UCL CENTRE FOR TRANSNATIONAL HISTORY

Larry Wolff (New York University),

Western Perspectives on Eastern Europe:  New Mental Mapping after the Cold War

Chadwick Lecture Theatre B05

(near the UCL main entrance on Gower Street, on the right)

Introduction: Axel Körner (UCL)

Vote of thanks: Wendy Bracewell (UCL-SSEES)

The lecture will be followed by a reception in the North Cloisters.

Larry Wolff is Professor of History and Director of the Center for European and Mediterranean Studies at New York University. He works on the history of Eastern Europe, the Habsburg Monarchy, the Enlightenment, and on the history of childhood. His most recent books include Paolina’s Innocence: Child Abuse in Casanova’s Venice ( 2012) and The Idea of Galicia:  History and Fantasy in Habsburg Political Culture (2010). 

Abstract: This lecture will discuss the idea of Eastern Europe, as first conceived in the eighteenth century, and how that idea has been recently transformed during the twenty years since the end of the Cold War.  Because the Cold War gave the idea of Eastern Europe its most concrete geopolitical meaning during the communist period, the post-communist period has witnessed a complex transformation of general ideas about the region, most notably in relation to the fall of communism and the entrance of so many lands of Eastern Europe into NATO and the European Union.  The lecture will make use of images and commentary, principally from the media and recent popular culture, in order to attempt to demonstrate the ways in which the idea and imagery of Eastern Europe has been altered during the last two decades. 

The event is generously sponsored by UCL Grand Challenge Intercultural Interaction (http://www.ucl.ac.uk/intercultural-interaction) and the The European Institute (www.ucl.ac.uk/european-institute).

The working group on Cosmopolitanism explores concepts and practices of cosmopolitanism in comparative perspective. Our aim is to produce a genealogy of works and objects through which we can analyse the transformation of the cosmopolitan ideal and its critiques. We usually do so by reading secondary texts associated with the modern revival of cosmopolitan political theories after the end of the Cold War. Three sessions in 2012 were devoted to the writings of Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottfried Herder, and Giuseppe Mazzini, which we read in conjunction with texts by Charles Taylor, Nadia Urbinati, and others. In the summer, we will turn to Fougeret de Monbron and the 18th century reception of Stoicism. In the Autumn of 2012, we will discuss different genres of cosmopolitan thought (treatises, travelogues, novels), and we also plan to look at non-European theories of cosmopolitanism. This group is open to academic staff, including visiting scholars, and graduate students who would be prepared to present their own work or a literature review on this topic at least once throughout the series. Participants can approach the topic from a particular angle related to their ongoing work.

For more details, visit our wikipage at https://wiki.ucl.ac.uk/x/LxdiAQ.

If you are interested in joining us, please contact the conveners, Dr Dina Gusejnova d.gusejnova@ucl.ac.uk and Dr Simon Macdonald simon.macdonald@ucl.ac.uk

Gogol and the Gauchos

Film screening of ‘Cossacks in Argentina’ (2010) and conversation with director Federico Windhausen

In 1962, the Hollywood film studio, Universal, released Taras Bulba, starring Yul Brynner and Tony Curtis.  This film was an adaptation of Gogol’s short story (1835, revised 1842) and depicts, in neo-Romantic opulence, the story of the eponymous hero and his cossack band’s war against the Poles.

The main scenes of the film were shot in the Northern Argentinian city of Salta, where thousands of extras were employed. Windhausen’s documentary film of 2010 returns to the city of Salta in Argentina as it is today and revisits the memories and impressions the filming has made on the community.

Windhausen’s film raises important questions of imperial memory in the Cold War and questions of translation and the changing memory of group identities that are used to characterise empires (Cossacks) and nations (Gauchos) across state boundaries – of the way that twenty-first century Agentinians remember twentieth-century Americans playing at nineteenth-century Russians and Ukrainians.

Federico Windhausen is a director and film scholar teaching at the California College of the Arts. His research areas include Latin American cinema (with an emphasis on Argentina) and experimental practices in film, video, and new media.

This discussion is a collaboration of the UCL Centre for Transnational History and the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies Russian Cinema Research Group.

Tim Beasley-Murray, SSEES

Dina Gusejnova, Centre for Transnational History

Dr Dina Gusejnova Leverhulme Fellow History Department and Centre for Transnational History, UCL Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT, UK http://www.ucl.ac.uk/history/about_us/academic_staff/dr_gusejnova

Presentation and discussion of

Avi Lifschitz, Language and Enlightenment. The Berlin Debates of the Eighteenth Century. (Oxford: OUP 2012)

Presentation and discussion of

Avi Lifschitz, Language and Enlightenment. The Berlin Debates of the Eighteenth Century. (Oxford: OUP 2012)

Discussants: Christopher Clark (Cambridge) and Nicholas Cronk (Oxford)

Chair: Axel Körner (UCL)

Senate Room, 1st floor South Block, Senate House,

Reception afterwards in the Jessel Room

Book Launch

Professor Stephen Conway, Britain, Ireland, and Continental Europe in the Eighteenth Century. Similarities, Connections, Identities

Chair: Axel Körner (UCL)

Discussants: Timothy Blanning (Cambridge) and Ian McBride (KCL)