The Guardian first revealed the NSA's comprehensive surveillance program in early June of last year, working from information from the now-infamous Edward Snowden. Two weeks later, a series of articles exposed NSA and British spying on European and South American officials at a G20 meeting and by the end of the month, Der Spiegel had published details of America’s electronic surveillance and bugging of European Union offices and the embassies of France, Italy, Greece, and others.

The eighth edition of the Carnegie Mellon International Film Festival is dedicated to the legacy of world-renowned filmmaker, psychologist, and Carnegie Mellon professor, Paul Goodman, and to his professional focus on the human challenges and achievements of diverse groups of workers worldwide.

Katja Wezel's research interests focus on 19th and 20th century Baltic history and transnational, comparative approaches to the study of memory politics and cultural conflicts in Eastern Europe. Professor Wezel studied History and English at the University of Heidelberg (Germany), the University of Wales, Aberystwyth (UK) and the European University in St. Petersburg (Russia). From 2005 to 2008 she was a member of an interdisciplinary graduate research group on Overcoming Dictatorships in Europe at Heidelberg University, Germany.

The conference promotes evidence-based policy-making on environment and energy, drawing on policy experiences and research knowledge from the US and the EU. Specifically, the focus will be on the challenge of securing energy for economic growth while ensuring the protection of human health and the environment. The broader conference agenda examines the choice of the energy portfolio of various countries, and how trade-offs should be struck on the benefits and risks of various energy resources.

Globalization, transnationalism, planetarity designate as much cultural forces as economic and political. However these dynamics do not affect the planet equally; rather regions and areas have distinct profiles. This conference takes as its task the exploration of cultural unification fostered by the EU. The European Union has set as its primary goal the political, economic, and cultural union of Europe. This combination of goals makes the EU unique among the world’s transnational organizations.

Annual Undergraduate Model EU.

This event will take place on Friday, February 14th from 1:00 to 4:00 PM in the William Pitt Union Assembly Room, Ball Room, and Kurtzman Rooms. It is designed to provide students with an opportunity to learn about the variety of language courses, programs, scholarships, and student organizations available to them at Pitt. Last year's language fair was a major success with over 400 students in attendance. We hope to build on this success in 2014.

The European Union Center of Excellence & European Studies Center is pleased to present the first Spring 2014 Conversations on Europe Videoconference.
Panelists will discuss the 2004 enlargement, which witnessed the growth of the EU from 15 member states to 25, and assess the impact of that expansion on the entering member states and the institutions of the European Union.

Professor Cabot reflects on how asylum, humanitarian aid and radical migrant politics reconfigure the relationship between rights and political recognition, amid rapidly changing conceptions of citizenship in Greece. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2005 and 2011, Dr. Cabot shows how humanitarian aid encounters provide venues for dialogical forms of negotiation, miscommunication, recognition, and misrecognition between aid workers and clients, as well as for potentially transformative social ties.

Ambassador Pavilionis visits the Center to reflect on the Lithuanian Presidency of the Council of the European Union—the first time the Presidency has been held by a state that emerged from the USSR--and to share his ideas about the future of the EU and Lithuania’s relationship with its fellow EU member states. Refreshments will be served.