Over the past decade China’s rapid economic growth and diversification has powered that country’s economy past a stage of primary industrialization into a new era of creativity and manufacturing. The country’s entrepreneurs are playing a leading role in developing businesses, seeking new markets, and creating products. Please join us in a discussion of China’s new entrepreneurs and how their business decisions are changing the global economy.

Refreshments will be served.

In honor of the 25th anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall, the German Department and the EUCE have organized a film and lecture series.

The first film, Der Geteilte Himmel/Divided Heaven (1963), will be held on September 11th at 5:30pm in room 324 of the Cathedral of Learning. The film will be introduced by Prof. Halle

Pizza will be provided at the film events.

The Divided Heaven
(Der geteilte Himmel)
Director: Konrad Wolf, b/w, 113 min., 1963/64

Actress and scholar Ruth Levin will join in a round table discussion titled "Europe en Miniature at the Margins." Focusing on a "Europe en miniature" at the "eastern-most border" of "Europe"--a region of "books and people," as the poet Paul Celan called it--is a region that is home to Austro-German, Jewish, Romanian, and Ukrainian cultures and has produced many poets who were fluent in several languages.

Between 1917 and his death in 1940 Leon Trotsky advanced three different analyses of the problem of Soviet bureaucracy—each providing a different account of how bureaucracy was promoting capitalist restoration in the USSR. The presentation will review Trotsky’s contributions on this subject and conclude with some observations regarding the weaknesses and strengths of Trotsky’s final theory.

For centuries the area of today’s Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania has been shaped by different national and ethnic groups. This symposium will examine the (re)imagining and (re)interpreting of spaces, symbols and sites in the of Baltic region from the 19th to the 21st century. Presenters will address historical difficulties with “mapping” this multi-ethnic region as well as current issues connected with the region’s recent history after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Thursday, October 9, 2014 (Alcoa Room, Pitt School of Law, 2nd floor)

For more information, please contact: Dr. Adriana Helbig, Associate Professor of Music, anh59@pitt.edu, 412-624-4193.

Featuring presentations by students who participated in Pitt’s Romani (Gypsy) summer study abroad program in Central and Eastern Europe, May 24-June 15, 2014.

This presentation looks at the short history of corporate sponsorship in post-Soviet Russian cinema, and especially the way that practices of Western-style product placement have shifted in an attempt to appeal to a younger demographic. Earlier works—such as _Night Watch_ (2004) and the _The Best Film_ trilogy (2008, 2009, 2011)—inserted advertisements with a touch of irony predicated on the assumption of a skeptical audience grounded in Soviet cinema.

The lecture will cover the recent developments in Ukraine and will discuss possible strategies of resolving the political and security crisis from the game theoretic perspective. We will discuss four editorials from VoxUkraine.org, a portal devoted to analysis of the events in Ukraine: (1) Imploding DNR/LNR: Is it good for Ukraine? (2) Can Ukraine play MAD with Russia? (3) Kyiv People's Republic: A threat to Ukraine, and (4) Ending the Russian-Ukrainian War.