Professor von Dirke is developing a two-semester course sequence entitled "German for Social Scientists." The first part is largely historical and the second will be more theoretical with a political science/sociology orientation. The course will be pitched to facilitate the transition from third to fourth year language level. It is also designed to allow students to develop the semantic repertoire (specific social science terminology, for example) necessary to read subject-specific academic texts.

Trust in political institutions is one of the key elements which make representative democracies work. Trust creates a connection between citizens and representative political institutions. Democratic governments which enjoy a large degree of trust also tend to have higher degrees of legitimacy and policy efficacy. In Europe's multi-level governance structure, it is imperative to learn more about the determinants of trust in EU institutions. With the increasing salience of EU issues, are domestic proxies still a key determinant of evaluating EU institutions?

This concert represents the first installment of IonSound's Leaving a Legacy project. The group performed commissions by three Pittsburgh composers, Christian Kriegeskotte, Philip Thompson, and Nizan Leibovich. Each work was inspired by, or created in collaboration with a visual art form: from the 16th century woodcuts by Hans Holbein, to a 19th century painting by Henri Matisse, to an interpretation of of the origins of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina.

SÚM was a loosely affiliated artist's collective that was founded following a 1965 self-organized exhibition of works by Jón Gunnar Árnason, Hreinn Friofinnsson, Sigurjón Jóhannsson, and Haukur Sturluson. In this talk, Pollentier discusses the emergence of SÚM, provides a brief overview of the group's major projects, and examines how the collective practices of its members provided a critique of the political and cultural environment of the 1960s and 70s.

This presentation examined a transformative moment for the traditional procession known as the Inchinata between the mid thirteenth and fourteenth century, a period characterized by the advent of the mendicant friars with their new models of personal devotion and do-it-yourself religion, the emergence of confraternities, the growing prominence of trade guilds, the solidifying of municipal government, the rise of the middle classes, and a new emphasis on penitential pilgrimage, especially to the city of Rome.

Late medieval audiences read the Bible in different languages, including the language of pictorial narrative.... This paper focuses on two intimately related manuscripts - a late twelfth-century Spanish narrative picture Bible produced for Sancho el Fuerte of Navarre (Amiens, B.m. ms. 108) and a fourteenth-century, stylistically-updated version of the same visual narrative (New York Public Library, Spencer 22).

Harvard Economist Dani Rodrik described how "Unconditional convergence is alive and well, but that we need to look for it within manufacturing industries rather than the economy as a whole. Industries that start at lower levels of labor productivity grow faster, regardless of the quality of policies or institutions in their home economies." For more, see Professor Rodrik's blog: http://rodrik.typepad.com/dani_rodriks_weblog/2011/09/unconditional-conv....