A LIVE INTERVIEW WITH Togzhan Kassenova, SUNY-Albany AND Cynthia Werner, Texas A&M University
REEES Fall 2022 series, The Specter in the Present: Trauma and its Legacies in Eurasia, will explore the place of trauma in Eurasia society in four interviews that pair scholars to discuss social and clinical trauma, victimhood, historical memory, and the politics of history in the region.
This event is part of a larger series.
This working group will meet in person every three weeks for the 2022-2023 academic year to discuss new scholarship about Eurasian borderlands. Faculty, graduate students, and advanced undergraduates are welcome to join. No prior expertise in Eurasia is necessary.
Content warnings have become an important feature of pedagogical practice. In this talk and discussion, I reflect on my experiences as a junior scholar trying to promote ethnographic research on topics that are triggering. I focus on “shopping” a book manuscript on sexual violence as a process beset by competing imperatives to engage ethically, to support the mental health of others, to adhere to disciplinary conventions around “thick description,” and to market the book as attracting a wide readership. Register on the Zoom link!
Szczecin is well-suited to analyze urban representation in public discourses and heritage debates. Its transnational history between Germany and Poland, its border shifts after WWII, and the access to the Baltic Sea inform and shape these debates to this day. In her research, Tabitha Redepenning explores urban authenticity. She takes an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on urban studies, cultures of remembrance, public history, and tourism theory.
Focusing on post-war discussions about specific buildings’ de- or reconstruction, Tabitha highlights the connections between urban structures through overarching narratives in tourist trails. Diverse local actors structure the city space along the linear narrative of the trails while simultaneously creating a particular city image.
Tabitha Redepenning studied book science, German studies, and European studies in Mainz, Frankfurt (Oder), and Wrocław. Her Master’s degree was in "Entangled cultures of remembrance in the German-Polish context on the example of the remembrance of Auschwitz liberation." She worked as an Educational Project Specialist at the Krzyżowa Foundation for Mutual Understanding in Europe. Since June 2020, she has been a research associate and Ph.D. student at the Herder Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe and a contributor to the project “Urban Authenticity: Creating, Contesting, and Visualizing the built Heritage in European Cities since the 1970s.”
Whether identified as ethnonationalist, pan-European, anti-colonial, or or pan-Islamic, "civilizationist" identification is in the foreground of many nationalist, racist, often white supremist narratives. Such approaches to identification extract concepts and mechanisms from earlier nationalist projects and feed them into the larger narratives of civilizationism taking hold today. While doing so, they tend to reproduce a radicalized approach to history, art, literature, material culture, and demography. This talk will address the broader implications of "civilizationism" with a historicist approach.
Barbara Weinstein is the Silver Professor of History at New York University and Past President of the American Historical Association. Her publications include The Amazon Rubber Boom, 1850-1920 (1983), For Social Peace in Brazil: Industrialists and the Remaking of the Working Class in São Paulo (1996), and The Color of Modernity: São Paulo and the Making of Race and Nation in Brazil (2015). Her research has received support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.
Ask questions about the Seminar & Field Trip Program, learn more about the interview process, and discuss your research interests!
In the first installment of the Global Studies Center's Two Evenings, Professor Edda L. Fields-Black from Carnegie Mellon University will facilitate a discussion on author Clint Smith's How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America. A deeply researched and transporting exploration of the legacy of slavery and its imprint on centuries of American history, How the Word Is Passed illustrates how some of our country's most essential stories are hidden in plain view—whether in places we might drive by on our way to work, holidays such as Juneteenth, or entire neighborhoods like downtown Manhattan, where the brutal history of the trade in enslaved men, women, and children has been deeply imprinted.
Global Literary Encounters book discussions are pre-lecture discussions that align with the Pittsburgh Arts & Lecture's Ten Evenings series. Global Literary Encounters put prominent world authors and their work in a global perspective in order to provide additional insight on writers and engaging issues.
This discussion will be held on Zoom. Please register to receive the Zoom link before the event.
