Faculty Spotlight

The European Studies Center’s faculty spotlight for Fall 2020 is aimed on core affiliated faculty member and a member of our ESC Faculty Advisory Board, Professor Randall Halle. Professor Halle is the Klaus W. Jonas Professor of German Film and Cultural Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. He is also the Director of the Critical European Culture Studies (CECS) Program at the University of Pittsburgh, which will admit its first Ph.D. candidate for the Fall 2020 semester.  Dr. Halle and his colleagues’ efforts to build this unique and elite program at Pitt included the creation of a new research network within the Council for European Studies (CES). This research network brings together scholars from around the world who work on culture and the culture industry within Europe. In Fall 2019, he organized a successful workshop at Pitt which culminated in the publication of a special issue of EuropeNow (26) 2019, entitled United in DiversityYou can read his introduction to the special issue here.  Inspired in large part by the work of Dr. Halle, the ESC has declared the 2020-21 academic year to be the Year of Creating Europe and we have framed the 2020-2021 Conversations on Europe Virtual Roundtable Series around questions related to the EU's motto "United in Diversity."