Marco Torsello is Professor of Comparative Law at the School of Law of the University of Verona, Italy. He is also a Global Professor of Law in NYU School of Law's La w Abroad program in Paris, and an Adjunct Professor at the School of management, MIP-Politecnico di Milano. His many publications include articles on international commercial arbitration, EUcommercial law, and the Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (CISG). He is the co-author with Franco Ferrari of "International Sales Law-CISG in a Nutshell"

Join Distinguished Teaching Professor Stacy Alaimo from the University of Texas Arlington for her talk this January at Pitt. Prof. Alaimo is an internationally recognized scholar of the environmental humanities and gender studies. She has published three monographs: Undomesticated Ground: Recasting Nature as Feminist Space (Cornell UP, 2000);
Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (Indiana UP, 2010); and Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pressures in Posthuman Times (U of Minnesota P, 2016). Bodily Natures won the ASLE (Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment) Award for Ecocriticism in 2011 and was featured in a special book session at the International Association of Environmental Philosophy in 2013. Alaimo also coedited Material Feminisms (Indiana UP 2008), and her edited collection Matter is forthcoming in 2017 (Macmillan). She is known for developing the concept of "trans-corporeality," a concept widely in circulation and included as a key term in Rosi Braidotti's The Posthuman Glossary (2017). Her current book project is entitled "Blue Ecologies: Science, Aesthetics, and the Creatures of the Abyss."

Graduate students may also attend a lunchtime colloquium with Professor Alaimo from 11:00am- 1:00pm in 501G in the Cathedral. Contact Nancy Glazener (glazener@pitt.edu) to RSVP, get access to readings, and to convey dietary restrictions.

Featuring:
Anne Knowles (University of Maine), Ruth Mostern (History), Karl Grossner (Stanford), and Ryan Horne (World History Center)

Presented by the World History Center

Please join the European Studies Center and Center for International Legal Education in welcoming Francesca Ragno, this year’s Italian Fulbright Distinguished Lecturer, to the University of Pittsburgh for a welcoming reception in the Alcoa Room at 4:00 – 5:30 pm.

Francesca Ragno is Researcher (tenure position) and Adjunct Professor of International Law at the School of Law of Verona University. She graduated in Law (J.D.) with honors at the University of Bologna, and obtained her PhD degree from the University of Verona. Throughout her career she spent several research stays abroad, including at the University of Hamburg, University of Heidelberg, and NYU. Her teaching and scholarship span Private International Law, European Law, International Commercial Law, and International Arbitration.

In her capacity as our 2018 Italian Fulbright Distinguished Lecturer, Professor Ragno has left her home University (Verona) to spend a four-month period at the University of Pittsburgh for spring 2018, where she is teaching “EU from an International Law Perspective.” The overarching aim of her teaching project is to increase understanding in the US of EU law at a critical time for the very existence of the European Union and its role as a global actor. At the same time, she cherishes the opportunity to reflect with students on the raison d'être of the EU from an American perspective and on the benefits and the opportunities that the EU provides for the USA.

The University of Pittsburgh is proud to host one of only five Italian Fulbright Distinguished Chairs in the U.S., in partnership with the U.S. – Italy Fulbright Commission in Italy. The University of Pittsburgh Italian Fulbright Chair is administered by the European Studies Center in cooperation with the Departments of French & Italian, History, and History of Art and Architecture.

CLAS-Latin American Cinema Series 2018/ CLAS- Serie de Cine Latinoamericano 2018

NERUDA: Una Cacería Salvaje (Pablo Larraín, Chile, 2016)
*Subtitles provided in English
With commentary by Pedro Salas, Ph.D. Hispanic Languages and Literatures, Instructor, Slippery Rock University

Come and join us for a great film and pizza!
Free and open to the public!

From A. O. Scott’s New York Times’ Review: “’Neruda,’ Pablo Larraín’s semifantastical biopic, is a warmhearted film about a hot-blooded man that is nonetheless troubled by a subtle, perceptible chill. Blending fact with invention, it tells the story of a confrontation between an artist (the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda) and an emerging dictatorship, and more generally illuminates the endless struggle between political authority and the creative imagination. For anyone who believes that poetry and democracy spring from the same source and provoke the same enemies, this movie provides both encouragement and warning.”

Official Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=neUwXV_cSwM

Interested in careers in International Law? Security? International Development? Arts and Entertainment? International Business? Health?

This toolkit series introduces students to the multitude of careers available by meeting and interacting with professionals in a variety of fields. Many of our guest speakers are Pitt alumni and those that graduated with an International Studies Certificate. By attending one or all of the panels, students will gain insight on career choices, what specific careers entail, how to articulate and prepare for short and long term career goals, and utilize resources at Pitt to make their goals a reality.

This series is designed for students to learn from professionals about:

What their work entails;
How they prepared for their career and what led them to their current position;
If they had to do it over, how would they better prepare themselves given resources at the university;
What employers are looking for in new-hires including soft and hard skills;
How to network with really interesting people

Funded by the ESC's Jean Monnet Center of Excellence Grant, this lecture is part of the Center's Participation and Democracy 2017-18 Series.

Historical Geographer Anne Knowles is co-founder of the Holocaust Geographies Collaborative http://holocaustgeographies.geo.txstate.edu/and a specialist in Historical GIS, Geovisualization, and Digital Humanities, with topical interest in intersections of economy, technology, and culture and their expression in the landscape. She will be Visiting Short-Term Fellow at Pitt's Humanities Center: see Humanities Center calendar for further events and workshops during her visit.

Presented by the Pittsburgh History Department Colloquium Series

A required informational meeting for all undergraduate students enrolled in GSC. Information presented will include opportunities about funding, study abroad, travel, pop-up courses, careers and important dates, and more! You'll meet the GSC staff as well as other students in the program. Snacks served along with special prizes!

Mitchell A. Seligson is the Centennial Professor of Political Science, Alexander Heard Distinguished Service Professor, and Professor of Sociology (by courtesy) at Vanderbilt University and Founder and Senior Advisor of Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP), which conducts the AmericasBarometer surveys that currently covers over 30 countries in the Americas. Seligson has carried out hundreds of surveys of public opinion, mainly focused on democracy and governance, in many countries in Latin America, but has also included projects in Africa and the Balkans. For details, see www.LapopSurveys.org.He currently is an elected member of the General Assembly of the Inter-American Institute of Human Rights. Over the past decade, he has been awarded over $25nmillion in research grants and contracts. To read more about Dr. Mitchell Seligson visit:
https://www.vanderbilt.edu/political-science/bio/mitchell-seligson

Lunch will be provided.

for more information contact: ket82@pitt.edu

What can practices to commemorate official epidemic responses tell us about the logics of response itself? Specifically, what do they tell us about the visions and logics of care that such practices represent? In this paper, I compare two exhibits that describe efforts to respond to the 2014-6 West African Ebola epidemic: the Imperial War Museum’s “Fighting Extremes: From Ebola to ISIS” (London) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s “Ebola: People + Public Health + Political Will” (Atlanta). Even as they rely on remarkably similar objects – rubber boots, protective gear, tippy taps, short, looped video interviews with frontline workers – to tell their Ebola stories, they differ with respect to how objects are oriented in space, in relation to other objects, ideas, and experiences, and their strategic positioning within museum (and institutional) agendas, more generally. These differences form the basis of my analysis, which is still quite preliminary. For the military museum, Ebola represents an instance of the ‘extreme’ and the extraordinary capacity of the armed forces to provide care under challenging circumstances. The exhibit showcases the tensions of militarized humanitarianism (referred to elsewhere as the ‘empire of hugs’): the military’s need to sustain itself through expansion of its work to humanitarian interventions and the counterinsurgency battles that are increasingly employing private military contractors. The CDC exhibit, while highlighting the contribution of its workers and ‘partnerships’ so central in US public health discourse plays to intimate dimensions of ‘population’ – suggesting that acts of care may occur outside the frame of the interpersonal. I end by discussing a recent trip to the in-progress National Ebola Museum in Njala, Sierra Leone, where questions of local ownership, memory and immunity linger in the archives.

What can the long history of a Sino-Tibetan region tell us about China’s frontiers? This talk develops themes of comparative interest from Contesting the Yellow Dragon: Ethnicity, Religion and the State by Xiaofei Kang and Donald S. Sutton, Brill (CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title of 2016). Officialdom from Ming times to the PRC reform period worked to overcome the ‘friction of terrain’ (in James C. Scott’s expression) in remote Songpan, handicapped by limited resources and their own ideological assumptions. But the same handicaps, and the peculiar unfolding of local history, helped locals to find space for their own political and cultural expressions, producing a frontier identity not quite like any other.

Global Studies will host a 4-part series with sessions on January 19th, February 2nd, February 16th, and March 16th to equip students to pursue research within the framework of the multidisciplinary field of global studies. The series is designed for students at any stage of their academic career. It's a must for students considering pursing a BPHIL, an honor's thesis, or enrolling in a graduate program in the future. Dr. Michael Goodhart, GSC Director and Professor of Political Science, along with GSC faculty will provide insight based on their experience on conceiving research ideas, formulating research questions, identifying methods to consider to collect and analyze data, ethically gathering data working within university research guidelines and lastly presenting and disseminating data using traditional methods and new forms of digital media. Each session will include ample time for discussion so bring your ideas and questions!