The Seventh Annual Graduate Student Conference on the European Union will welcome graduate students from around the world to present the research on "Crisis, Cooperation, and Change in the EU."

The French Immersion Institute, Directed by Bonnie Adair-Hauk, Ph.D., organized this workshop for middle and high school teachers to broaden their cultural understanding of current events and international studies regarding French-speaking countries, to strengthen their French listening and speaking skills, and to share strategies for teaching of French language and culture.

Members of the newly-constituted External Advisory Board for the EUCE/ESC met for breakfast and a panel discussion about banking and the sovereign debt crisis in Europe.

As the European Union confronts one of the deepest crises of its history, the frustration of a number of member states at the apparent hegemony of the “Franco-German couple" has become vocal and public. With elections approaching in 2012 in France and 2013 in Germany, it is worth considering what a transfer of power from the current governing parties to the major opposition parties, the Parti Socialiste (PS) and the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD), might harbor for the future of the European integration project.

Mr. Lionnet’s thesis explores sovereignty, hegemony, and human rights in EU-ACP (African, Caribbean, and Pacific Group of States) relations. His project seeks to get beyond the ideology of Eurafrica to better understand development policies in the 1950s and 1960s. For his research, Mr. Lionnet has come to the University of Pittsburgh to make use of the European Union Delegation Collection housed at the University Library. The Collection is a virtually complete assemblage of official European Community documents published since the early 1950s. In his work on development, Mr.

Randall Halle is the Klaus W. Jonas Professor of German Film and Cultural Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. He studied at the University of Wisconsin—Madison, the University of Freiburg, the University of Utrecht, and the Free University in Berlin. He received his PhD from Madison in 1995. Halle works primarily on film, visual culture, and social philosophy. He is currently pursuing two different projects tentatively entitled Interzone Europe: Social Philosophy and the Transnational Imagination as well as Visual Alterity: Seeing Difference. Halle has received numerous grants.

Please join us for a talk: Lyle Scruggs is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Connecticut. He is a candidate for the senior position in comparative politics in the Department of Political Science.

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 21
Pizza & Politics: What’s Next For Italy? A Conversation with Alberta Sbragia
Dr. Alberta Sbragia, Vice Provost, University of Pittsburgh
12:00 PM, 4217 WWPH

Over 75 papers will be delivered on topics from all fields (literature, history, political science, sociology, anthropology, law, religion, art, music, cultural studies, film studies, gender studies, etc.) that treat the question of the idea of France or Frenchness in any time period from the middle ages to the twenty-first century.

For a full version of the conference schedule, please visit the Web site.

Maciej Pisarski is the Deputy Chief of Mission at the Embassy of the Republic of Poland in Washington, DC, a post he has held since August 2010. Previously he worked as the acting director of the Department of Strategy and Policy Planning in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Warsaw, Poland. Mr.