Join us for a meeting of the New York-Russia Public Policy Series, co-hosted by the Harriman Institute at Columbia University and the New York University Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia. In this first event of the academic year, our panelists will discuss the results and importance of Russia’s Duma elections for parliament held on September 19, 2021. The ruling United Russia party is widely…

Casa Italiana hosts this book club online on the Zoom platform 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 taken place with time in…

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, “empire” and “modernity” have been proposed as particularly useful frameworks for the comparatively oriented and globally relevant research on Russia and the Soviet Union. Surprisingly enough, there was little exchange and cross-traffic between these two major clusters of innovation in the field of Russian and Soviet studies. By introducing the concept of Soviet…

Please join the East Central European Center at the Harriman Institute for a roundtable discussion in celebration of National Translation Month. This year’s roundtable features four translators presenting current projects, all texts by exciting, contemporary, and up-and-coming East-Central European women writers. Topics will include issues of migration, exile, gender and sexuality, ethnicity, and feminism. The program will include literary readings from recently translated works, including Ivana…

Organized in the wake of World War Two by the victorious Allies, the Nuremberg Trials were intended to hold the Nazis to account for their crimes and to restore a sense of justice to a world devastated by violence. As Francine Hirsch reveals in her groundbreaking new book, a major piece of the Nuremberg story has routinely been left out:…

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…

Rachel Kaufman's first poetry collection, Many to Remember (Dos Madres Press, 2021), enters the archive’s unconscious to reveal the melodies hidden within the language of the past. The collection unravels Kaufman's historical research on New Mexican crypto-Judaism and the Mexican Inquisition alongside the poet’s own family histories. This presentation will explore questions of history, memory, mythology, and translation. How can poetry translate history and the rhythms and form of the archive?…

Please join us for the inaugural event of our Work of Care in Russia speaker series, a presentation by Maria Galmarini-Kabala (College of William & Mary). The Soviet system of care and social protection involved both the distribution of monetary help through the Pensioning Department of the Commissariat (later Ministry) of Social Assistance and the implementation of social policies in such diverse fields as…

Join Professor Jane S. Gerber and Dr. Noam Sienna as they discuss their research from the new bookJews and Muslims in Morocco: Their Intersecting Worlds. Multiple traditions of Jewish origins in Morocco emphasize the distinctiveness of Moroccan Jewry as indigenous to the area, rooted in its earliest settlements and possessing deep connections and associations with the historic peoples of the…

Sholem Aleichem's Moshkeleh Ganev was a first for Yiddish literature in featuring as its hero a rowdy, uneducated horse thief. The novel is unique for its focus on the underclass and portrayal of Jews interacting with non-Jews in the Russian Pale of Settlement. Breaking norms, it centers on characters on the fringe of respectability. Originally written in 1903 and published three times, in…

About “Irregular Readings”: “Irregular Readings” is a new literary initiative, created by NYU Center for the Humanities, Stanford University’s Division of Literatures, Cultures and Languages, and Deutsches Haus at NYU, which will showcase moderated conversations and readings to introduce English-speaking audiences to contemporary German-language literature and the authors who are creating this diverse and vibrant body of work. The series…

On October 10, join us for a virtual book talk with acclaimed Finnish-Estonian author Sofi Oksanen on her new novel Dog Park. With moderator Bethanne Patrick, she’ll discuss the writing of the novel, an international bestseller out in translation by Owen Frederick Witesman from Knopf on September 21. A captivating story of intrigue, betrayal, and murder in the global fertility market from Oksanen, “an international publishing…

Please join us for a talk with Emily Greble (Vanderbilt University), author of Muslims and the Making of Modern Europe (Oxford University Press, October 2021), with discussant Elidor Mëhilli (Hunter College, CUNY) and moderator Tanya Domi (Harriman Institute). Muslims and the Making of Modern Europe shows that Muslims were citizens of modern Europe from its beginning and, in the process, rethinks Europe itself. Muslims are neither newcomers nor outsiders in Europe.…

About this event Deutsches Haus at NYU presents a conversation with the author Timothy Snyder and the author and illustrator Nora Krug about the graphic edition of Snyder’s book “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century.” A bold connection between past and present, the book is a warning that the lesson of 20th century’s European shift to fascism, Nazism, and communism…

Please join the Harriman Institute for a roundtable discussion on current events in the Balkans, moderated by professor Tanya Domi (SIPA/Harriman Institute). This discussion is situated at a momentous time of political strife that cuts across the Western Balkans region against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic. Front burner issues include a precarious Bosnia and Herzegovina that manages to muddle through one…

What is the status of Jews in Europe in the 21st century? How do they maintain vital communities? Do they desire to remain in Europe? To remain Jewish? Where are the trendlines headed? A mere 0.1% of Europe's population is Jewish. Proportionally, this figure is at its lowest since the turn of the first millennium. European Jews' numbers have continued…

Explore a selection of Danish literature in English translation with a new nationwide virtual book club! Organized as part of the new National Danish Book Club and Literary Event Series on October 12, we will discuss Olga Ravn’s The Employees (De anisette) translated by Martin Aitken. Structured as a series of witness statements compiled by a workplace commission, The Employees…

About the Book The two decades since the last authoritative general history of Dutch Jews was published have seen such substantial developments in historical understanding that a new assessment has become an imperative. This volume offers an indispensable survey from a contemporary viewpoint that reflects the new preoccupations of European historiography and allows the history of Dutch Jewry to be…

While scholars of Russian culture generally pay great attention to the study of authors and texts, they sometimes neglect readers. Our volume, Reading Russia. A History of Reading in Modern Russia (Milano, Ledizioni, 2020, vol. 2, open access), is the attempt of an international team of scholars to describe the history of the relationship between Russians and their favorite books.…

Please join the Ukrainian Studies Program at the Harriman Institute and the Ukrainian Jewish Encounter (UJE) for a discussion with writers Vasyl Makhno and Andrey Kurkov. Vasyl Makhno’s novel Vichnyi Kalendar (The Eternal Calendar, 2019) received the 2020 “Encounter: The Ukrainian-Jewish Literary Prize™”, which is sponsored by the Ukrainian Jewish Encounter with the support of the NGO Publishers Forum (Lviv, Ukraine). Makhno and fellow writer Andrey Kurkov…

In Vasily Grossman’s case, the boundary between literature and reality is unusually thin.  The figure of Viktor Shtrum, the nuclear physicist hero of Grossman’s two Stalingrad novels, is based on that of Lev Shtrum, a Jewish-Ukrainian nuclear physicist executed during the Purges.  The fictional Viktor Shtrum in turn prefigures the real Andrey Sakharov, an equally creative and free-thinking nuclear physicist. …

Deutsches Haus at NYU presents a conversation with Rebecca Donner and Atina Grossmann about Donner’s new book “All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days: The True Story of the American Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler,” which tells the story of Mildred Harnack – Donner’s great-great-aunt – an American scholar in Berlin who headed an underground…

Please join the Njegos Endowment for Serbian Language and Culture at Columbia University’s East Central European Center and the Harriman Institute for a lecture by Sandra Davidovic, doctoral candidate in International and European Studies at the University of Belgrade, accompanied by esteemed professor Susan Woodward (CUNY) as a discussant. The process of privatizing socially owned enterprises in Kosovo, conducted under the auspices of the United…

On October 16, as part of a day-long Celebration of Louis Kahn 120 in New York presented with Archtober, learn about the celebrated Estonian-born architect’s work as an educator! In this lively conversation with Kahn’s student Charles E. Dagit Jr. hosted by award-winning journalist Neeme Raud, we’ll take a close look at the important role Louis Kahn had as a teacher,…

In this talk, Professor Nadieszda Kizenko will discuss her new book, Good for the Souls: A History of Confession in the Russian Empire, with Professor Anne Lounsbery. From the moment that Tsars as well as hierarchs realized that having their subjects go to confession could make them better citizens as well as better Christians, the sacrament of penance in the Russian…

Casa Italiana hosts this book club online on the Zoom platform 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 taken place with time in…

As the Shared History Project enters its chapter on the Weimar Republic and the beginning of National Socialism, our panelists will discuss how German-speaking Jews seized on the era of cultural freedom ushered in by the Weimar Republic to rediscover, revitalize, and transform Jewish culture and identity in a modern context. Michael Brenner (American University/Munich), Rachel Seelig (University of Toronto), and Kerry Wallach (Gettysburg College) will discuss how…

Elements of Border and Infrastructure: Earth I October 20th, 2021 / 12:30 pm EST/ Link for Registration The land question is an age old in the political history of the Middle East, but only more recently has scholarship on the politics of conservation and resource management brought such questions to bear on this topic. This panel invites its participants to…

Judah P. Benjamin (1811–1884) was a brilliant and successful lawyer in New Orleans, and one of the first Jewish members of the U.S. Senate. He then served in the Confederacy as secretary of war and secretary of state, becoming the confidant and alter ego of Jefferson Davis. In this new biography in the Jewish Lives series at Yale University Press,…

During the Space Race, space science fiction cinema on both sides of the Iron Curtain was often a tool for articulating visions of the future; today, this cinematic subgenre is a site of – often nostalgic – memory. Soviet science fiction cinema is an especially interesting case in point. Once a prophecy of 'great things to come' under the auspices…

From the 1880s to the 1940s, an upsurge of explosive pogroms caused much pain and suffering across the eastern borderlands of Europe. Rioters attacked Jewish property and caused physical harm to women and children. During World War I and the Russian Civil War, pogrom violence turned into full-blown military actions. In some cases, pogroms wiped entire Jewish communities out of existence.…

A conversation with Silvana Patriarca (Fordham University), Pamela Ballinger (University of Michigan) and Giulia Bonazza(Ca’ Foscari University & Columbia). Coordinator: Konstantina Zanou (Columbia University).   This event celebrates the recent publication of three books, which are here presented and discussed in dialogue with each other: Giulia Bonazza’s Abolitionism and the Persistence of Slavery in Italian States, 1750–1850 (2019), Pamela Ballinger’s…

Giacomo Puccini named three criteria of Italian music: clarity, spontaneity, and simplicity. In this meeting we explore the music of Francesco Provenzale, founder of the Neapolitan school of opera, especially for his use of harmony. Provenzale’s expressive dissonances heighten the clarity of his overall harmonic scheme. "What Makes It Italian?": According to Puccini is a music listening and discussion group that…

DNA has the potential to be an essential and exciting genealogical tool. But many Eastern European Jewish testers find their DNA results completely overwhelming and unnavigable. In this talk, Jennifer Mendelsohn, an internationally renowned journalist and professional genealogist, will help those with Ashkenazi heritage learn how to make sense of their DNA results. She’ll cover the basics of DNA testing, including…

Deutsches Haus at NYU presents a conversation with Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon, moderated by Sharon Marcus in the context of the recent publication of Reitter and Wellmon’s new book, Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age (The University of Chicago Press, 2021). The humanities, considered by many as irrelevant for modern careers and hopelessly devoid of funding, seem…