Nancy Ries is Professor of Anthropology and Peace and Conflict Studies at Colgate University, Director of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program there, and a member of Colgate's Russian and Eurasian Studies faculty. She has done anthropological fieldwork in Russia since the 1980s, and is the author of Russian Talk: Culture and Conversation during Perestroika. Ries has published essays on Russian mafia, gender relations, and on the everyday violence of war and social conflict.

Responses will be offered by Nancy Condee (Global Studies), Alberta Sbragia (Political Science), and Gregor Thum (History)

Russell Berman is Director of German Studies at Stanford, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Editor of TELOS,
and recent President of the Modern Language Association. He is an expert on German literature and culture and
on cultural relations between Europe and the United States, and is a pioneer in German Cultural Studies.
In more than 80 articles and five books, he has written widely on modern German and European literature and politics,
as well as on issues in contemporary cultural theory.

Professor Spivak’s talk (and Q&A) will engage with some of the key issues confronting the western historical and intellectual tradition, especially as they relate to post-colonialism and gender.

*A conversation with poet Martin Espada and historian Marcus Rediker

How movements from below create and use poetry and history.

Science, Culture, and the Human after World War II

Our work on this topic seeks to bridge the divide between medieval and early modern studies by taking a long view of three questions surrounding particular uses of vernacular languages and broader processes of vernacularization in this period: How did changes in technologies of communication, such as the rise of letterpress printing, intersect with the uses of vernacular languages? How were the structures of "vernacular theology" transfigured during the period leading up to and following the Protestant Reformation and Catholic Counter-Reformation?

With responses by Barbara McCloskey (History of Art and Architecture) and David Pettersen (French).

Faculty and graduate students in Pitt Humanities departments can access readings for colloquia by logging in to , clicking on the tab “My Resources,” clicking on “Humanities Center,” and then clicking on “Colloquium Series” where there is a link to the pdf files. Anyone else wishing to access the readings may request the reading at humctr@pitt.edu.

Our work on this topic seeks to bridge the divide between medieval and early modern studies by taking a long view of three questions surrounding particular uses of vernacular languages and broader processes of vernacularization in this period: How did changes in technologies of communication, such as the rise of letterpress printing, intersect with the uses of vernacular languages? How were the structures of "vernacular theology" transfigured during the period leading up to and following the Protestant Reformation and Catholic Counter-Reformation?

Nicholas Vazsonyi is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of South Carolina and the editor of the Cambridge Wagner Encyclopedia (forthcoming 2013), an international effort involving some 80 scholars from 11 academic disciplines and residing in 9 countries. He teaches and researches on German literature and culture, including music and film, covering the 18th through the 21st centuries. He has published monographs on Wagner and on Goethe, and edited volumes on Wagner’s Meistersinger and on German national identity from 1750 to 1871.