Join us for a screening (with English subtitles)and discussion led by film expert Stephen Brockmann (Carnegie Mellon University). Goodbye, Lenin! (2003) was directed by Wolfgang Becker. In this comedy/drama, a dedicated young man, Alex (Daniel Brühl), recreates East Germany in their 77m2 apartment to protect his socialist mother Christiane (Katrin Sass) from the shock of the fall of the Berlin Wall! Can he pull off this elaborate scheme knowing that the slightest shock could prove fatal? Alex strives to keep the fall of the GDR a secret for as long as possible.

From 1949 to 1989, the Soviet Union conducted 456 nuclear tests at Semipalatinsk nuclear test site in Kazakhstan. Despite decades of nuclear fallout, Kazakh rural communities inhabit the area around the site. How has living around a nuclear test site shaped those communities and their post-Soviet experience? This live interview with Magdalena Stawkowski will discuss her ethnographic work and the ways the Semipalatinsk test site still shapes economy, environment and subjectivities.

Please join the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures for a poetic exploration of the ill-fated friendship between Confederate General Lewis Armistead and Union General Winfield Hancock. In this unique noh drama, Playwright Elizabeth Dowd and composer David Crandall re-imagine the conflict at the center of American history as a Japanese noh drama. Noh, originating in Japan more than 650 years ago, is one of the oldest continuously evolving stage arts in the world.

On the eve of the Pittsburgh Global Town Hall hosted by the University of Pittsburgh, Global Voice, World Workable Trust, and the Heinrich Böll Foundation, the University Center for International Studies will host a workshop and town hall discussion specifically for area middle and high school students. The goal is to focus on the concerns of the next generation of globally-minded citizens, while exploring avenues for climate activism. How do you turn local activism into global reform? What role do the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) play in these discussions?

Dr. William Tsutsui, President of Hendrix College in Arkansas, will come to campus during International Week. He will be giving a public talk on “Godzilla on My Mind” and we will follow with a screening of the original Gojira. Dr. Tsutsui is THE expert on the Godzilla movies. He is a Japanese historian (a Japanese-American ethnically).

Join the Asian Studies Center as we celebrate the start of a new school year. Meet our staff, affiliated faculty, and new students, and learn about our exciting initiatives and opportunities for the 2019-20 school year!

K-16 educators are invited to join the Asian Studies Center for this free presentation and curriculum workshop on Thanhha Lai's "Inside Out & Back Again." Lai's award-winning book of poems chronicles the Vietnam War through the eyes of 10 year-old Ha, whose family flees Saigon for the promise of a better life in the United States. The hardships endured by Ha and her family during the war fade into the past as they struggle to adjust to a new way of life in America—one that is often at odds with the promise of their new country. Act 48 hours available.

The Summer Institute for Pennsylvania Teachers (SIPT) helps new CHS teachers in social studies and world languages to infuse international content into their courses. Workshops include presentations by University faculty, experienced CHS teachers, and others.

Thirty years after the democratic transition in 1989, hybrid political cultures and peculiar, neither Western nor fully Eastern power practices seem to have taken root in the European semi-peripheries. Regional experts speak of de-globalization as the outcome of the emergence of populist and nationalist movements in both Western and Eastern Europe, and warn against the peculiar role the latter area might play—as it already did in the interwar period and during the Cold War—as a laboratory of authoritarian politics.

The Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies (REEES) and the Study Abroad Office (SAO) in collaboration with the Pittsburgh-based global service-learning organization Amizade propose to bring together community organizers and nonprofit leaders with University of Pittsburgh faculty and students for a public forum themed “Water Is Life." The thematic concentration on water reflects the contemporary significance of the topic, which invites inquiry from a regional and global perspective. Water is at the core of human and environmental existence.