Lecture

Search and Rescue (SAR) missions in the Central Mediterranean continue to be the subject of extensive debate in Italy and in Europe, even as the number of sea arrivals have significantly declined. A multitude of actors engaged in rescuing migrants and refugees at sea has created an increasingly complex situation in the waters south of Sicily all the way to the Libyan coast. Based on previous and on-going research by Dr. Marolda and her Ford Institute working group, this lecture addresses the following questions: 1) What is the migration challenge Europe is facing in the Central Mediterranean?

The hit HBO miniseries Chernobyl thrust the nuclear disaster back into public consciousness. What are its legacies in and around the "Exclusion zone"? This live interview with award-winning historian Kate Brown will discuss her book Chernobyl: A Manual for Survival and the role of international agencies in actively suppressing the magnitude of this human and ecological catastrophe. This event is part of the REEES Fall Speaker Series, Nuclear Fallout: Science and Society in Eurasia.

As part of our Year of Memory and Politics Series, the ESC is pleased to welcome Peter J. Verovšek as a Jean MonnetCenter of Excellence speaker. Thirty years after 1989 - and15 years since the first postcommunist states joined the EU - European memory is still divided by the faultlines of the Cold War. Whereas the West’s historical imaginary is based on the traumas of Nazism associated with 1945, Central Europe’s is dominated by the legacy of communism signified by 1989. These differing understandings of the past have resulted in divergent conceptions of democracy.

Across the Western world, the air is filled with talk of immigration. The changes brought by immigration have triggered a renewed fervor for isolationism able to shutter political traditions and party systems. So often absent from these conversations on migration are however the actual stories and experiences of the migrants themselves. In fact, migration does not simply transport people. It also changes them deeply.

In my presentation, I link contemporary expressions of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic narrative to Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, and I claim that the zombie-ridden landscapes of The Walking Dead lead back to Boccaccio’s masterpiece, to its structure, and to its main themes. Dennis R. Perry defines the apocalypse as the breaking up of the predictable universe: the world as we know it starts collapsing, and so does the scale of values everyone relies on. Apocalypse is therefore but a massive change of costumes, of parameters, of language.