Do you want to share your ideas with other undergraduate students? Or get feedback on a paper? Maybe you are considering graduate school in one of the modern languages and want to get some conference experience and practice your presentation skills? Then consider sending an abstract to the exciting conference we are planning at the University of Pittsburgh. Abstracts should be sent to Professor Mecchia by Dec. 9, 2016.

Closing Panel of the 2016 Housing Summit

As part of the 2016 Housing Summit, neighborhood tours will leave from the University of Pittsburgh campus. Space is limited to please register at the website. Lunch provided. Reserve tickets for $5. A debrief and discussion from the tour will take place from 3:00pm-5:00pm in 4130 Posvar Hall.

A symposium featuring Lynn Zelevanskey, Carnegie Museum of Art, Andreas Valentin, Universidade Do Estado Do Rio Janeiro, Carla Stellwelg, School of Visual Artys, Joesph M. Ortiz, M.D., Sarah Montross, DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Aleca Le Blanc, University of California-Riverside. Moderated by Professors Terry Smith and Jennifer Josten of the University of Pittsburgh and Katherine Brodbeck of the Carnegie Museum of Art.

Rian Thum’s research and teaching are generally concerned with the overlap of China and the Muslim World. He argues that the Uyghurs - and their place in China today - can only be understood in the light of longstanding traditions of local pilgrimage and manuscript culture.

Morgan Liu is a cultural anthropologist studying Islamic knowledge and practice in post-Soviet Central Asia, focusing on Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. He is interested in ethnographic approaches to the state, postsocialism, space, and agency. Liu takes a comparative look at notions of just society across the Middle East, Russia, and Asia.

Georgetown University professor, Dr. James Millward, discusses the ancestors of the guitar, viola, mandolin and other members of the stringed instrument family that hail from Central Eurasia and traveled both east and west along what we call the “Silk Road.” Silk Road interactions involved more than the conveyance of a thing from point A to point B; these conversations laid the shared substratum of old world civilization and continue to resonate today.

In this paper I offer an analysis of the emergence, tactics and implications of urban transgression in Santiago, Chile, by emerging urban and housing movements. I explore the multi-scalar action repertoires that have unfolded and that invite a close consideration of the changing parameters of class struggle in the country.

This talk is part of an effort to retrofit the theory of the novel in two ways: first quite literally by framing a theory of the novel alongside novels that are contemporary with the theory. The second impulse is to review the kinds of novels included in our theories: might including anti-literary works from around the world revise what we know of the novel and its robust global circulation? In short, the talk is an attempt to develop a twenty-first century theory of the novel that arrives from twenty-first century novels.

Q: What do the Islamic State, the IRA, the governments of South Sudan, Myanmar, Afghanistan and Nigeria have in common?
A: They all use child soldiers.
 What is a child soldier? Why does the definition matter? What happens when child soldiers grow up? At what point do child soldiers shift from victim to perpetrator? What is being done to prevent the recruitment and use of child soldiers?