The squatting of physical spaces is an important form of protest in European social movements. From
the 1970s onwards, activists began to occupy abandoned buildings transforming them in spaces
where to experiment alternative lifestyles and elaborate radical politics. In Italy, squatted spaces,
usually named “Self-Managed Occupied Social Centers” and first established in the 1970s, became
the backbones of national and transnational social movements that emerged late in the 1990s. Far
from being dismissed, this form of collective action continues to be used in order to create spaces of

Next Wednesday (April 11), the Society and Honors College will proudly play host to a prominent intellectual historian of our generation: J.G.A. Pocock, author of Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law, Machiavellian Moment, and a multi-volume work on Edward Gibbon. An emeritus professor at Johns Hopkins, Pocock is noted for developing a novel approach to the study of history often referred to as the Cambridge School of intellectual history. His work encompasses a broad range of intellectual endeavors, including not only history, but also political science, philosophy, and literature.

Colloquium on Germany, Sabine Von Dirke (German), "White Collar Blues: Immaterial Labor and its Discontent,” with responses from Stephen Brockmann (Carnegie Mellon) and Lisa Brush (Sociology).

Colloquium, Ruth Bottigheimer (Stony Brook), “What’s Eastern and What’s Western in the Arabian Nights?” with responses from Susan Andrade (English) and Giuseppina Mecchia (French and Italian).

Colloquium, “To the Unknown Cinemagoers: German Cinema as an Occupation Cinema,” with responses from Mark Lynn Anderson (English), Lina Insana (French and Italian) and Barbara McCloskey (History of Art and Architecture).

Sarah Beckwith works on late medieval religious writing, medieval and early modern drama, and ordinary language philosophy. In this seminar, we will discuss chapter three of her most recent book, Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness (Cornell, 2011). Professor Beckwith is also the author of Signifying God: Social Relation and Symbolic Act in York's Play of Corpus Christi (Chicago, 2001), and Christ's Body: Identity, Religion and Society in Medieval English Writing (Routledge, 1993).

From medieval pogroms to modern racial science, Jewish history in Europe has come to stand as a test case for thinking about problems of historical continuity and change, embodied most clearly in the tension between narratives emphasizing a timeless antisemitism and arguments for the distinctive mentalities associated with discrete historical periods.

Prevailing accounts of the development of baroque sculpture take for granted the centrality of Gianlorenzo Bernini without probing the historical processes that led to the dominance of his art. The book Dr. Estelle Lingo is preparing takes the self-consciously ambitious sculptures of Bernini’s older contemporary, the Tuscan Francesco Mochi (1580-1654), as the entry point for an inquiry into the historical and cultural forces driving the transformation of sculpture in the first half of the seventeenth century.

The great naval Battle of Lepanto of 1571 in which the Turkish armada was devastated by the combined fleet of the Papacy, Venice, and Spain was an event of enormous symbolic as well as military importance to the Catholic Church, because it briefly gained for the Christian Alliance control of most of the Mediterranean, temporarily eradicating the threat of the “infidel”. Several Italian and Spanish artists depicted the battle but none so splendidly as Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574) in the Sala Regia of the Vatican Palace.

James Knapp (English) and Peggy Knapp (Carnegie Mellon) will present:

"Aesthetics of Time: the Case of the Middle English Sir Orfeo,"
with responses from Ryan McDermott (English) and Daniel Selcer (Duquesne).