Mangia con noi! Bring your lunch and chat with us! Pitt students only, all levels welcome!

In this talk, Robin Visser will speak about her new book, Questioning Borders: Ecoliterature of China and Taiwan. Published by Columbia University Press in 2023, the book engages with the intersection of ethnic minorities and environmental studies in modern China from a comparative, interdisciplinary, and global context. Lunch provided.
This event is sponsored by the Steinbrenner Institute for Environmental Education and Research, Global Studies in the History Department, the Environmental Humanities Research Seminar, and the Humanities Scholars Program.

Pitt in Rome info session on Thursday 11/30 in the Global Hub from 12-1pm. Come learn about the Pitt in Rome program for Summer 2024, applications are open until 1/22!

EU ENLARGEMENT LECTURE SERIES: 20th Anniversary of the EU Enlargement

As part of our continued efforts to bring together experts with diverse perspectives to discuss contemporary issues facing Europe, the European Studies Center/European Union Center of Excellence (ESC/EUCE) along with the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies (REEES) offers a new lecture series to commemorate the 20th Anniversary of the EU Enlargement. This virtual lecture series will be held on the last Thursday of each month. 

2024 marks the 20th anniversary of the biggest enlargement of the European Union in its history. Ten countries, mainly former socialist Eastern European states, almost doubled the EU from 15 to 25 member states. May 1, 2004, was the triumphal return to the European Family for many. But for some, it initiated a process of disenchantment with the EU and the West.

Each month, the ESC/EUCE, together with REEES at the University of Pittsburgh, will focus our attention on a specific country or a group of countries in the EU by inviting experts and eyewitnesses to discuss the hopes and realities of the EU integration before and after expansion to address what hopes were fulfilled and what new hopes exist for the Union in the present.

Each session is recorded and later posted on the internet with suggested additional readings and further resources. Please check out our webpage for more details and mark the last Thursday of the month to attend this event.

Moderator:
Gregor Thum, Associate Professor, University of Pittsburgh Department of History

Panelists:
Michal Vašečka, PhD, Bratislava Policy Institute. He is sociologist by background and focuses his interests on issues of ethnicity, race, antisemitism, and migration studies. As an Associate Professor he operates at the Bratislava International School of Liberal Arts (BISLA) since 2015, he is a program director of Bratislava Policy Institute. Since 2012 Michal Vašečka serves as a representative of Slovakia in the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI) of the Council of Europe. He operated at the Faculty of Social Studies of Masaryk University in Brno in 2002-2017 and at the Faculty of Social and Economic Sciences of the Comenius University in 2006-2009.

Miloslav Bahna, PhD., Slovak Academy of Science. He is a senior researcher at the Institute for Sociology of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, where he currently serves as the director. His research focuses on international migration, quantitative comparative sociology and quantitative survey methodology. He is a long term representative of Slovakia in the International Social Survey Programme and the CESSDA ERIC pan-European infrastructure. His first book focuses on post-2004 EU enlargement migration from Slovakia (VEDA, the publishing house of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, 2011).

Come meet international students, make friends, practice conversational English, and have fun together, during these weekly discussion groups coordinated by the English Language Institute. Feel free to bring your lunch :)

Indigenous knowledge of local ecosystems often challenges settler-colonial cosmologies that naturalize resource extraction and the relocation of nomadic, hunting, foraging, or fishing peoples. In this talk, Dr. Visser will present findings from her new book, Questioning Borders (Columbia UP, 2023), which analyzes relations among humans, animals, ecosystems, and the cosmos in ecoliterature by Han and non-Han Indigenous writers of China and Taiwan. She will compare “root-seeking” novels by Beijing writers, set in China’s “exotic” southwest, with literature by Wa, Nuosu Yi, and Gyalrong Tibetan Indigenes from Yunnan and Sichuan provinces to discuss the different implications of utilizing indigenous ecological perspectives in these works.

Robin Visser is professor in modern Chinese and Sinophone literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author of Questioning Borders: Ecoliteratures in China and Taiwan (Columbia UP, 2023) and Cities Surround the Countryside: Urban Aesthetics in Postsocialist China (Duke UP, 2010).