The EUCE/ESC will hold a ceremony during graduation weekend to recognize its undergraduate and graduate recipients of the European Union or West European Studies Certificate Program. A reception will follow for family and friends of the Center in the Pittsburgh Athletic Association.

This presentation is offered as an introduction to Courtney Long’s dissertation, “Re-Categorizing Great Britain's Medieval Architecture: A Lesson in Nineteenth-Century Visual Taxonomy.” Courtney’s project seeks to investigate the ways in which architectural historians and natural scientists conveyed the process of change over time in textual and graphic observations published between 1800 and 1850.

Abstract

We use the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to show that personal relationships which
individuals maintain for non-economic reasons can be an important determinant of regional
economic growth. We show that West German households who have social ties to East
Germany in 1989 experience a persistent rise in their personal incomes after the fall of
the Berlin Wall. Moreover, the presence of these households significantly affects economic
performance at the regional level: it increases the returns to entrepreneurial activity, the

Dissertation Defense, open to the public

*See the file below for abstracts*
**RSVP requested**

PROGRAM

First Session | 1:30 – 3:00
Welcome and Introduction
Drew Armstrong + Mrinalini Rajagopalan
Architectural Studies Program
University of Pittsburgh

Diego Rivera and the ‘Building’ of Mexican Identity
Patricia Morgado
North Carolina State University

Generalizing Away Uniqueness: James Stirling's Interrogation of the Oxbridge Courtyard
Amanda Reeser Lawrence
Northeastern University

Coffee Break

Second Session | 3:30-5:00

*Part of the Jean Monnet Lecture Series on European Union Law*

Dr. Davor Babic was a visiting professor at the School of Law for the spring term 2012 (December 28, 2011-January 28, 2012). He taught European Private International Law (2 credits).

Laura Mulvey is Professor of Film and Media Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London. She has written extensively on film and film theory. Her books include Fetishism and Curiosity (1996), Death Twenty-four Times a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (2006), Experimental British Television (edited with Jamie Sexton, 2007), and Visual and Other Pleasures (2nd edition, 2009). She has co-directed films, including Riddles of the Sphinx (1978) and Frida Kahlo and Tina Malatti (1980), as well as the documentary Disgraced Monuments (1996).

*Reception to follow*

Few architectural tracts remain from the medieval period in the west. Two tracts on architecture that this paper utilizes from this period—one by Gervase in 1185, and one by Edmer in 1116—both discuss subjects that collectively include the fire, building, and arrangement of different architectural campaigns at Canterbury Cathedral. Here, these texts are used to trace the written knowledge of the succession of churches—those of Lanfranc, Anselm, William of Sens, and William the Englishman, the last of whose termination of the cathedral remains intact today.

This paper analyzes the 1965 Film Montages of the West German artist Peter Roehr. Roehr’s untitled Film Montages of American and European commercial advertisements utilized an explicitly mechanical aesthetic to remove removed any personal identification, political impetus, or artistic qualities from the montages. Such an extreme disavowal of subjectivity through the cold objective logic of mechanical precision indicated that these montages could, and should, be understood in two other ways: as Roehr’s purposeful self-silencing, and as critiques of commodity fetishization.

"Whoever controls the media, controls the mind." - Jim Morrison