Lecture

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently predicted that global average temperatures will rise 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels in the mid-2030s. Over the last decades, a global network of scholars, policy makers, activists, and others have organized to offer ways to mitigate and even reverse the effects of climate change. What offramps can these solutions and movements offer our collective humanity?

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently predicted that global average temperatures will rise 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels in the mid-2030s. Over the last decades, a global network of scholars, policy makers, activists, and others have organized to offer ways to mitigate and even reverse the effects of climate change. What offramps can these solutions and movements offer our collective humanity?

The lecture by Prof. Dr. Steffen Höhne, "Bohemia, Prague, and Franz Kafka – Intercultural Contexts in Central Europe," will explore Franz Kafka's work in relation to the cultural and political dynamics of Bohemia and Prague. The event will also include a discussion with students from Prof. Dr. Amy Colin's Kafka seminar.

This talk summarizes the results of genealogical research done by the author – a linguist and academic from Hungary – which she has conducted in the past five years to uncover her own family’s history of mostly peasant ancestors in 18th-19th century rural southern Hungary. These results are then discussed in terms of the micro-historical, social-historical, and epigenetic contexts of modern (Central European) identity.

In the 1970s, a new genre of samizdat emerged in the Soviet Union: the dissident conduct manual, covering situations ranging from interrogations to apartment searches to interviews with psychiatrists. They spoke not to the age-old question "What is to be done?," but the existential "How should you conduct yourself?" What did self-respect require? Did interrogation rooms and psychiatric wards demand a distinct code of behaviour, a moral state of exception- or did they merely reproduce everyday Soviet reality in a heightened form?

Join Till Mostowlansky, Research Professor and Eccellenza Professorial Fellow in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at The Graduate Institute Geneva, present his latest work: Transforming Landscapes of Aid: How Gulf Business, the War in Ukraine, and Equestrian Sports Change Small-Town Kyrgyzstan.

Hear from Pitt Slavic Alumni Dr. Olga Kim, in the 2024 Pitt Slavic Alumni Lecture!

This year, Pitt's annual memorial keynote lecture on Slovak culture, which helps keep alive the memory of Thomas Kukučka (whose commitment to Slovakia in the 1980s helps future generations to improve their knowledge of the country), will focus on Slovak Immigration in Pittsburgh.

How did the project of Soviet internationalism imagine a future for a “national musical instrument” like the Ukrainian bandura? Drawing on the archive of the Kyiv Palace of Pioneers (KPDU), the mass institution that provided afterschool opportunities for Soviet schoolchildren known as “Pioneers,” alongside interviews with bandura players, this lecture tells the story of the formation of the children’s bandura ensemble in Soviet Ukraine and the violent erasures that enabled its creation.

You are cordially invited to a free lecture, "America's Troubled Foreign Policy," by Professor John Mearsheimer, R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Chicago on Monday, March 11, 2024 at 6:00 p.m. Professor Mearsheimer will examine U.S. foreign policy concerning China, Russia, the Ukraine war, the Gaza crisis, and more. The lecture will be followed by a Q & A session.