This three-day symposium "Crossing Borders: Ways of Constructing Identities" will take place at the University of Augsburg as a joint graduate student conference between the University of Augsburg and the University of Pittsburgh. Fifteen total graduate students will present: five graduate students from the University of Pittsburgh and ten from the University of Augsburg will be giving individual presentations on topics related to their dissertation research. The Faculty of Philology and History at the University of Augsburg will provide conference rooms.

On Monday, François Hollande became the first French Socialist candidate elected president since 1981. He campaigned for higher government spending and taxation. Does this signal a new economic approach to Europe’s financial problems? What might happen to austerity? And what is the Socialist economic approach? Dr. Alberta Sbragia, University of Pittsburgh Vice Provost and former Director of the European Studies Center and the European Union Center of Excellence addresses these questions, and talks about the future of the EU.

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.

Screening of THE QUEEN will be introduced by Director, Stephen Frears. Q&A session with Colin MacCabe.

Known for making provocative, stylized, and tightly budgeted films about people living on society's social and/or sexual fringes,
British director Stephen Frears is renowned as one of his country's most vibrant and recognizable filmmakers. Regarding his

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).

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 Wesche researches in the 17th through the 21st Centuries and is particularly interested in poetics and rhetoric, drama, and myth. The author of two monographs (Der Vers im Drama. Studien zur Theorie und Verwendung im deutschsprachigen Sprechtheater des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts. [2009] and Literarische Diversität. Abweichungen, Lizenzen und Spielräume in der deutschen Poesie und Poetik der Barockzeit. [2004]) and editor of another four volumes and numerous articles, Professor Wesche will present his recent research on literature, biology, and the transfer of knowledge.

Is there such a thing as Jewish horror? Looking at examples of what has frightened Jews over three millennia of literary history, we'll venture some conclusions.