Lecture

Inventing Racial Whiteness: Early Modern Playbooks of Racial Triangulation

Type: 
Wednesday, April 2, 2025 - 13:30 to 15:00
Event Location: 
William Pitt Union Ballroom
Join us for an event featuring Noémie Ndiaye, Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Chicago, whose research focuses on early modern English, French, and Spanish theater with an emphasis on race. Ndiaye will discuss her award-winning book, Scripts of Blackness: Early Modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race (2022), which explores how performance culture influenced the construction of race in early modern Europe. Her book has received multiple prestigious awards, including the 2023 Bevington Award and the 2023 Rose Mary Crawshay Prize.

Meet the Ambassor

Type: 
Tuesday, March 18, 2025 - 12:00 to 13:00
Event Location: 
Global Hub
Dr. Sajić served as the ambassador of Bosnia and Herzegovina to France, UNESCO, Algeria, Monaco, Andorra and Romania. She was also a foreign policy advisor in the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina. She will be at Pitt to discuss her diplomatic experiences with students and the wider community. Light lunch will be provided.

Serving Polish Pittsburgh: The Sztark Family, 1930s-1940s

Type: 
Wednesday, March 26, 2025 - 17:00 to 18:00
Event Location: 
4130 Posvar Hall
In the interwar period, a Polish Consulate served Pittsburgh's sizeable population with Polish roots. The last consul before the Second World War was Heliodor Sztark, who came to Pittsburgh in 1938, together with his wife, Aniela and their younger daughter Nina. All three became active public figures within the Polish community, the city of Pittsburgh, and Pitt. After the war, Heliodor resigned from his post because he did not agree with the new Polish government. The family settled in Texas, where they started a new life under very difficult conditions.

Experiments in Clean Living? Group Houses as Radical Activism in 1970s West Germany

Type: 
Friday, March 28, 2025 - 16:15 to 17:30
Event Location: 
Wesley Posvar, Room 5601
Please note a change of time: Keynote Speaker for the Undergraduate Research Symposium: The Discussion will explore one of the means by which primarily young people in West Germany attempted to “revolutionize” everyday life and beyond, through new, explicitly political forms of cohabitation designated Wohngemeinschaften (WGs).

From Secularism to Public Order: Identity Politics and the Idea of Muslim Solidarity in France

Type: 
Wednesday, April 2, 2025 - 16:30 to 17:45
Event Location: 
4303 Posvar Hall
As part of the Unmasking Prejudice: Confronting Antisemitism, Islamophobia, and Racism Across Europe Spring Lecture Series Lecture Summary: TBD About the Speaker: Kirsten Wesselhoeft is associate professor of religion at Vassar College. She is a scholar of contemporary Islam, drawing on ethnography and political analysis to study Muslim thought and culture in contexts shaped by colonial encounters and secular liberalism.

Feeling (Un)safe: Jews, Muslims and the German State Since October 7

Type: 
Thursday, March 13, 2025 - 16:00 to 17:15
Event Location: 
Wesley W. Posvar, Room 4130
As part of the Unmasking Prejudice: Confronting Antisemitism, Islamophobia, and Racism Across Europe Spring Lecture Series: For about 25 years, a minority security dilemma has been crystalizing in Germany. With increasing Muslim immigration, the state has gradually instituted measures to acculturate this small but growing minority to the official memory culture centered on the Holocaust.

Keynote Address: Russian Orthodox Sacred Objects in Central Asia: A Legacy of Imperialism?

Type: 
Friday, March 28, 2025 - 14:45 to 16:00
Event Location: 
5601 Posvar Hall
Orthodox Christianity first came to Central Asia along with the Russian conquest in the 19th century. Along with Slavic settlers came Orthodox sacred objects, such as miraculous icons and the relics of saints. Churches, monasteries, and parish communities were build around these objects. During the colonisation process, control over Orthodox sacred objects was contested by the imperial regime, settler communities, and the native population.

ValEUs: European Values in the Eu's Developmental, Energy and Climate Policies

Type: 
Monday, January 6, 2025 - 10:15 to 11:45
Event Location: 
Zoom
Join our upcoming ValEUs Lecture on “European Values in the EU´s Developmental, Energy and Climate Policies” with Randall Halle. Halle directs the European Studies Center and is a Klaus W. Jonas Professor of German Film and Cultural Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. The event is organised by the Institute for European Studies of the European University Viadrina (IFES) as a collaboration between its Talk Series “Human & Planet” and the “ValEUs Lecture Series”. Funded by the European Union.

IFES Lunch Lecture: Why did Trump win (at such scale)?

Type: 
Thursday, November 21, 2024 - 13:00 to 14:00
Lunch Lecture: Why did Trump win (at such scale)? The Viadrina Institute for European Studies (IFES) invites you to the following event as part of the Lunch Lectures series: Sascha Münnich (EUV) in conversation with Randall Halle (Pittsburgh). The result of the presidential election in the USA was in some ways to be expected and yet it came as a shock to many people: How was Donald Trump able to prevail against Kamala Harris by such a clear margin?

Front-Line Issues: War, Climate, and Refugees

Type: 
Thursday, March 27, 2025 - 13:00 to 14:30
Event Location: 
4130 Posvar Hall
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? “Eurasian Environments” seeks to provide some reflections to mark the UN’s 2024 Climate Change Conference in Baku, Azerbaijan.