Regulating Unregulated Migration:
European and U.S. Reactions to Immigration

Friday, May 4th
9:00-9:30 Continental Breakfast
9:30-10:00 Welcome and Introductions
Suzanna Crage, Department of Sociology, University of Pittsburgh
Ronald Linden, Director, European Union Center of Excellence/European Studies Center

10-11:30 The EU & U.S.: Demographic trends
Martin Schain, Department of Politics, New York University

11:30-1:30 Lunch (for registered participants)
Presentation: Public opinion about migration in the US and selected European countries

Historian Ann Blair of Harvard University will visit the University of Pittsburgh on October 1-2, 2012. The topic of her talk will be "Latin Authorship During the Rise of the Vernaculars."

More details to follow.

"Speaking in Tongues" Lecture Series

More details about the lecture will follow.

The notion of cultural purity is demonstrably a myth, as any careful historical analysis of cultural expression anywhere in the world can reveal multiple origins, blends, syncretisms, hybridities that are the inevitable result of human contact.

Dr. Erik Gray is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is the author of The Poetry of Indifference: From the Romantics to the Rubáiyát (Massachusetts 2005) and Milton and the Victorians (Cornell 2009), as well as the editor of Tennyson's In Memoriam (Norton 2004) and Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book 2 (Hackett 2006). He has also published articles on a range of poets including Virgil, Sidney, Donne, Milton, Pope, Gray, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, the Brownings, and Christina Rossetti.

Dr. Talley’s talk is part of a book-length project on the evacuation and children’s literature that has won grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Children’s Literature Association, and the ALAN Foundation.

Dr. Lee Talley is Associate Professor of English at Rowan University where she teaches Victorian and children’s literature. She edited the Broadview edition of Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and has most recently published in Children’s Literature and Keywords for Children’s Literature (edited by Philip Nel and Lissa Paul).

Stephen Brockmann is president of the German Studies Association and Professor of German at Carnegie Mellon University. He is the author, most recently, of A Critical History of German Film (2010), as well as of Nuremberg: The Imaginary Capital (2006), German Literary Culture at the Zero Hour (2004), and Literature and German Reunification (1999). In 2007 he won the DAAD Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in German and European Studies/Humanities. From 2002-2007 he was the managing editor of the Brecht Yearbook.

Did World History arise suddenly in the late-20th-century U.S., either because of individuals such as William McNeill or movements such as the World History Association? Or did world history arise more gradually throughout the 20th century through rethinking of universal and Eurocentric histories?

Katja Naumann takes the latter approach, emphasizing the gradual establishment of world-historical criteria from 1920 to 1970, for instance through “general education.”

In Person:
3703 WW Posvar Hall
Reception to follow

Live Online:
Link from the
World History Center at:

Professor Ruth B. Bottigheimer, Stony Brook University, teaches courses on European fairy tales and British children's literature. Her work crosses disciplinary boundaries, contextualizing genres in their socio-historical cultures of origin, assessing them in terms of publishing history parameters, and utilizing linguistics in discourse analysis. Her languages of research are English, German, and French, occasionally Italian and Spanish.

Putin’s Kiss focuses on the young, charismatic Masha, a 19-year-old spokeswoman for Nashi, a government-friendly Russian youth organization that promotes strong nationalistic ideals. Since she was fifteen, Masha was highly-involved in Nashi and the organization’s aim to rid Russia of its “enemies.” Through her involvement and loyalty, Masha received tons of benefits from Nashi and was frequently noted as “the girl who kissed Putin.” However, as Masha grows and begins to befriend critical journalists, her beliefs are challenged.