The Eastern Mediterranean has long suffered from a complex security setting, which is made up of both traditional security challenges as well as asymmetric threats. More recently, we started to witness the additional effect of a couple of new challenges, which have set in motion a rebalancing of powers in the region and may threaten its stability even further: the Arab Spring and the recent offshore energy findings.

With its post-Cold War role in Europe behind it, an end to its role in Afghanistan planned for 2014, and new challenges in the Arab world, NATO is at yet another turning point in searching for a new role. This conversation will focus on what that role might be and how it relates to the security perspectives (broadly conceived) of the United States and its European allies.

As a part of the Jean Monnet Lecture on European Union Law, Professor Wainwright’s lecture will center on the economic and political problems that currently face the European Union, and will examine a possible scenario for recovery. On the economic front, EU countries are faced with high indebtedness, high unemployment, and low growth. Politically, Eurozone countries are committed to closer economic union, while the present United Kingdom government is seeding a renegotiation of its treaty ties with the EU—with the possibility that it might exit if the renegotiation is unsuccessful.

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.

Kurt has written widely about democratization and methodological themes. He also has had a recent article in PS about the tenure process.

*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?

From the heads and tails of individual notes to the foreheads and feet of song stanzas, medieval musical writings are replete with body parts. Sometimes the terms are used by convention, or in the service of simple mnemonics. But in other cases, the reasons for acts of musical anthropomorphization are less clear. Tracing the rhetoric of musical animation from the treatises into the realm of musica practica can give us fresh insight into some of the best-known songs of the later middle ages.

Shakespeare's plays Merchant of Venice and Twelfth Night both contain men named Antonio who speak of their love for another male character. Both Antonios remain single at the ends of their plays while both of the men they love marry women. Recent critics often see homosexual desire in the Antonios, and productions today often emphasize their exclusion from the comic community.