of the foreign policy of Bosnia and Herzegovina, a post-conflict country with an active agency in international affairs. Bridging academic and policy debates, the book summarizes and further examines…
Prof. Gutman's book tells the story of Armenian migration to North America in the late Ottoman period, and Istanbul’s efforts to prevent it. It shows how, just as in the present, migrants in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were forced to travel through clandestine smuggling networks, frustrating the enforcement of the ban on migration. Further, migrants who attempted…
A roundtable discussion moderated by Professor Tanya Domi (Columbia/SIPA). It is a precipitous moment in Balkan history. The European Union is weighing the accession candidacies of North Macedonia and Albania, with decisions pending before the German Bundestag that are likely to influence outcomes in Brussels. The negotiations for the Serbia-Kosovo agreement have been fraught with tension for months, and are currently at a standstill. Bosnia had yet…
"What does it mean to discover an unspoken Nazi past in your family? In a moment defined by chance and circumstance, I learned of my German grandfather’s support for the Nazi regime, a fact that had never been openly talked about. Using my family’s struggle with memory as a site of inquiry, I examine the process of remembering, its transmission,…
Join us for a discussion on Proust in Black (Proust au Noir), an essay/fictional work by Fanny Daubigny. Moderated by professor and author Caroline Weber. In Proust in Black, the City of Angels turns into a theater of the Faubourg Saint-Germain and A la recherche du temps perdu becomes a noir novel. Albertine is a Femme Fatale and Marcel a detective down on his…
A talk with political scientist Yana Gorokhovskaia. Regional and local elections in Russia are marked by low voter turnout and typically attract little attention at home and abroad. This summer, however, an election for seats in a rubber-stamp regional legislature drew over 50,000 protesters to the streets, resulted in 2,500 detentions, and ended with embarrassing losses for pro-regime United Russia…
“Playing rock music in the USSR was like fighting for freedom. Opposing the hypocrisy and pressure of the Soviet system, musicians tried to build a new Russia without totalitarian ideology, without censorship and the imperialistic pattern of behaviour. Rock was an active cultural and social force. When the USSR collapsed, rock music became part of the mainstream and lost its…
To RSVP, please click here. Laurent Cohen-Tanugi and Adam Gopnik explore ideas about current threats to democracy, the meaning and value of liberalism, and the rise of populism in the U.S., France, Great Britain and beyond, explored in their recent books, Cohen-Tanugi’s Résistances: La démocratie à l’épreuve, and Gopnik’s A Thousand Small Sanities: the Moral Adventure of Liberalism. Cohen-Tanugi’s book focuses on…
Benedetta, Aeropoetry, Futurism and Fascism A lecture by Lucia Re, UCLA Through the analysis of the aeropoem “Volontà e poesia del golfo di Napoli,” which features the arrival of Mussolini in Naples in November 1936, this presentation discusses the relationship between art and politics in the work of Benedetta Cappa Marinetti. In ENGLISH. From the Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimo.