Past Events

In 1973, the European Community introduced the concept of European identity in order to define and strengthen its position vis-à-vis other countries, and in world politics more broadly. Over time, it has become clear that European identity has to do much more with the presence of European otherness and ‘Others’, such as Muslims in Western Europe. In his talk, Professor Radeljic will address the (ir)relevance of the European identity discourse for European national identities and members of European otherness. Moreover, he will outline a number of possible challenges to a European identity, posed by some recent policy choices as well as future of the European Union. Professor Radeljic is the author of Europe and the Collapse of Yugoslavia: The Role of Non-State Actors and European Diplomacy (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2012), and the editor of Europe and the Post-Yugoslav Space (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013) and Debating European Identity: Bright Ideas, Dim Prospects (Oxford: Peter Lang, forthcoming 2014). LUNCH will be provided.

Organized in collaboration with Wulf Reiners of the Jean Monnet Chair for Political Science of the University of Cologne, the workshop will serve to bring together practitioners and academic scholars to discuss the collaboration of state and non-state actors, such as the European Union, as well as those from civil society, within the system of global health governance. Participants will include Bernard Merkel, European External Action Service, who works on Food Safety, Health and Consumer Affairs at the EU Delegation of the EU to the USA in Washington; Donald Burke, Dean, Graduate School of Public Health; Guy Peters, Department of Political Science; and Nidhi Bouri and Amesh Adalja, of UPMC Health Security.

As a part of Europe Day celebrations, EUCE connected with Sunnyside Elementary. We presented information on the EU to two 6th grade classes.

A continuation of the conversation begun by PICT Theatre's production of Tadeusz Slobodzianek's play Our Class,/i>, and featuring noted Princeton historian Dr. Jan T. Gross, whose book Neighbors inspired the play. Join us for a compelling discussion.

Haven't seen the play? Our Class runs through May 4th. Use code PANEL55 for Buy-One-Get-One-Free tickets at picttheatre.org or call 412-561-6000.

RSVP requested: https://picttheatre.secure.force.com/ticket/

In recent years, the area of the Black Sea region has seen several momentous changes, including: the emergence of several new states—some as a result of violent conflict; the appearance of a variety of governing systems, nominally based on democratic models but varying widely in terms of the practices of democracy; the end of the long-standing status quo of the Cold War with a resulting change of alliance patterns; and increasing prominence of a European, and Russian, energy highway. This conference will draw together experts from the United States and Europe to assess both the nature and impact of global changes on the Black Sea region and the responses of powerful international actors. A series of workshops sessions will cover, among other topics, the military, economic, ethnic-religious and energy dynamics of the Black Sea region and the strategic responses of the United States, European Union, Russia, Turkey and Ukraine. For more information, please email the EUCE/ESC at euce@pitt.edu or call 412-648-7405. More information, including a draft of the program, can be found on the EUCE/ESC website.

Science, Culture, and the Human after World War II

The definition of the human is always in flux. Science offers no absolute account of “human nature”; even the species definition can be contested. The idea of human rights has faltered not only on what counts as rights and who can enforce them, but also on who is entitled to them: on who counts as “human.” Despite the instability of its definition, the human has long been a foundational term for theories of social justice. What happens, then, when scientific innovations and geopolitical transformations conspicuously challenge the definition of the human? These seminars will focus on the scientific and technological innovations and the geopolitical transformations in the decades following the World War II.

Political theorists as diverse as Hannah Arendt and Frantz Fanon decried the failure of the concept of human rights and called for new formulations of the human. At the same time, the biologist Rachel Carson cautioned of the contamination and exhaustion of natural resources endangering life on a planetary scale. The genre of science fiction proliferated in this period as it engaged with the scientific innovations and geopolitical transformations that placed the idea of the human in question. The narratives emerging from these works, philosophical and fictional, offer insight into a politics and poetics of life that continue to structure twenty-first debates about science and politics; they will be the subject of this seminar.

In these seminars, we will consider a broad range of works, across genres, media, and cultures. We will explore connections among concepts such as “human rights” and the changing idea of “human being” as it emerged through scientific research especially in fields renovated (or generated) by the war, such as genetics, cybernetics, and psychoanalysis. We will consider how the effort to come to terms with the unthinkable in a variety of arenas gave rise not only to new anxieties about the future (and accompanying recasting of the past), but also to new ways of thinking about the connections among artistic expression, cultural criticism, freedom, and human possibility.
Readings may include works by such authors as Paul Celan, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Hannah Arendt, Antonin Artaud, Erwin Schrödinger, Norbert Wiener, John Hersey, Rachel Carson, Johan Galtung, Stokely Carmichael, Martin Luther King, Octavia Butler and such films as Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Manchurian Candidate, and Blade Runner.

*Please register by e-mailing: Ms. Tory Konecny vad16@pitt.edu.*
**followed by lunch for participants**

This is an interdisciplinary seminar, drawing students from art history, films studies, anthropology, and creative writing, which has investigated the role of death and mortality in the formation and transformation of culture. The course is organized around the new constellation structure of HAA, focusing on the conceptual frameworks of agency, identity, and mobility/exchange.

Twelve students will be presenting their research on topics spanning the ancient world to the present, Asia to Europe to the U.S. The atmosphere will be informal and students will be available concurrently, four at any given time, to discuss their research. Each of them will have the chance to give a short "TED talk" of 8 to 10 minutes at least twice during their round, leaving ample time for discussion with those who drop by.

In February President Obama announced the beginning of negotiations designed to produce a US-EU Free Trade Agreement. Mutual tariffs are already low and trade high; business and labor constituents seem supportive, and officials are eager to conclude this agreement “on one tank of gas,” i.e., quickly. But significant issues will be in play, including: opening markets for agriculture products, trade in services, and access to public contracts. Regulation and non-tariff barriers-including, for example, “cultural exceptions” favored by some European countries and American restrictions on European airlines may constitute substantial obstacles. More broadly, supporters of more global approaches to trade fear the impact of such an exclusive bilateral deal on the emerging and less developed markets. Our Conversation on Europe will cover these and other related issues, with participants from several venues and input from university and community people.

Ambassador (ret.) J.D. Bindenagel is a special Advisor to the President at DePaul University in Chicago.
Martin Staniland is a Professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh.
David Cleeton is a Professor of Economics at Illinois State University.
Zaki Laïdi is a Professor and the Director of Research at Sciences Po in Paris, France.
Ben Beachy is Research Director with Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch.

This presentation is offered as an introduction to Courtney Long’s dissertation, “Re-Categorizing Great Britain's Medieval Architecture: A Lesson in Nineteenth-Century Visual Taxonomy.” Courtney’s project seeks to investigate the ways in which architectural historians and natural scientists conveyed the process of change over time in textual and graphic observations published between 1800 and 1850. In her talk, Courtney will focus on the numerous attempts made by nineteenth-century British architects, historians, and theorists to systematically describe and illustrate the history of medieval ecclesiastical architecture in Great Britain. Examining pictures and diagrams found in a select work of published books by Thomas Rickman, John Britton, Edmund Sharpe, and John Ruskin, this presentation seeks to analyze the nineteenth-century attempts to codify British Architectural History and to structure knowledge graphically.

French Immersion Workshop for primary and secondary school teachers.

Abstract

We use the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to show that personal relationships which
individuals maintain for non-economic reasons can be an important determinant of regional
economic growth. We show that West German households who have social ties to East
Germany in 1989 experience a persistent rise in their personal incomes after the fall of
the Berlin Wall. Moreover, the presence of these households significantly affects economic
performance at the regional level: it increases the returns to entrepreneurial activity, the
share of households who become entrepreneurs, and the likelihood that firms based within
a given West German region invest in East Germany. As a result, West German regions
which (for idiosyncratic reasons) have a high concentration of households with social ties
to the East exhibit substantially higher growth in income per capita in the early 1990s. A
one standard deviation rise in the share of households with social ties to East Germany in
1989 is associated with a 4.7 percentage point rise in income per capita over six years. We
interpret our findings as evidence of a causal link between social ties and regional economic
development.

Our work on this topic seeks to bridge the divide between medieval and early modern studies by taking a long view of three questions surrounding particular uses of vernacular languages and broader processes of vernacularization in this period: How did changes in technologies of communication, such as the rise of letterpress printing, intersect with the uses of vernacular languages? How were the structures of "vernacular theology" transfigured during the period leading up to and following the Protestant Reformation and Catholic Counter-Reformation? And how does a focus on vernacularization help us to reevaluate theories and practices of translation-whether from one language to another, from one medium to another, or from one cultural sphere to another?

John King is Distinguished University Professor Emeritus at the Ohio State University. He is the author of numerous books, including the following:
English Reformation Literature: The Tudor Origins of the Protestant Tradition; Tudor Royal Iconography: Literature and Art in an Age of Religious Crisis; Spenser's Poetry and the Reformation Tradition; Milton and Religious Controversy: Satire and Polemic in Paradise Lost; Foxe's Book of Martyr's and Early Modern Print Culture. He is the recipient of fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, among many others.

This event is part of a yearlong series, “Speaking in Tongues,” organized by the Medieval and Renaissance Studies Program at the University of Pittsburgh and supported by a collaborative research grant from the University of Pittsburgh’s Humanities Center.

Our work on this topic seeks to bridge the divide between medieval and early modern studies by taking a long view of three questions surrounding particular uses of vernacular languages and broader processes of vernacularization in this period: How did changes in technologies of communication, such as the rise of letterpress printing, intersect with the uses of vernacular languages? How were the structures of "vernacular theology" transfigured during the period leading up to and following the Protestant Reformation and Catholic Counter-Reformation? And how does a focus on vernacularization help us to reevaluate theories and practices of translation-whether from one language to another, from one medium to another, or from one cultural sphere to another?

John King is Distinguished University Professor Emeritus at the Ohio State University. He is the author of numerous books, including the following:
English Reformation Literature: The Tudor Origins of the Protestant Tradition; Tudor Royal Iconography: Literature and Art in an Age of Religious Crisis; Spenser's Poetry and the Reformation Tradition; Milton and Religious Controversy: Satire and Polemic in Paradise Lost; Foxe's Book of Martyr's and Early Modern Print Culture. He is the recipient of fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, among many others.

This event is part of a yearlong series, “Speaking in Tongues,” organized by the Medieval and Renaissance Studies Program at the University of Pittsburgh and supported by a collaborative research grant from the University of Pittsburgh’s Humanities Center.

Hear about opportunities to teach English or conduct research abroad through the Fulbright U.S. Student Program. Fulbright alumni and current Fulbright participants will join representatives from the university’s National Scholarships advising office to provide information on the Fulbright experience and how to best prepare for it.

From the heads and tails of individual notes to the foreheads and feet of song stanzas, medieval musical writings are replete with body parts. Sometimes the terms are used by convention, or in the service of simple mnemonics. But in other cases, the reasons for acts of musical anthropomorphization are less clear. Tracing the rhetoric of musical animation from the treatises into the realm of musica practica can give us fresh insight into some of the best-known songs of the later middle ages. Beyond this, the rhetoric of songs alive offers a useful alternative to the “work concept”—a musical ontology whose applicability before the Renaissance has been repeatedly called into question. The “creature concept” of song can serve as a powerful (if whimsical) tool for describing and analyzing musical things that are perishable but autonomous, subject to change and growth, and capable of doing work in the world.

Anna Zayaruznaya, an Assistant Professor of Music at Princeton University, is interested in the relationship between music and its texts in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Her research brings the history of musical form and notation into dialogue with medieval literary theory, the history of ideas, and iconographic and codicological trends. Recent papers and publications have focused on the motets of Guillaume de Machaut and Philippe de Vitry, Milanese chant, Isorhythm, and musical resonances in the poetry of John Gower and Jean Molinet. Currently she is working on a book that explores the roles played by the monstrous and hybrid in fourteenth-century musical aesthetics.

*Part of the History Department's Book Symposia Series*

Featuring commentary by:
Billy Hutchinson (Progressive Unionist Party, Northern Ireland)
David Miller (CMU)
Peter Shirlow (Queen's University-Belfast)

Graduate Seminar building on Prof. Berman's talk "Figuring out Europe: Nation, State and the European Union in the German Public Sphere"

Since the reign of Emperor Akbar the Great (d. 1605), paintings produced in Mughal India began to evince responses from Mughal artists to European art. This lecture centers on the phenomenon of what I term “Mughal Occidentalism,” namely the trans-global style and visual expression that Mughal artists and patrons developed following the meeting of Indian painting with Renaissance art; the use of European pictorial techniques by Muslim and Hindu artists; and the transformation of Christian visual culture into an Indian idiom. By analyzing visual and textual evidence, I examine these works of art from the perspective of the Mughals, and observe how Mughal artists were recontextualizing Western motifs and creating their own vernacular/cosmopolitan aesthetics. This synthesis of European and Indo-Persian pictorial traditions became the hallmark of the Mughal painting style.

In music and words, two Germans from different generations reflect on the Holocaust, German history, and what it means to be German in the 21st century.

*A discussion/question and answer period will follow the talk*

ABOUT THE PERFORMERS

FRITZ OTTENHEIMER, as a Jewish boy growing up in Nazi Germany, escaped Nazi persecution by immigrating to the U.S. in 1939, and eventually fighting against Germany with the U.S. Army at the end of WWII. A retired engineer, Mr. Ottenheimer has documented his experiences surrounding the Holocaust and Post-War Germany in a memoir, “Escape and Return.” He resides in Pittsburgh, PA.

SUSANNE ORTNER-ROBERTS is a world-renowned clarinetist from Augsburg, Germany, who specializes in Jewish (Klezmer) music. As a representative of a new generation of Germans, she is committed to using words and music to promote cross-cultural understanding, and to educate others about how young Germans today deal with the atrocities of war and the Holocaust committed by their grandparents’ generation. She is the subject of the recent book “Living the Dream – Für die Musik nach Amerika” written by German Television journalist Helge Fuhst. Susanne also teaches German at the University of Pittsburgh.

The lecture aims to reflect on how gender relationships and femininity are represented, depicted, and performed in contemporary Italy. Such a reflection is linked to the peculiarity of the Italian mediascape from a political and cultural viewpoint, and has direct consequences on political life and women’s movements. In this respect, the talk offers an overview of Italian society through the lens of gender and resistance to the influence of the media in monopolizing the evolution of women’s representations and identity in the country. From another perspective, this Italian viewpoint is framed and contextualized against the backdrop of the EU, as a driving force of change and a site of both quantitative and qualitative comparison for gender representation, equality, and domestic violence. A reception in honor of Visiting Italian Fulbright will be held immediately after the lecture. Light refreshments will be served.

With its post-Cold War role in Europe behind it, an end to its role in Afghanistan planned for 2014, and new challenges in the Arab world, NATO is at yet another turning point in searching for a new role. This conversation will focus on what that role might be and how it relates to the security perspectives (broadly conceived) of the United States and its European allies. Faculty participants include Marina Skordeli, Director of the Jean Monnet Center at The University of Athens; Taylor Seybolt, Assistant Professor of International Affairs at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, The University of Pittsburgh; Ryan Hendrickson, Professor of Political Science, Eastern Illinois University; and Gulnur Aybet, Senior Lecturer in International Relations, University of Kent.

Dr. Venuti will give a seminar focusing on different ways of thinking about translation, using theory and examples of translations between English and other languages. He will focus on particular texts and ways to teach them, again, to students without strong second language skills. Amani Attia (Arabic Coordinator), Lina Insana (Associate Professor of Italian), and Gina Peirce (Assistant Director of Russian and East European Studies) will also speak at this workshop.

For seminar materials, contact: Carol M. Bové.

Prof. Venuti will give an overview of literary translation including the ways in which a translated text offers a set of relations, a form of intertextuality, analogous to the set offered by the source text. He will discuss particular strategies one might use with undergraduates and beginning graduate students who often lack advanced knowledge of a second language, for instance two English versions of the same source text. There will be ample opportunity for discussion.

Organizer: The Marginal Theory Society

*Anyone is welcome to attend any of the presentations.*

Marginal Theory Workshop: "Non-Traditional Approaches to International
Relations"

Schedule of events:

Saturday, February 9th

9:45-10:00 - Introduction

10:00-10:30 - First Speaker - Dr. Daniel Lieberfeld - (Duquesne - Social
and Public Policy) - "Leadership and Post-conflict Reconciliation"

10:30-11:00 - Q and A

11:00-11:15 - mini-break

11:15-11:45 - Second Speaker - Dr. Robert Cavalier (CMU - Philosophy) -
"Toward a More Deliberative Democracy - Here and Abroad"

11:45-12:15 - Q and A

12:15-1:30 - long break

1:30-2:00 - Third Speaker - Katharina Nieswandt (Pitt - Philosophy) - "In
What Sense are Rights Conventional?"

2:00-2:30 - Q and A

2:30-2:45 - mini break

2:45-3:15 - Fourth Speaker - Leslie Marshall (Pitt - Political Science) -
"Economic Rights and Social Equality in Autocratic Regimes"

3:15-3:45 - Q and A

3:45-4:00 - mini break

4:00-4:30 - Fifth Speaker - Corinne Ogrodnik (Pitt - Sociology) -
"Transnational Peasant Politics and the 2008 Global Food Price Crisis"

4:30-5:00 - Q and A

5:00-6:00 - Reception

Mr. Dimiter Kenarov will present a lecture that focuses on shale gas in Poland and Europe which will be live videoconferenced with the European Union Center of Excellence at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.

Mark Lynn Anderson is an associate professor of Film Studies in the Department of English at the University of Pittsburgh. He is interested in the relations between media institutions and radical democracy, and has published essays on star scandals, media censorship, and early film education. His forthcoming book, Twilight of the Idols, examines the relations between early Hollywood stardom and the human sciences.

Dr. Rosemann will examine the relationship between the Christian intellectual tradition and the postmodern deconstructionist approach. Arguing that although tradition and deconstruction may appear inimical, he will present a case for why they imply and require each other. Dr. Rosemann's talk will take the form of a dialogue between texts by the Belgian Denis the Carthusian, the great 15th-century theologian who lived in Germany, and Martin Heidegger, the German philosopher whose reflections on Destruktion in Being and Time remain seminal for the deconstructionist method.

The book project, “Shakespeare and the Senses,” charts Shakespeare’s diverse experiments with cross-modal sensory and linguistic effects in relation to recent developments in historical phenomenology and current research in cognitive neuroscience.

*With responses by Bruce McConachie (Theater), Marianne Novy (English).

Matilda of Canossa - familiar to scholars of medieval papal history as a champion of Pope Gregory VII during the Investiture Controversy - is best known to seventeenth-century scholars through the controversy which erupted from the “holy robbery” of her body in 1633. Under the cloak of night and the pope’s command, Matilda of Canossa’s body was taken from its tomb at the Lombard monastery of San Benedetto Polirone, much to the public outcry of the local religious community who venerated the eleventh-century noblewoman’s remains as “holy relics.” Her body was brought to Rome, and placed within an elaborate tomb in a strategic spot on the second right pier on the right aisle of St. Peter’s – a location that situated her directly on route to the Porta Sancta, through which Juibilee pilgrims would have to pass to receive an Indulgence of the Holy Year.

Through text, painting, and sculpture commissions, the celebratory “cult” of the Guelph noblewoman and papal supporter was invigorated on a grand scale under the cultural patronage of Pope Urban VIII (1623-1644). The tomb monument to Matilda of Canossa (1637) by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, remains one of the master sculptor’s least appreciated works; art historians quick to characterize the work as “expressionless,” “disappointing,” and “lifeless,” have dubbed the statue “Chilly Matilda.” However, such a critical reception belies the influential role that the monument played in seventeenth-century monument design. Seventeen years after the monument’s unveiling, Pope Alexander VII commissioned Bernini to complete an equestrian monument of Emperor Constantine, asking that the monument be made in the likeness of the monument to Matilda. Equally, when Pope Innocent XII commissioned the funerary monument for Queen Christine of Sweden he requested the work be similar to that of the Countess Matilda (“a somoglianza della quello Contessa Matilda”).

Using the lens of agency, Cymbala’s paper investigates why Matilda’s sculpted image became so central to papal commissions in the later half of the seventeenth century. Examining the sculptural interplay between the monuments to Matilda, Constantine, and Christine of Sweden, Cymbala will highlight the papal goals and political messages that such sculptural relationships espoused in the age of Catholic Reform in Rome.

How do precarious workers employed in call-centres, universities, the fashion industry and many other labour markets organise, struggle and communicate to become recognised, influential political subjects? “Media Practices and Protest Politics; How Precarious Workers Mobilise” reveals the process by which individuals at the margins of the labour market and excluded from the welfare state communicate and struggle outside the realm of institutional politics to gain recognition in the political sphere.

In this important and thought provoking work Alice Mattoni suggests an all-encompassing approach to understanding grassroots political communication in contemporary societies. Using original examples from precarious workers mobilizations in Italy she explores a range of activist media practices and compares different categories of media technologies, organizations and outlets from the printed press to web application and from mainstream to alternative media.

Explaining how activists perceive and understand the media environment in which they are embedded the book discusses how they must interact with a diverse range of media professionals and technologies and considers how mainstream, radical left-wing and alternative media represent protests. Media Practices and Protest Politics offers important insights for understanding mechanisms and patterns of visibility in struggles for recognition and redistribution in post-democratic societies and provides a valuable contribution to the field of political communication and social movement studies.

The aim of the conference is to bring to the fore the medical context of the ‘Scientific Revolution’ and to explore the complex connections between medicine and natural philosophy in Renaissance and Early Modern Europe. Medicine and natural philosophy interacted on many levels, from the practical imperative to restore and maintain the health of human bodies to theoretical issues on the nature of living matter and the powers of the soul to methodological concerns about the appropriate way to gain knowledge of natural things. And issues of life, generation, aging, and vital activity were important topics of investigation for canonical actors of the Scientific Revolution, from Boyle, Hooke and Locke to Descartes and Leibniz. Recent efforts to recover the medical content and contexts of their projects have already begun to reshape our understanding of these key natural philosophers. Putting medical interests in the foreground also reveals connections with a wide variety of less canonical but historically important scientists, physicians, and philosophers, such as Petrus Severinus, Fabricius ab Aquapendente, Lodovico Settala, William Harvey, Richard Lower, Thomas Willis, Louis de la Forge, and Georg Ernst Stahl. This interdisciplinary conference will bring together scholars of Renaissance and Early Modern science, medicine and philosophy to examine the projects of more and less canonical figures and trace perhaps unexpected interactions between medicine and other approaches to studying and understanding the natural world.

Speakers:

Tawrin Baker (Indiana University)
Domenico Bertoloni Meli (Indiana University)
Antonio Clericuzio (University of Cassino)
Dennis Des Chene (Washington University)
Michelle DiMeo (College of Physicians of Philadelphia)
Peter Distelzweig (University of Pittsburgh)
Patricia Easton (Claremont Graduate University)
Benjamin Goldberg (East Tennessee State University)
Anita Guerrini (Oregon State University)
Hiro Hirai (Radboud University Nijmegen)
Dolores Iorizzo (University College London)
Cynthia Klestinec (Miami University, Ohio)
Gideon Manning (Caltech)
Craig Martin (Oakland University)
Evan Ragland (University of Alabama, Hunstville)
Alan Salter (University of Sydney)
Jole Shackelford (University of Minnesota)
Justin E. H. Smith (Concordia University, Montreal)
Charles Wolfe (Ghent University)

Business does not only influence science in 21st-century America. This talk reveals how entrepreneurial science has been with us since the scientific revolution, and exposes how product marketing, patent litigation, and ghostwriting pervaded the practice of natural history and anatomy, the big sciences of the early modern era. It argues that the growth of global trade in the Dutch Golden Age gave rise to a transnational network of entrepreneurial science, connecting natural historians, physicians, and curiosi in Amsterdam, London, St Petersburg, or Danzig. These practitioners were out there to do business. They bought and sold exotica, preserved specimens, anatomical prints, and botanical atlases. This talk shows how, in their trade, Dutch naturalists relied on such mercantile innovations as postal networks and international banking, and also developed their own infrastructure for managing the long-distance, monetary exchange of scientific knowledge and curiosities. In the process, they contributed to the growth of modern science, and imbued its ethos and practices with financial undertones. Entrepreneurial rivalries, secrecy, and marketing strategies transformed the honorific, gift-based exchange system of the early modern Republic of Letters into a competitive marketplace. Emphatically, this talk also claims that trade brought about a culture of scientific debate in the Netherlands, thoroughly influencing the visual epistemology of early modern science. Market competition pitted naturalists against each other, and compelled them to develop philosophical arguments to promote the representational claims of their imaging techniques. This talk reconstructs how financial motives spurred a pamphlet war over the proper method to represent human anatomy, and also engendered the early eighteenth-century debate over Newtonian and Aristotelian color theory.

MONDAY OCTOBER 29, 5-7PM
“THE LAST ILLUSION/DER RUF”
Director: Josef von Baky, b/w, 104 min., 1948/49
A German-Jewish university professor’s return to Germany at the end of the war brings
with it a difficult departure from his American émigré community, an unexpected
reunion with his ex-wife and a final battle against anti-Semitism. This film is based on
the displacement of actor and director Fritz Kortner and contains autobiographical elements.

WEDNESDAY NOVEMBER 7, 5-7PM
“THE SONG IN ME/DAS LIED IN MIR”
Director: Florian Cossen, colour, 94min, 2010
During a stopover in Buenos Aires, Maria Falkenmayer hears a Spanish nursery song
and reacts in a troubled way. Where does she, a young German, remember this
melody and these lyrics from? In the search for an answer, she learns the truth about
her family, her origin, and her identity.

WEDNESDAY NOVEMBER 14, 5-7PM
“CLOUD NINE/WOLKE NEUN”
Director: Andreas Dresen, colour, 100 min., 20007/08
Inge meets Karl, impulsively falls passionately in love with him and leaves Werner,
her husband of 30 years, to go and live with Karl. Sounds like many other love stories,
apart from the fact that all parties involved are well into their sixties or even seventies.

Films will be shown from 5-7pm, 4217 WWPH. PIZZA WILL BE SERVED

*Part of the The A. W. Mellon Distinguished Lectures in the History of Science

"Newton’s Shadow: Francesco Algarotti and the Passion for Science in the Eighteenth Century"

Paula Findlen is the Ubaldo Pierotti Professor of Italian History at Stanford University.

*Part of the yearlong series, “Speaking in Tongues”

Jen Waldron and Ryan McDermott will lead an informal seminar on Nicholas Watson’s "Censorship and Cultural Change: Vernacular Theology, the Oxford Translation Debate, and Arundel's Constitutions of 1409" (1995).

*Part of the yearlong series, “Speaking in Tongues”

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 11: EUROPE DAY!
Are you interested in studying and eventually working in Europe? Then join us for this series of events that will give you information and resources to successfully include Europe in your plans.

Europe Day Fair
11:00am – 2:00pm, Lower Lounge – William Pitt Union
The Europe Day Fair has been designed to promote Europe related programs and resources on campus, and help undergraduate students understand the ways they can Europeanize their studies and post graduate plans while at Pitt. Come meet with representatives from Europe related centers, academic programs, clubs and organizations on campus, and learn about Europe related resources at the office of Career Development & Placement Assistance. Also learn about European study abroad options and the many ways study abroad can be paid for with scholarships and financial aid.

Panel: “Your Interests in Europe and International Relations: Where Can They Lead?”
3:00 – 4:30, 4130 WWPH
Interested in learning how to match your interests in (Europe related) International Relations and Political Science with academic options and choices for graduate programs and professional fields? Join us for tips & suggestions and to brainstorm about your own interests and plans.
Panelists include: Ron Linden, Director, EUCE/ESC; Bob Hayden, Director, REES; Gemma Marolda, Faculty, EUCE and Political Science Dept; Kristian McCloud – Career Development and Placement Assistance Office

“Passport Career” Orientation
6:00 – 8:30, Lower Lounge – WPU
Passport Career is a useful tool for Pitt students and alumni who may be considering a job or internship search abroad and allows users to search for information by city and country of interest. Susan Musich, the founder Executive Director of Passport Career, will introduce this new resource to students interested in exploring possibilities of working abroad.

Provost Lecture at Science 2012
Miranda A. Schreurs, PhD, is a recognized leader in the field of comparative environmental politics and policy in Europe, the United States, and East Asia.

Schreurs grew up in the United States and earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Washington and her doctorate in comparative politics from the University of Michigan. She joined the University of Maryland in 1994 and has worked as a guest professor at universities in Japan and Germany. In 2007, she was recruited to the Freie Universität Berlin as professor of comparative politics and director of the university’s Environmental Policy Research Centre, an international team of social science researchers and students who study, evaluate, and provide policy advice related to environmental and sustainable energy politics and policies.

In 2008, Schreurs became a member of the German Advisory Council on the Environment. She is chair of the European Environment and Sustainable Development Advisory Councils, a network of advisory councils across Europe. In 2012, German Chancellor Angela Merkel appointed her to the Ethics Commission on a Safe Energy Supply, which was charged with advising the German government on energy questions after the Fukushima nuclear explosion.

Author of several books and many journal articles on energy and environmental policy, Schreurs has held fellowships from the Social Science Research Council–MacArthur Foundation Program on International Peace and Security Affairs, the Fulbright Foundation, and the National Science Foundation/Science and Technology Agency of Japan.

Lunch will be provided

*Part of the yearlong series, “Speaking in Tongues”

The background of Peter Paul Rubens’s Miracles of St. Francis Xavier, painted in 1617 for the Jesuit church in Antwerp, contains a surprising detail - a horned Hindu idol that is being destroyed by rays of light emanating from an allegory of the Catholic Faith. Far from being meaningless exotica, the Hindu idol plays an important iconographic role in the larger decorative scheme of the Antwerp Jesuit church. Designed by Rubens in 1620 and executed by his assistants, the ceiling decoration of the side aisles and galleries contains several other images of the destruction of idols by early Christian saints such as St. Eugenia and St. John Chrysostom. There is no other Jesuit church in the world where the themes of iconoclasm and idol smashing are so prominent. This iconography must have had special significance for audiences in Antwerp. In the course of this presentation, I will demonstrate that the events of the late sixteenth century, including the iconoclasm of 1566 and the tyrannical governorship of the Duke of Alba, still resonated in Antwerp and led Rubens to make certain iconographic choices when confronted with the problem of how to depict the destruction of religious images in a city that was still recovering from wounds inflicted by revolt, oppression, mutiny, and war.

*Lunch provided*
RSVP to losagio@pitt.edu by Monday, September 17, 2012

Graduate students and faculty are invited to participate in this workshop, which will provide training in the theory and application of the multiliteracies approach to teaching advanced-level foreign language courses. Participants will have the chance to develop their own teaching materials.

Heather Willis Allen is an Assistant Professor of French and Second Language Acquisition at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she also serves as Course Chair for the Elementary French program. Allen’s research interests include language-learning motivation, teacher development, and literacy-based approaches to teaching and learning. Her book-length publications include Educating the Future Foreign Language Professoriate for the 21st Century (Heinle Cengage, 2011), co-edited with Hiram H. Maxim, and Alliages culturels: La société française en transformation (in press, Heinle Cengage), a literacy-based introduction to French culture today textbook co-authored with Sebastien Dubreil. Allen’s research has also appeared in the ADFL Bulletin, Foreign Language Annals, the French Review, Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad, the Journal of Studies in International Education, the L2 Journal and the Modern Language Journal. Her next project, contracted with Pearson, is a co-authored introduction to foreign language teaching manual entitled A Multiliteracies Framework for Collegiate Foreign Language Teaching.

The Habsburg Monarchy disappeared in 1918, but many elements of its urban culture survived and even continued to evolve in the years to follow. In popular cinema of the interwar period, we can pick up what Nancy Condee has called, in other contexts, an "imperial trace" and begin to map out a common cultural space that continued to bridge the former twin seats of empire, Vienna and Budapest. For this talk, I will focus on three titles -- Frühjahrsparade (1934), Ernte/Die Julika (1936), and Maria Ilona (1939) -- helmed by Géza von Bolváry, one of the most prolific directors of the period. These films point the way toward a "post-imperial" cinema that both re-enacted and re-imagined the relationship between the Austrian and Hungarian halves of the vanished Dual Monarchy.

The lurid biblical story of John the Baptist, King Herod, and Herod’s precocious stepdaughter became an operatic hit in 1905 with Richard Strauss’ Salome. The lecture presents an earlier musical version of this character, la Figlia in Alessandro Stradella’s oratorio San Giovanni Battista (1675), and considers the reasons why femmes fatales ruled the operatic stage in the seventeenth no less than in the late nineteenth century.

Susan McClary is Professor of Music at Case Western University. Her research focuses on the cultural criticism of music, both the European canon and contemporary popular genres. She is best known for her book Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (1991), which examines cultural constructions of gender, sexuality, and the body in various musical repertories, ranging from early seventeenth-century opera to the songs of the pop queen Madonna. In her more recent publications, she explores the many ways in which subjectivities have been construed in music from the sixteenth-century onward. Modal Subjectivities: Renaissance Self-Fashioning in the Italian Madrigal (2004) won the Otto Kinkeldey Prize from the American Musicological Society in 2005, and its sequel — Desire and Pleasure in Seventeenth-Century Music — appeared in 2012.

To cap off the events of Irish Studies Week 2012, the EUCE/ESC will host a reception with live Irish music and information on the multiple opportunities to explore contemporary and historical Ireland while at the University of Pittsburgh. Refreshments provided. Open to the community.

All films will have subtitles accessible to non-German speaking audiences. All film screenings are open to the public. All films will be DVD projection. Many of these films are rare and hard to find. I would encourage you to bring friends so they can take advantage of the experience.

Tuesday September 11
Nerven [Nerves] (Robert Reiner 1919)
Die Austernprinzessin [The Oyster Princess] (Ernst Lubitsch 1919)

Tuesday September 18
Schloß Vogeloed [Castle Vogeloed] (F.W. Murnau 1921)
Nosferatu (F,W. Murnau 1922)

Tuesday September 25
Die freudlose Gasse [Joyless Streets] (Georg Wilhelm Pabst 1925)
Asphalt (Joe May 1929)

Tuesday October 2
Die Elf Teufel [The Eleven Devils] (Zoltan Korda 1927)
König der Mittelstürmer [The Champion of the Stadium] (Fritz Freisler 1927)

Tuesday October 9
Metropolis (Fritz Lang 1927)
Algol (Hans Werckmeister 1920)
Wunder der Schöpfung [Our Heavenly Bodies] (Hanns Walter Kornblum 1925)

Tuesday October 16
Berlin, die Sinfonie der Großstadt [Berlin the Symphony of the Great City] (Walter Ruttmann 1927)
Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed [The Adventures of Prince Achmed] (Lotte Reiniger, 1923-26)

Tuesday October 23
Büchse der Pandora [Pandora’s Box] (Georg Wilhelm Pabst 1929)
Der Letzte Mann [Last Laugh] (F. W. Murnau 1924)

Tuesday October 30
Der Blaue Engel [The Blue Angel] (Josef Von Sternberg 1930)

Tuesday November 6
Anders als die Andern [Different from the Others] (Richard Oswald 1919)
Mädchen in Uniform [Girls in Uniform] (Leontine Sagan 1931)

Tuesday November 13
Menschen am Sonntag [People on Sunday] (Robert Siodmak 1930)

Tuesday November 20
Die Dreigroschenoper [Three Penny Opera] (Georg Wlhelm Pabst 1931)

Tuesday November 27
Kuhle Wampe [To Whom Does the World Belong?] (Slatan Dudow 1932)

Tuesday December 4
Die Drei von der Tankstelle [Three Men and Lilian] (Wilhelm Thiele 1930)
Der Kongress Tanzt [The Congress Dances] (Erik Charell 1931)

This three-day symposium "Crossing Borders: Ways of Constructing Identities" will take place at the University of Augsburg as a joint graduate student conference between the University of Augsburg and the University of Pittsburgh. Fifteen total graduate students will present: five graduate students from the University of Pittsburgh and ten from the University of Augsburg will be giving individual presentations on topics related to their dissertation research. The Faculty of Philology and History at the University of Augsburg will provide conference rooms.

On Monday, François Hollande became the first French Socialist candidate elected president since 1981. He campaigned for higher government spending and taxation. Does this signal a new economic approach to Europe’s financial problems? What might happen to austerity? And what is the Socialist economic approach? Dr. Alberta Sbragia, University of Pittsburgh Vice Provost and former Director of the European Studies Center and the European Union Center of Excellence addresses these questions, and talks about the future of the EU.

Regulating Unregulated Migration:
European and U.S. Reactions to Immigration

Friday, May 4th
9:00-9:30 Continental Breakfast
9:30-10:00 Welcome and Introductions
Suzanna Crage, Department of Sociology, University of Pittsburgh
Ronald Linden, Director, European Union Center of Excellence/European Studies Center

10-11:30 The EU & U.S.: Demographic trends
Martin Schain, Department of Politics, New York University

11:30-1:30 Lunch (for registered participants)
Presentation: Public opinion about migration in the US and selected European countries
Hamutal Bernstein, German Marshall Fund

1:45-3:15 US migration politics, Arizona immigration laws, US Courts
Marc Rosenblum, Congressional Research Service, U.S. Library of Congress
Luis F.B. Plascencia, Dept. of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Arizona State University

3:30-5:00 Approaches to controlling migration in Pennsylvania, Alabama, and Texas
Jan Ting, Beasley School of Law, Temple University
Shay Farlay, Alabama Appleseed Center for Law & Justice Inc., Montgomery, AL
Faye Kolly, De Mott, McChesney, Curtright & Armendáriz, LLP, Immigration and Criminal Defense Attorneys, Austin, Texas

Saturday, May 5th

8:30-9:00 Continental breakfast

9:00-10:30 EU politics, policies, and practices
Kris Pollet, European Council on Refugees and Exiles, Brussels, Belgium
Adam Luedtke, Political Science Dept., Stockton College

10:45-12:15 Migration control in the Mediterranean
Nick Vaughan-Williams, Dept. of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick
Cetta Mainwaring, International Relations, Wadham College, Oxford University

All panels are free and open to the public.
Organized by Suzanna Crage, Dept of Sociology

"Speaking in Tongues" Lecture Series

More details about the lecture will follow.

From medieval pogroms to modern racial science, Jewish history in Europe has come to stand as a test case for thinking about problems of historical continuity and change, embodied most clearly in the tension between narratives emphasizing a timeless antisemitism and arguments for the distinctive mentalities associated with discrete historical periods. Our colloquium, “The Holocaust and the Middle Ages,” seeks to reexamine Jewish history as a multi-layered problem of narrative and conceptualization, in which deeply interested anti-Jewish narratives from the premodern world form points of explosive contact with modern literary and historical modes of analysis. Part of our work is to examine how later historical lenses, such as the interests of post-Reformation history and the consuming project of Holocaust history, have substantially dictated the terms of modern understanding of Jewish-Christian relations, often with distorting effects. At the same time, medieval paradigms of religious conflict continue to operate as the unacknowledged foundations for contemporary efforts to think about problems of political conflict rooted in religious difference.

Our objective is to bring together a small group of scholars and encourage significant interdisciplinary dialogue between medievalists and specialists in later fields, including particularly Reformation history and Holocaust studies. In doing so, we hope to move beyond generalities about the evolution of Western patterns of religious conflict to gain critical purchase on the ways in which our narratives for thinking about these problems are deeply imbricated in the assumptions, needs, and theories at work within discrete moments of historical thought.

For more information, please visit our website (www.medren.pitt.edu) or contact the Director, Professor Jennifer Waldron (jwaldron@pitt.edu).

Screening of THE QUEEN will be introduced by Director, Stephen Frears. Q&A session with Colin MacCabe.

Known for making provocative, stylized, and tightly budgeted films about people living on society's social and/or sexual fringes,
British director Stephen Frears is renowned as one of his country's most vibrant and recognizable filmmakers. Regarding his
tendency to make films that branch into unfamiliar territory, Frears has said that he likes "making films about different cultures...I'm interested in things that I've never encountered before. I try to put myself in the audience's position." Born in Leicester, Frears studied law at Cambridge University before turning to the arts. He became involved with London's Royal Court Theatre, where he served as an assistant to director Lindsay Anderson and to actor Albert Finney. He started his career in the film industry as an assistant director to Karel Reisz, with whom he worked from 1966 until 1972.

Scripted by Peter Morgan, 2006's THE QUEEN took a comic-yet-sympathetic look at the P.R. nightmare that
ensued after Princess Diana's death in 1997. Bolstered by Helen Mirren's universally acclaimed work as Queen
Elizabeth II, the film enjoyed a healthy arthouse run through awards season, when Frears found himself the recipient
of countless Best Director nominations from critics' organizations, as well as the Golden Globe Awards.

B. Burcak Basbug-Erkan is an assistant professor of Statistics at the Middle East Technical University (METU), Ankara. She acts as the director of the METU Disaster Management Research and Implementation Centre since 2008. She holds a B.Sc. in statistics, METU, a M.Sc. degree in statistics, University of Warwick, the UK and a Ph.D. in statistics at the London School of Economics and Political Science, the UK. Her main research interest is disaster risk management, extreme event modelling, insurance and actuarial analysis and financial risk management of disaster losses. She teaches disaster risk management, linear models, insurance and actuarial analysis, probability and stochastic processes.

Next Wednesday (April 11), the Society and Honors College will proudly play host to a prominent intellectual historian of our generation: J.G.A. Pocock, author of Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law, Machiavellian Moment, and a multi-volume work on Edward Gibbon. An emeritus professor at Johns Hopkins, Pocock is noted for developing a novel approach to the study of history often referred to as the Cambridge School of intellectual history. His work encompasses a broad range of intellectual endeavors, including not only history, but also political science, philosophy, and literature. Professor Pocock will lecture at 602 Cathedral of Learning at 4:00 PM, and we'd love for you to come along and help Pitt show its support for history as an intellectual exercise.

Matt Zwick, a student at the Law School, and local attorney David Rosenberg will present a paper they co-authored, entitled "Legal Professional Privilege: Comparing Different Approaches Within the United States and the European Union."

The 2012 Jean Monnet Symposium hosted by the European Union Center of Excellence and European Studies Center at the University of Pittsburgh will bring together historians and political scientists to discuss empires old and new. Its goal is to advance the current discussion of how to define empire, look at how empires have defined themselves in the past, and build upon our understanding of historical empires to refine new categories of analysis applicable to the European Union of the present. Featured presenters include Patrick Manning and Daniel Bisbee, Martha Chaiklin, and Peter Karsten from the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh; along with Magali Gravier (Copenhagen Business School), Josep Colomer (George Washington University), and Joshua W. Walker (German Marshall Fund).

Co-sponsor: World History Center

INFORMATION SESSION: Career and Internship Opportunities with the U.S. Dept. of State

Tom Armbruster
Senior Foreign Service Officer
Diplomat in Residence
City College of New York

Date: April 4th, 2012
Time: 1:00
Place: 4130 Posvar Hall

Come see how you can contribute to and join Secretary Clinton’s foreign policy professionals who manage America’s relations with the world. The Foreign Service offers the opportunity for public service, challenge, lifelong learning, foreign language study, and the chance to live and work overseas. On Wednesday, April 4, Senior Foreign Service Officer Tom Armbruster, most recently U.S. Consul General in Vladivostok, Russia, will present a discussion on State Department internships, both in American embassies and consulates abroad, and at State Department headquarters in Washington. Mr. Armbruster will also describe the process for becoming a Foreign Service Officer and the 13 dimensions that successful candidates demonstrate. Foreign Service officers serve in these career tracks: Consular – touching the lives of others through American citizen service and visa adjudications; Management – making diplomacy work and keeping our Embassies and Consulates running; Economic – promoting economic partnerships, free markets and trade; Public Diplomacy – explaining American values and policies through speakers, exchanges, and cultural programming; Political - analyzing political events and advising Washington and the “country team” at the Embassy, headed by the Ambassador.

Join us on Tuesday, April 3rd as three alumni of the European Studies Center discuss how their interests in
Foreign language and international studies have shaped their postgraduate lives. Panelists include Christopher Burdick, Policy Advisor for the U.S. Treasury; Benjamin Keller – lawyer for DLA Piper in N.Y.C.; Carrie Weintraub, International Relations graduate from the London School of Economics. Some of the issues to be discussed include: pursuing graduate studies in Europe, preparing for law/graduate school, the importance of networking, what it’s like working for law firms and/or the government, and what tips and suggestions they would offer undergraduates in European or international studies programs now. International Studies and pre law counselors from the Career Center will also be available to answer questions and provide information about resources and planning strategies. If you have questions about this event, please contact Steve Lund, Assistant Director of the European Studies Center, at slund@pitt.edu, 412-6248-7422.
Sponsored by: European Union Center of Excellence & European Studies Center

Colloquium, Ruth Bottigheimer (Stony Brook), “What’s Eastern and What’s Western in the Arabian Nights?” with responses from Susan Andrade (English) and Giuseppina Mecchia (French and Italian).

With financial crises looming in Europe, the world is bracing for new shocks. How will it all play out? Will the euro and the European Union survive? These and many other questions engage students at the University of Pittsburgh. Join us to learn about some of the initiatives that Pitt graduate students from varying disciplines are creating to bring the EU to campus (or bring the campus to the EU)! Don’t miss out on this chance to meet colleagues who have similar research, professional or extracurricular interests in the EU. And, of course, pizza will be served.

French Immersion institutes are designed for middle and high school French teachers, as well as French majors to broaden their cultural understanding of current events and international studies regarding French-speaking countries, to strengthen their French listening and speaking skills, and to share strategies for the teaching of French language and culture. We will be offering the following workshop spring, 2012

Topic: "Les Elections Présidentielles et Législatives Françaises de 2012

With Jean-Dominique Le Garrec, Consul Honoraire de France and Jean Pierre Collet, Ancien Consul Honoraire de France

Program Director : Bonnie Adair-Hauck, Ph.D.
Time: 8:30 a.m.-1:30 p.m. Room: 5200 Posvar Hall
Cost: $10.00 per workshop
Includes: ACT 48 credit, workshop; continental breakfast; lunch

Pennsylvania ACT 48 credit available for participants.

*****************All activities are conducted in French*****************

Dr. Erik Gray is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is the author of The Poetry of Indifference: From the Romantics to the Rubáiyát (Massachusetts 2005) and Milton and the Victorians (Cornell 2009), as well as the editor of Tennyson's In Memoriam (Norton 2004) and Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book 2 (Hackett 2006). He has also published articles on a range of poets including Virgil, Sidney, Donne, Milton, Pope, Gray, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, the Brownings, and Christina Rossetti. This talk is drawn from his current book project on love poetry.

Katie Trumpener, Emily Sanford Professor of Comparative Literature and English and director of graduate studies in comparative literature at Yale University

This graduate seminar is in English and open to all graduate students.

Katie Trumpener is one of the most innovative scholars in the field of comparative cultural studies. Her research spans the modern period (the late 18th century to the present) and explores a broad range of topics, from the history of the British and European novel to Anglophone fiction (especially from Scotland, Ireland, and Canada); from European film history to visual culture and music; nationalism, regionalism, and traditionalism; literature and culture of World War I, World War II, and the Cold War; the history of children’s literature (18th century to the present); and female novelists.

The gap between the art and the science involved in producing Early Modern bird’s-eye views has long puzzled historians. On a visual level, city views were posited as being oriented toward a single perspective while simultaneously opening up vast, impossibly elevated cityscapes. Frequently they included the artist–cartographer’s self-portrait within the image, often shown sketching the city from a high hilltop—as if to verify the view as something witnessed and drawn directly from life. Considering that such views were almost always products of the studio stitched together from multiple site drawings and instrument-aided measurements, why did cartographers, artists, and geographers continually play down the scientific underpinnings of the viewmaking enterprise, treating it as a realm of direct, unmediated observation? This talk traces the theoretical and visual discourses concerning the purpose of the city view in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It will detail how measurement was translated into convincing perspectival pictures, and will further address the significant reversal that occurred in those discourses around 1600, when the emphasis upon the artist–cartographer’s transformative abilities would be replaced by a new stress upon the neutralizing power of scientific instruments.

Mark Rosen is Assistant Professor of Aesthetic Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas. He received his Ph.D. in the History of Art from the University of California, Berkeley, and has held a National Endowment for the Humanities Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Medici Archive Project in Florence as well as a two-year Samuel H. Kress Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence. He has published in The Art Bulletin, Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, Oud Holland, Archives Internationales d’Histoire des Sciences, Nuncius, and other journals. His book manuscript, The Painted Map in the Age of Print and the Era of Exploration, is currently under review.

Saskia Beranek, PhD Candidate, History of Art and Architecture - University of Pittsburgh

In the 1630s, the most prominent aristocrats in the United Provinces, Frederik Hendrik and Amalia van Solms, commissioned a series of paintings from the Italian play Il Pastor Fido for Amalia’s private rooms in their new palace of Honselaarsdijk. Though the palace itself no longer exists, extensive documentation of both the design of the palace and its decoration survive. Previously, it has been suggested that these scenes contained a portrait of their patron. This paper furthers this hypothesis through a consideration not only of the iconography and political allegory of the cycle, but also through an examination of how portraits became an active element within elite spaces in the early modern period. Using two other examples of site specific allegorized portraiture of the same patron, this paper not only explores the artistic policies of a significant female patron, but also raises issues about the interaction of architectural spaces and their decoration and the dynamic and flexible power of the portrait.

Shirin Fozi, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Northwestern University

Tomb effigies have long formed a cornerstone of the modern study of Gothic and Renaissance art; it is well known that they were popular across western Europe during the thirteenth through sixteenth centuries, and attracted a broad spectrum of patrons and artists. The origins of the effigy format, however, have been very nearly overlooked in the past century: while a few of the rare, early Romanesque effigies are known to specialists in the field, a comprehensive study of the rise of this sculptural type in the eleventh and early twelfth centuries has yet to be published. This talk introduces a few key monuments from the formative period of the figural tomb effigy, and proposes that these Romanesque effigies were distinct from their Gothic and Renaissance counterparts not only in form, but also in function.