Come and meet other CLAS students and staff!

Join Brazil Nuts for their weekly Portuguese language conversation table during Spring semester, every Monday from 4:30-5:30 pm in the Global Hub!

2022-23- MEET EU EMERGING FILMMAKER:
VIDA SHERK,
Director, Night Ride (Noćna vožnja)

This is a three-part seminar that focuses on what makes a film visually distinctive, and
how mood boards and storyboards can be used in the pre-production process to
help the director, the cinematographer, the costume designer, the art director, and
the rest of the crew envision the right atmosphere for the film - and choose the
right tools to do so.

The goal of this seminar is also to encourage even Screenwriting students to
develop mood boards for their stories, as they can be a useful tool during the
screenwriting process as well.

FEB 14, 2023 @ 10:00-11:30 AM EST- Required
PART I: MOOD BOARDS - What are mood boards, and why are they important? Can
they be useful for screenwriters (during the development phase) as well, and how?

FEB 21, 2023 @ 10:00-11:30 AM EST (2nd Half-Optional)
PART II: STORYBOARDS – How do mood boards influence storyboards? How do we
make a storyboard?

FEB 28, 2023 @ 10:00-11:30 AM EST (Optional)
PART III: THE CHICKEN OR THE EGG? WHICH COMES FIRST? Are mood boards
useful only in the later stages of pre-production? Is there even a right way to
approach the development and pre-production process, or can we shake things up
and start with the parts of pre-production which are usually reserved for the later
stages in the process of making a movie, only after a story (or script) is already set
in stone?

REQUIRED WORK: Participants will be asked to produce mood boards and
storyboards for their own projects. We will discuss their own exercises and work
during the seminar. They will also be asked to watch Vida Skerk's short film “Night
Ride” beforehand, as this film and the material made during the preparation for
this project will be used as examples during the seminar.

Join CLAS ambassadors to learn more about CLAS academic offerings and related programs.

Come and practice your Hungarian and meet others interested in the language! All levels welcome.

This is the third event as part of the series Race, Rebellion, and Global Solidarity. Black Star, Crescent Moon offers a new perspective on the political and cultural history of Black internationalism from the 1950s to the present. Author Sohail Daulatzai maps the rich, shared history between Black Muslims, Black radicals, and the Muslim Third World, placing them within a broader framework of American imperialism, Black identity, and the global nature of white oppression. Join us for a discussion with the author that will be facilitated by Dr. Michael Sawyer, Associate Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh. His work focuses on the revolutionary potentiality of Black people, and takes a multi-disciplinary approach to exploring the works that authorize, accompany, sustain, and depicts Black Being.

Want to learn about fan cultures of East Asia? Interested in the online culture of k-pop fans? What is Otaku and how does it help define Japanese fandom? This semester's lecture series will explore the fan cultures of East Asia and their influence on contemporary fan cultures across the world. In this lecture, Dr. Patrick Galbraith of Senshu University, Tokyo, will discuss Otaku fandoms.

Join the German Club for Spring 2023's weekly conversation hours, on Tuesdays from 6:30-7:30 pm!

This is the fourth event as part of the series Race, Rebellion, and Global Solidarity. Amidst the ruins of a dying order desperately trying to maintain its grip, we are living in an era marked by massive economic disparities, the rise of authoritarianism and explicit white nationalism, Black freedom movements and the calls for abolition, the normalization of the “War on Terror” and the unfinished projects of decolonization, amongst other repressive forces and insurgent voices. How did we get here? And how do we chart a course forward? This talk will explore the artists, thinkers, and movement builders who we can think with as we seek to create a world that does not yet exist. This is a hybrid event.

This talk discusses the responses of Polish authorities and wider society to two phenomena of human mobility: the
arrival of refugees from the Middle East and North Africa on Poland's border with Belarus in 2021-22, and the
arrival of Ukrainians fleeing the war on the Polish-Ukrainian border in and after February 2022. The first of these
groups encountered hostility, while the latter received a compassionate welcome. I analyze these seemingly
disparate responses with reference to the shifting politics of border enforcement in the European Union, arguing
that the technocratic model of border control that dominated EU discourse and practices in the early 21st century
has now been exhausted.

Reinhard Heinisch, University of Salzburg

Radical populism represents the greatest challenge to liberal democracy across Europe. The emergence of this phenomenon has impacted both established democracies, such as the United Kingdom, when we think of Brexit, and new democracies, such as Hungary and Poland. Populist actors have also played a role in the COVID pandemic and in the context of Russia's war on Ukraine, as they mobilize people against mainstream policies that attempt to manage these crises. Despite the general importance of populism as a political phenomenon, including at the EU level, its history and impact vary widely across Europe. It is important to understand the specific causes and effects of the success of populism because not all forms of political radicalism or authoritarianism are populist. The talk will address these questions and show that populism is closely related to the decline in legitimacy of established institutions and traditional elites in times of social and economic change. Drawing especially on the case of Austria, where radical populism has been long established, the lecture and discussion will provide an overview of this phenomenon and the state of political science research

A Workshop with Dr. Jennifer Morgan (NYU), Dr. Marisa Fuentes (Rutgers University), and Pitt's History Department Faculty. In-person and on Zoom.

Join the French Club for Spring 2023's weekly conversation hours, on both Wednesdays and Thursdays from 5-6:30 pm!

Note: French Conversation Hour will not meet in the Global Hub on Thursday, April 13.

Join the CLAS community for an evening of food and fun!

Join us on Wednesday, February 22nd at 6pm ET on CMU campus (Grand Posner Room 340) for Dr. Patrick Galbraith’s second lecture in Pittsburgh, "Erotic Comics in Japan: An Introduction to Eromanga." Dr. Galbraith will discuss Japanese freedom of expression, censorship, and Erotic Manga. He explores how increased visibility of a wide range of manga and anime, including erotic variants, has led to deepening suspicion, public outrage and calls for strengthening regulation, if not banning some content out right. Patrick W. Galbraith is a lecturer at Senshū University in Tokyo. He is the author of The Moe Manifesto: An Insider's Look at the Worlds of Manga, Anime, and Gaming, coauthor of AKB48, and coeditor of Idols and Celebrity in Japanese Media Culture.

Registration is not required for this lecture.

Join the Spanish Club for Spring 2023's weekly conversation hours, on Wednesdays from 6-8 pm!

Join the Arabic Language and Culture Club for this weekly get-together and safe space for Arabic speakers to have a conversation and work on their language skills!

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

Fernando Tormos-Aponte is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh and a Kendall Fellow at the Union of Concerned Scientists. He earned his Ph.D. in Political Science from Purdue University and a BA from the Universidad de Puerto Rico—Río Piedras. Dr. Tormos-Aponte specializes in social movements, environmental and racial justice, intersectional solidarity, identity politics, social policy, and transnational politics. Dr. Tormos-Aponte’s research on social movements focuses on how social movements cope with internal divisions and gain political influence. Tormos-Aponte also investigates civil society claims about the uneven government response across communities. His work in this area examines the causes and consequences of government neglect of socially vulnerable communities during disaster recoveries.

Presentation summary:

Emerging scholarship assesses the electoral consequences of climate disasters. This study contributes to this literature by evaluating the extent to which communities underserved by disaster recovery efforts punish political incumbents. Using power restoration in the US territory of Puerto Rico after Hurricane María in 2017 as a measure of government responsiveness, the study examines how government responsiveness to disasters affects subnational electoral outcomes during the 2020 elections in Puerto Rico.

Join the French Club for Spring 2023's weekly conversation hours, on both Wednesdays and Thursdays from 5-6:30 pm!

Note: French Conversation Hour will not meet in the Global Hub on Thursday, April 13.

As part of the bi-annual Consortium for Educational Resources on Islamic Studies (CERIS) Faculty Reader's Forum, this teacher workshop is for K-16 educators to follow on the February 21 CERIS book discussion on Black Star, Crescent Moon. The workshop will be led by Kate Daher, former Pittsburgh Public Social Studies Teacher and Curriculum Writer for the District. She has traveled extensively and written curriculum for African American history classes, social studies and more.

Teachers can get Act 48 credit. Register at the link provided.

Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia are often conceptualized as a single geopolitical unit. The 21st century has challenged these conceptions due to breakthroughs in technology and medicine, new regional conflicts, and the continuing effects of globalization. These transformations have molded individuals, nations, cultures, languages, and disciplines, provoking questions of identity. For our platinum conference GOSECA invites presentations exploring identity today.

This program is subject to change.

All papers will be pre-circulated and there will be no presentations. Audience members are strongly urged to read the papers by the members of the panel that they plan on attending in advance. To request access to papers, please email raja.adal@pitt.edu with your affiliation and the panel(s) that you are planning to attend. For more information, please click here.

The material history of state authority, of corporate capitalism, or of any other modern institution begins in the office. Without paperwork there is no government. But with paperwork, there also come the paper, pens, brushes, screens, drives, keyboards, and other instruments for inscribing, copying, transmitting, storing, and consuming texts. This conference seeks to trace the material history of inscription in bureaucratic cultures. In scope it covers the globe and in time, although it takes our current historical moment as a point of departure, it starts with the assumption that the very first office technology may well have been writing itself.

Methodologically, this conference brings together three roughly defined fields that have often existed in isolation: media studies, the history of writing systems, and the study of bureaucratic cultures. Fueled by the rise of electronic literature, literary theorists have joined media theorists in thinking about how transformations in the medium of writing is recasting our relationship to the text. Scholars of writing systems are also concerned with the material mediation of writing but focus on the invention and development of scripts and on the consequences of changes in their material bases. Scholars of bureaucratic cultures study the material mediation of writing in the context of institutional structures, whether corporations or government bureaucracies or otherwise, that are ubiquitous in everyday life. This conference seeks to cross-pollinate these three approaches. It asks not only how instruments of inscription from brushes to typewriters to computers have changed over time, but how their transformation relates to how power is constructed, distributed, and exerted, within the office and beyond.

We ask two central questions. First, how do instruments of inscription mediate bureaucratic practice? Does it matter if a text is written with a brush, a pen, or a typewriter? Historians have traditionally focused on the semantic contents of texts while art historians have been concerned with the formal properties of images. Can a material history of writing provide us with a vantage point from which to think about the relationship between semantic meaning and material form? This is all the more of a concern today, when we are unsure about the future of the text. As writing is de-territorialized, produced anywhere in the world, including by non-human bots, the separation of the body of the writer from the text that began with scribes and typewriters has, with fake news, brought us to the edge of a crisis of credibility. What is the future of writing? This moment, when it also seems that the written text is being supplanted by images and video, is a good time to rethink the visual, aesthetic, and material nature of writing.

The second question concerns how writing mediates our relationship to the archive. How does it matter if we see an office document in its original, as a facsimile, or as a printed reproduction? Bureaucratic documents such as laws and treaties often take multiple forms. Japanese laws from the nineteenth century to today, for example, are simultaneously printed in an official gazette and available as a unique copy with the vermillion seal of the emperor, the wet signature of the cabinet ministers, and the date and summary of the law written with a brush. Does it matter which version of the law legal scholars, historians, or anyone else uses? And what methods do we use for “reading” the materiality of a document? At a time when digital methods are allowing for the large-scale distant reading of thousands or millions of texts, can we use such methods without forsaking the materiality of the text?

Co-organized by Raja Adal (University of Pittsburgh) and David Lurie (Columbia University).
Raja Adal (University of Pittsburgh)

Stephen Chrisomalis (Wayne State University)

Andrew Glass (Microsoft Corporation)

Katherine Hayles (Duke University)

Matthew Hull (University of Michigan)

Hoyt Long (University of Chicago)

Bryan Lowy (Princeton University)

Christopher Lowy (Carnegie Mellon University)

David Lurie (Columbia University)

Brinkley Messick (Columbia University)

Mara Mills (New York University)

Lara Putnam (University of Pittsburgh)

Dennis Tenen (Columbia University)

Annette Vee (University of Pittsburgh)

Tyler Williams (University of Chicago)

Yurou Zhong (University of Toronto)

Emerging Scholars on the State of the Field, Activism, and Advocacy is the third panel in the Decolonization in Focus Series.

The Russian war in Ukraine has had innumerable impacts, from personal to political, local, national, and global. One of the many sea changes wrought by the war has been the reckoning within Slavic/Russian & Eurasian Studies over the outsized role Russia has played and continues to play in the field and what could and should be done about it. The invited panelists in this series will consider the relationships of power that have long dominated the region, how they have impacted the field of study, and what, if anything, could and should be done about it.

The series will consist of six wide-ranging panels featuring speakers from a variety of disciplines and institutions. Panelists and participants will be encouraged to consider why decolonizing Russian & Eurasian studies matters, how to implement concrete change in their classrooms, and how to conceive of the future of expertise within the field. All sessions will be convened using Zoom, live-streamed via YouTube, and recorded to be made available for later viewing.

Are you looking to gain experience that will help prepare you for a globally-connected job market? Stop by Drop-In Hours to learn more about getting the Global Distinction added to your academic transcript, receiving special recognition at graduation, and standing out to prospective employers!

Do you like books? Do you like boba? Join the Asian American Futures Collective's Books and Boba Reading Group. We're reading "Afterparties" by Anthony Veasna So. Free books available in limited quantities. RSVP at bit.ly/booksandboba1 to reserve a copy of the book and be counted for a free boba drink during the event!

The Global Studies Center and Postindustrial, a multimedia outlet focused on reimagining industrial communities, is hosting a 4-part series that will allow a small group of students to develop journalism skills while learning about global issues in the context of Appalachia. Students will get the opportunity to learn about podcast production and journalistic writing from Postindustrial journalists that have a wealth of knowledge and experience in reporting on global issues as they relate to our region. By the end of the series, students will have the tools to produce narrative written work, created a podcast episode, and learned about other podcast production techniques. These skills will be situated in discussions about the impacts of the war in Afghanistan, slow violence, and extractive economies featuring conversations with individuals who experienced those impacts firsthand both at home and abroad. This event is solely in person.

On the anniversary of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, REEES and GOSECA invite all to join us in witnessing the artwork, testimonials, and lived experiences brought about by the war.

On ‘Decentering’ and Reimagining Slavic and East European Studies from the Periphery” will be delivered by Sunnie Rucker-Chang, Associate Professor at the Department of Slavic and East European Studies at Ohio State University. Dr. Sunnie Rucker-Chang writes on racial and cultural formations, minority-majority and minority-minority relations in Southeast Europe. Her work has appeared in Critical Romani Studies, EuropeNow! - A Journal of Research and Art, Interventions: Journal of Post-Colonial Studies, Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, Journal of Transatlantic Studies, Slavic and East European Journal, and Slavic Review. She is currently finishing a monograph examining the politics of Blackness in former Yugoslav states that challenges conventional ideas of race and racialization in the Balkans and connects the region to broader trends in European Studies.
This is a hybrid event.

The Undergraduate Asian Studies Research Conference will be an opportunity for undergraduates at any level to meet with other students interested in Asian Studies from around the northeast U.S. Students interested in presenting will participate in panels, with speaking times between 10-15 minutes. To register for the program, students only need to provide a subject for their paper/ title and the name and email of a faculty member who can vouch for them. Students who would like to attend the conference and hear the papers are also encouraged to register. To register please click here.