Events

Portuguese Language Table

This talk presents preliminary data from a new research project that attempts to track women's movements throughout the ancient Mediterranean between 600 BCE and 400 CE. The preliminary data presented is primarily from Greek language grave markers, but also includes some citizenship decrees in Greek cities and includes women identified by approximately 60 ethnics from all over the Mediterranean. Because tombs and grants of citizenship are typically marked by ethnics, it allows us to see women who identify as having come from another location than the one they were buried or became a new citizen in. The primary goals of the project are to 1. understand the extent to which women moved in antiquity, 2. the reasons for movements (migration, enslavement, etc), and 3. to bring women to the surface in economic, social, and political histories where they are typically ignored because the data appears outside of standard literary evidence. This data can provide a foundation for comparative studies on the history of migrations, particularly in the Mediterranean.

To commemorate the 70th anniversary of the publication of Simone de Beauvoir's ground-breaking The Second Sex, Dr. Manon Garcia (Harvard) will offer a lecture for undergraduates titled 'What is a Woman?: Beauvoir’s Understanding of Sex as Situation.' All students are welcome! Talk in English!

Dr. Garcia (Harvard) recently published the well-received book On ne naît pas soumise, on le devient (“One is not born, but rather becomes, submissive”) (Flammarion, October 2018), which is part of a recent reconsideration of the legacy of Simone de Beauvoir.

Cosponsored by Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies, the Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies, the European Studies Center, the Honors College, and the Humanities Center.

Join professors and students from the Department of German and practice your language skills!

The Asian Studies Center, in close partnership with the Center
for Latin American Studies and the Graduate School for Public
and International Affairs, is pleased to announce the
appointment of Professor Enrique Dussel Peters as Global
Professor in the University Center for International Studies.

As Professor at the Graduate School of Economics, Universidad
Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) Dr. Dussel Peters is an
internationally recognized expert on China-Latin America
relations. His work focuses on economic development, political
economy, industrial organization and trade theory, NAFTA and
CAFTA, TPP and CPTPP, and the evolution of industrial, trade
and regional patterns in Latin America and Mexico. He has
published extensively on China's overseas foreign direct
investment (OFDI) in Latin America and Mexico, and on Mexican
firms in China. In conjunction with his scholarly work, Dr.
Dussel Peters has served as the Coordinator of the Area of
Political Economy at the Graduate School of Economics at
UNAM (2004-2008), and is currently the Director of the Center
for Chinese-Mexican Studies at the National Autonomous
University of Mexico and Director of the Academic Network of
Latin American and Caribbean on China (Red ALC-China).

Dr. Dussel Peters has joined the University of Pittsburgh this
semester. With affiliation in the Graduate School of Public and
International Affairs he is teaching a graduate seminar on
China-Latin America relations. Working closely with faculty in
Latin American Studies and in Asian Studies his research
activities will support the Global Asia Initiative.

For more information, visit: https://calendar.pitt.edu/event/featured_scholar_lecture_by_dr_vanessa_v...

fro-Latinx Portraiture: The Case of Arturo Schomburg
The Race, Gender, and Representation in the Africana World series presents: Dr. Vanessa Valdés, Director of the Black Studies Program and Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at The City College of New York-CUNY. Her research specialization focuses on comparative studies of Black cultural productions throughout the Americas, including the Caribbean, Brazil, and the U.S. She is the author of the critically acclaimed Diasporic Blackness: The Life and Times of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg (2017), in which she analyzed Schomburg’s engagement with the vibrant, ethnically diverse, and racially charged world of early twentieth-century New York City.

Summary:
Arturo Schomburg was a central figure in early 20th-century efforts to recover evidence of global Black excellence; with a focus on Spanish-speaking Black populations, he found himself educating a predominantly English-speaking audience about the histories of Afro-Latin Americans. Yet while he was prominent in New York City, particularly in the 1920 and 1930s, there was little memory of his physical image in the years after his death. In this talk, I will discuss questions of the genealogy of photography of Black populations in the ​early 20th century, Schomburg's legibility as a Black man in his portraits, and his measured resistance to the medium.

In addition to her public talk, Dr. Valdés will also speak with students enrolled in a class on Afro-Hispanic writers in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literatures.

This series is sponsored by the following units: Department of Africana Studies, Afro-Latin American and Afro-Latinx Studies Initiative, Department of Hispanic Languages and Literatures, Department of History, Center for Latin American Studies, Center for Race and Social Problems, Humanities Center, World History Center.

Improve and practice your Russian language skills with instructor Katya Kovaleva.

Join the Pitt German Club for an hour of German conversation practice and cultural activities.

Portuguese Language Table

Income inequality and what to do about it is a hot button political issue throughout our world. Much this disparity is the result of how the value of labor is calculated. How much is a worker's labor worth? How is it measured? Namely, how is it commodified? This live interview with Martha Lampland will discuss these questions from an unlikely place--socialist Hungary--to shed light on how economists in a society without a labor market nonetheless determined the value of labor and what this says about socialism and capitalism.

This event is part of the Socialism: Past, Present, and Future Pop-Up Course.

Join professors and students from the Department of German and practice your language skills!

The Global Studies Center looks forward to beginning a monthly, informal social hour - hosted by Global Studies Ambassadors and fellow GSC students Mark, Sarah and Destiny - as a way to get to know other like-minded Global Studies students.

Join Professor Robert Hellyer of Wake Forest University for a discussion on the socio-economic history of green tea in America and Japan in the late 19th and early 20th century.

Soon after the Meiji Restoration of 1868, Japan dramatically expanded tea production—especially of high-quality sencha green tea—specifically to meet demand from the United States, then a green tea consuming nation. This presentation will outline that export trade highlighting how tea production helped to ease social tensions in the nascent Japanese nation-state by providing employment for Tokugawa retainers who had opposed the new central regime during the Boshin War (1868-1869). It will also explain the ways in which a change in American tastes—the 1920s’ embrace of black teas produced in South Asia—brought a decline in Japanese tea exports to the United States. Facing a glut, Japanese tea merchants aggressively marketed sencha at home for the first time, emphasizing its health benefits. As a result, more Japanese began to consume sencha, setting in motion a trend that made that type of green tea the definitive daily beverage it remains today.

Sponsored by the University of Pittsburgh National Consortium for Teaching About Asia and the Asian Studies Center, University Center for East Asian Studies

Join professors and students from the Department of German and practice your language skills!

Practice your Hebrew at our weekly language table!

Borders--whether political, cultural, linguistic, or otherwise--are artificial constructs, often fluid and rarely unanimously accepted. The spaces between and beyond the lines of demarcation--the "borderlands"--often manifest as multicultural, impermanent places of shifting identities and disparate perspectives. Many scholars have remarked on the global and cultural transformations that have taken place since 1989 and the accompanying emergence of new borderlands in Europe and Central Asia. The liminal spaces around these borders have become new points of contact and conflict for various cultures and ideologies, now brought together or divided by the turn of history. For its 17th annual conference, the Graduate Organization for the Study of Europe and Central Asia (GOSECA) at the University of Pittsburgh invites presentations that explore the concept of "borderlands," whether political, ideological, cultural, linguistic, or of another type altogether.

Practice your Bosnian, Serbian, or Croatian language skills at our weekly language table.

Practice your Modern Greek language skills - all levels welcome!

You are invited to participate in the spring 2020 book discussion on "Jihad, Radicalism and the New Atheism" by Mohammad Hassan Khalil at the University of Pittsburgh. The discussion will be led by Associate Professor Jeanette S. Jouili of Department of Religious Studies. Dinner will be served at 5 PM.

A free book is available to the first 15 registrants, reach out to Elaine Linn at eel58@pitt.edu to get your copy today.

Participants can register by copying and pasting the following link:
https://cerisnet.secure.pitt.edu/resource/faculty-readers-forum

Join us for this FREE professional development mini course on the world of Whaling from New England to Europe to Japan. Speakers will address topics such the lives of sailors, what parts of a whale and what kinds of whales were harvested, the global commodity chain of whaling, and a challenge to the contemporary Japanese narrative about the importance of whaling to Japan. Class time will also include previewing portions of the American Experience film Into the Deep, experiencing some of the music of whalers, and a curriculum session with a master teacher. Free ACT 48 hours, materials, parking, and meals. Space limited so please register by Friday, February 14, 2020.

To register: https://forms.gle/7X6sHr4jsin66Gif7

The Center for Sustainable Business and the Global Studies Center invite you to join us for an interactive panel discussion about the role of business in driving social change in line with the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) framework. The panel will be moderated by Dr. Michael Goodhart, Professor of Political Science and Director of the Global Studies Center.

Panel includes...
-Shareen Hertel, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Connecticut
-Grant Ervin, Chief Resilience Officer, Sustainability Manager at the City of Pittsburgh
-Aurora Sharrard, Director of Sustainability, Office of Sustainability at the University of Pittsburgh
-CB Bhattacharya, H.J. Zoffer Chair of Sustainability & Ethics at the Katz Graduate School of Business at the University of Pittsburgh

Portuguese Language Table

Dr. Victoria Reyes is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Riverside. She received her PhD from Princeton’s Department of Sociology in January 2015, and was a 2016-2017 Postdoctoral Fellow at the National Center for Institutional Diversity at the University of Michigan. She previously taught in Bryn Mawr College’s Growth and Structure of Cities Department. Her research focuses on boundaries; how they are created and remade as well as how they shape inequality in global settings, and she has examined these processes as they relate to leisure migration, cultural politics, sovereignty, and legally plural, foreign-controlled places she calls “global borderlands.”

Practice your Turkish language skills - all levels welcome!

Practice your Bosnian, Serbian, or Croatian language skills at our weekly language table.

Improve and practice your Russian language skills with instructor Katya Kovaleva.

Join the Pitt German Club for an hour of German conversation practice and cultural activities.

Portuguese Language Table

Speaker, Dr. Emmanuel Jean-François, Penn State

This talk takes islands and seas as its focus, outlining an approach to geographies that can be considered globally in any context. It explores the case of the Indian Ocean but relates to broader themes such as colonialism/postcolonialism, racism, and global movements and migration.

As Dr. Jean-François puts in in his abstract: "Using the New Thalassology and Kamau Brathwaite’s notion of “tidalectics” as a relational framework for exploring multipolar connections, minor solidarities, and long-ignored forms of cosmopolitanism, this presentation discusses how the transcolonial and transoceanic imaginaries of Francophone Indian Ocean writers disrupt the colonial taxonomies that have construed islands as spaces of colonial difference, isolation, and vulnerability. While their “de-insularization” of islands and their rewriting of geographies, temporalities, and epistemologies bridge the gap between landmasses and seas, oceans and archipelagoes, it also configures fluctuating horizons and symbolic spaces of relation from which minority, racialized, and subaltern subjects across multiple sites can interact in fruitful and lateral ways."

José-Alain Sahel is the chair of the Department of Ophthalmology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, director of the UPMC Eye Center, and the Eye and Ear Foundation Chair of Ophthalmology. Dr. Sahel is known worldwide for his expertise in vision restoration techniques. He has developed several interventions— including stem cell implantation, gene therapy, innovative pharmacologic approaches, and the artificial retina—for retinitis pigmentosa, age-related macular degeneration, vascular eye disease, and other vision impairments that currently are untreatable. Over the past decade he has led pioneering efforts in optogenetic vision restoration, a technique in which cells in the retina are genetically modified to express light sensitive proteins. This therapeutic technique has the potential to help patients who are blind or visually impaired as a result of a genetic defect. Sahel, who was born in Algeria, studied medicine at Strasbourg University and in Lariboisière, Saint-Louis. He received his medical degree with a Medal of the Faculty of Paris and obtained his specialty certification in ophthalmology. He completed a residency in neurology and neurosurgery at the Louis Pasteur University Hospital in Strasbourg. He also was a research fellow at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary and a visiting scholar in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology at Harvard University. Dr. Sahel is the founder and director of the Vision Institute in Paris and currently a professor at the Sorbonne’s medical school Université Pierre-et-Marie-Curie.

Practice your Bosnian, Serbian, or Croatian language skills at our weekly language table.

Practice your Modern Greek language skills - all levels welcome!

Ever since Deng Xiaoping effectively de-radicalized China in the 1980s, debates have swirled around which path China would follow. Would it democratize? Would it embrace capitalism? Would the Communist Party's rule be able to withstand globalization and the internet? One thing few seriously considered: Mao Zedong would make a political comeback. This live interview with Jude Blanchette will discuss the return of the populist enthusiasm for the Great Helmsman's policies, and what it means for the present and future of Chinese communism.

This event is part of the Socialism: Past, Present, and Future Pop-Up Course.

Practice your Hebrew at our weekly language table!

Practice your Bosnian, Serbian, or Croatian language skills at our weekly language table.

Practice your Modern Greek language skills - all levels welcome!

In her presentation, Dr. Williams will explore the advent of faith-based maternity homes in Nigeria since the early 1930s and how they adapted to socio-political and biomedical trends in their search for legitimacy. Various scholars have examined relationships between ethnomedical practitioners, biomedicine, and the state; even fewer have extended this conversation to practices of divine healing in Africa. Notwithstanding, there has been little exploration of religious birthing institutions that increasingly play vital roles as primary maternal healthcare providers. By examining Faith Homes and their socio-political search for legitimacy in colonial and post-colonial Nigeria, Williams reflects on the enduring connections between religion and medicine in Africa.

Ogechukwu Williams is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History and Department of Medical Humanities at Creighton University, Omaha NE. Her book project examines the intersections between biomedical maternities, traditional midwifery, and faith-based birthing institutions in Nigeria. She is co-author of Writing the Nigeria Biafra War.

Part of FRIT's Week of Francophonie.

Quebecois Author Ms. Wilhelmy discusses The Body of the Beasts, her book on animality and humanness. The event will be in English.

Please join us!

There will also a public book event on Wednesday, April 1 at The White Whale Bookstore in Bloomfield. 7 pm.

Hosted by the Dept. of French and Italian, with support from the Year of Creativity, the Honors College, and the Humanities Center.

Questions? Contact Prof. Kaliane Ung

Part of FRIT's Week of Francophonie. A screening of the Franco-Senegalese drama film. The film is in French w/ English subtitles.

Designed for juniors, seniors, and graduate students to establish a career direction
and formulate a strategy for securing a full-time position in today's competitive
international and global workplace. Students focus on developing specific
competencies that include career selection, jobsearch activities, resume and
cover letter development, professionalnetworking techniques, behavioral
interviewing skills, and workplace ethicsin preparation for government, business,
and nonprofit sector careers. ALL ARE WELCOME TO ATTEND WORKSHOPS.

Learning Goals
This initiative emphasizes developing readiness to transition to the
workplace. The focus is on the development of self-awareness, interviewing
skills, the acquisition of job-hunting knowledge as well as the formulation
of an action plan to achieve the student's job and career goals.

Learning Outcomes

1. To clarify personal interests, values, skills
and career options.
2. To research/explore various fields for
international and global careers.
3. To create a career search strategy that
can/will be used upon course completion.
4. To present self effectively in an interview or
conversation with potential employers.

Part of FRIT's Week of Francophonie.

Come and make couscous and petits-choux at this Cooking Workshop! This event will be held in French.

There has been a resurgence of the Left since the 2008 Great Recession. A class-based politics, dormant for so long, has finally returned to mainstream political discourse. But what is this Left? What are its goals, possibilities and limitations? How will it organize itself for the politics of the 21st century? This live interview with Jodi Dean will discuss her book trilogy that provokes us to rethink and even revisit the Left with a renewed vision of communism, a efficacy of the political party, and the ethics and spirit of comradeship.

This event is part of the Socialism: Past, Present, and Future Pop-Up Course.

Part of FRIT's Week of Francophonie.

Pause Cafe and Board Games in Language Media Center! There will also be delicious crêpes as well... And don't forget the raffle!

This event will be in French.

Practice your Modern Greek language skills - all levels welcome!

Artists will demonstrate how to use found and recycled materials to make speculative and renderings of landscapes that are spatially aware while also being aesthetically pleasing and imaginative.

*Participation in the full series in encourages, but not required*
Register at forms.gle/zZyEsmYQkPDgjxt56

Forty years ago, Margaret Thatcher declared that “there is no alternative.” State socialism was dying and capitalism, restructured as neoliberalism, was ascendant. The collapse of state socialism in 1991 seemed to hammer the last nail into socialism’s coffin and vindicate Thatcher’s prophecy. Fast forward to today—socialism is back. However, the road to socialism is not easy. Today’s socialists cannot simply be dreamers. They must also be realists. This live interview with Sam Gindin will discuss the need for socialists to establish popular confidence in the feasibility of a socialist society and the pragmatic steps we can take to get there.

This event is part of the Socialism: Past, Present, and Future Pop-Up course.

Japanese video games have had a significant impact on the medium worldwide. Dr. Rachael Hutchinson considers how ‘Japan’ has been packaged for domestic and overseas consumers through these games. Ultimately, she argues that Japanese artists have expressed similar ideas in the video game medium as in older narrative forms such as literature and film.
Rachael Hutchinson is Associate Professor in Japanese Studies at the University of Delaware. She received her D.Phil. from the University of Oxford in 2000, and her research addresses representations of Japanese identity in a range of narrative texts – literature, film, manga and video games.

Space is limited, so please register! Registration is free.

Practice your Modern Greek language skills - all levels welcome!

Portuguese Language Table

Communist revolution in the 20th century was reliant on a profound change in individual consciousness. It is not surprising that communist ideology spoke forcefully and often about creating “new people.” Revolutionary China was no different. But how did Chinese communists at various levels, from Mao Zedong to village cadres, understand their work to transform individual consciousness? What did “Maoism” mean in the everyday? This live interview with Aminda Smith will explore the profound and personal changes in individual’s consciousness through multiple points of contact between individuals, the state, the Party, and its propaganda apparatuses.

This event is part of the UCIS pop-up course.

The Global Studies Center looks forward to beginning a monthly, informal social hour - hosted by Global Studies Ambassadors and fellow GSC students Mark, Sarah and Destiny - as a way to get to know other like-minded Global Studies students.