Events

Presentation: Being LGBTQ+ Abroad
- 4:00 pm to 5:00 pm
- 810 William Pitt Union

Seminar: Extractive Empire: Bricks, Cement, and Soviet Material Movements after WWII
- Katherine Zubovich (SUNY Buffalo)
- 4:00 pm
- Baker Hall 246A, Carnegie Mellon University
After World War II, the USSR's leaders relied heavily on construction materials mined and produced in recently liberated territories to rebuild the country's ruined cities. This paper traces the material networks linking Soviet cities to forests, quarries, and factories supplying the wood, marble, brick, and cement integral to Soviet rebuilding. Focusing on the Aseri Brickworks and Kunda Cement Factory, both located along Estonia's northern coast, the paper examines the interplay between Soviet occupation and materials extraction. Part of the Socialist Studies Seminar series.

Festival: SCREENSHOT: Asia Film Festival - A Useful Ghost
- 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm
- Harris Theater
At the beginning of the Cannes Film Festival Critics’ Week winner A Useful Ghost (Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke, 2025), we learn that March has lost his beloved wife Nat, whose work in the family factory has left her—and many other workers—poisoned. Their relationship gets a second chance, however, when she comes back to him, reincarnated as a vacuum cleaner. His family is less pleased by her reincarnation and finds their rather unconventional love disturbing. Anxious to be the good daughter-in-law again, Nat decides to become useful by setting herself against the other ghosts who have revenge on their minds. As she becomes involved in banishing other spirits, the question of a ghost’s usefulness clashes with Thailand’s recent authoritarian history. With its tonal shifts and fractious genre changes, A Useful Ghost should not work. But the fact that it does—and does so brilliantly—is a credit to the debut film director’s sense of humor and razor-sharp political vision.
Toronto International Film Festival 2025, Cannes Critics’ Week Grand Prize 2025

Film: The Silent Light Presents: F.W. Murnau's Faust
- 7:00 pm
- Frick Fine Arts Building, Auditorium

Festival: SCREENSHOT: Asia Film Festival - Daughter's Daughter
- 1:00 pm to 3:00 pm
- Frick Fine Arts 125
Jin Aixia (Chang) has two daughters, but Emma (Karena Lam), who grew up in New York, and Fan Zuer (Eugenie Liu), who grew up in Taipei, never knew about each other until well into adulthood. When Zuer and her partner decide to try and get pregnant via in vitro fertilization, they wind up travelling to the US for treatments. Tragically, the couple die there in an accident, but their embryo remains alive and well — and Aixia is left as its legal guardian. Arriving in New York overwhelmed with grief, she is faced with the choice to donate, terminate, or find a surrogate for the embryo. But after a life spent feeling like she’s fallen short as a mother, who is she to decide what to do with her deceased daughter’s unborn child?
2024 Toronto International Film Festival Platform Award winner, 2024 Golden Horse winner, best original screenplay

Festival: SCREENSHOT: Asia Film Festival - A Better Tomorrow (Special 4K restoration)
- 8:00 pm to 10:00 pm
- Harris Theater
When A Better Tomorrow debuted in 1986, it spawned the Hong Kong gangster cinematic craze, propelled the careers of John Woo and Chow Yun-Fat to international stardom and made Hong Kong cool an aesthetic across the world. We are celebrating the 2025 4k of this film and the entire Golden Princess Collection at the Harris Theater. In the original HK gangster film– A Better Tomorrow, two estranged brothers — Leslie Cheung’s fresh-faced cop Kit, and Ti lung’s jaded criminal Ho — struggle to reconnect after Ho serves three years in prison. As Ho attempts to stay out of gangster life, both are drawn into crime, violence and the Hong Kong underworld. Not only does Woo’s A Better Tomorrow set the gold standard for intense corridor shootouts but also laid the foundation for a stylistic template that would resonate throughout Woo’s illustrious career.

Festival: SCREENSHOT: Asia Film Festival - Tripoli/A Tale of Three Cities
- 3:30 pm to 5:30 pm
- McConomy Hall
While living abroad, a filmmaker returns to Tripoli, Lebanon to confront a hometown that once rejected him as a queer child. With a microphone in hand, he walks around coffee shops, public squares and a park to ask the city’s inhabitants about their cultural and social beliefs and their embrace of new ideas. Gradually, he meets a group of marginalized individuals whose eccentric life choices contradict the general lifestyle in this religiously and socially conservative city. Through intimate conversations with a communist activist, a queer music producer, and other unconventional characters, Tripoli/A Tale of Three Cities explores the complicated relations one forms with a hometown in crisis. This contemplative urban symphony paints a picture of a city trapped in a self-spun web, paralyzed by a deep economic crisis, a faltering revolution, and a looming doomsday.
International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam
Co-sponsored by The Humanities Center at Carnegie Mellon University and Backyard Docs

Student Club Activity: German Club at Pitt
- Claire Meachen
- 5:30 pm to 6:30 pm
- Global Hub

Language Table: Hungarian Conversation and Tutoring
- Viktoria Batista
- 4:00 pm to 5:00 pm
- Braun Room (12th Floor), Cathedral of Learning
Tuesdays, 4-5pm
Braun Room (12th Floor), Cathedral of Learning
Come to chat, practice, meet others who are interested in Hungarian and Hungary! All levels are welcome.
For more info, contact Dr. Viktoria Batista (vib21@pitt.edu)
Language Table: Turkish Language Table: Board Game Night
- Eda Kurtsoy
- 8:00 pm to 9:00 pm
- Global Hub

Information Session: Vira I. Heinz Program Information Session
- 4:00 pm to 5:00 pm
- 810 William Pitt Union
Want to study abroad this summer? You could be selected for a scholarship of $5,000+! Learn more about the Vira I. Heinz Program for Women in Global Leadership (VIH Program) by stopping by this info session. Qualified students will be female-identifying, have a QPA of 3.0 and be a current sophomore or junior with no prior travel experience beyond Canada. Come by even if you are thinking about it for next year!

Information Session: Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) Program Information Session
- Stephen Wludarski & JET Alumni Panel
- 6:00 pm to 7:30 pm
- 4130 Posvar Hall
Are you interested in living and working abroad?
Have you been studying Japanese and looking to apply your skills after graduation?
Do you want to make an impact on the lives of young people?
Would you like to find out where the ultimate ramen shop is found?
If any of these questions apply to you, then please join the Asian Studies Center and JET Alumni group in Pittsburgh for an information session to learn more about the Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) Program. This hybrid Information Session will be in room 4130 Posvar Hall, on the 4th floor of W. Wesley Posvar Hall on October 2, 2025 starting at 6:00pm. Learn about the requirements of the JET Program and learn from your future-JET Program sempai with our JET Alumni Panel.

Lecture: Island Tinkerers: Innovation and Transformation in the Making of Taiwan's Computing Industry
- 2:00 pm to 4:00 pm
- Posvar Hall 4130
In this seminar, Honghong Tinn will introduce her new, open access book Island Tinkerers: Innovation and Transformation in the Making of Taiwan’s Computing Industry (MIT Press, 2025). Tinn's book tells the critical history of how hobbyists and enthusiasts in Taiwan, including engineers, technologists, technocrats, computer users, and engineers-turned-entrepreneurs, helped transform the country with their hands-on engagement with computers. It was through their creative and ingenious tinkering with computers that they were able to gain a better understanding of the technology, opening the door to future manufacturing endeavors that now include Acer, Foxconn, Asus, and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC).
Honghong Tinn is Assistant Professor in the Program in the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. She is also an affiliated historian at the Charles Babbage Institute. She received her Ph.D. in Science & Technology Studies from Cornell University. Her research interests are in the areas of the history of electronic digital computing, Cold War, econometrics, and science, technology, and medicine in East Asia. Her work on these topics has appeared in Technology and Culture, Osiris, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, and East Asian Science, Technology and Society. She is the author of Island Tinkerers: Innovation and Transformation in the Making of Taiwan’s Computing Industry (MIT Press, 2025). She was on the Executive Council of the Society for the History of Technology (2017-2019), chaired the Society’s Internationalization Committee (2013-2014) and the International Small Grants Committee (2017-2019), and is an elected member of the Nominating Committee (2023-2025).

Lecture: Before and after 1989: The Short History of Liberal Democracy in Hungary
- 4:00 pm
- 4130 Posvar Hall
Victoria Harms, Associate Teaching Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University and author of the book The Making of Dissidents: Hungary’s Democratic Opposition and Its Western Friends, 1973-1998 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024) in conversation with Gregor Thum, Associate Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh. Introduction by Kati R. Csoman, Director of the Nationality Rooms and Intercultural Exchange Programs.
Co-sponsors to list are: Hungarian Room Committee of the Nationality Rooms and Intercultural Exchange Programs, the History Department, World History Center, European Studies Center, Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies.
Where: 4130 Posvar Hall
When: 4pm - 5pm October 6th
What: Interview followed by a Q&A segment

Language Table: Hungarian Conversation and Tutoring
- Viktoria Batista
- 4:00 pm to 5:00 pm
- Braun Room (12th Floor), Cathedral of Learning
Tuesdays, 4-5pm
Braun Room (12th Floor), Cathedral of Learning
Come to chat, practice, meet others who are interested in Hungarian and Hungary! All levels are welcome.
For more info, contact Dr. Viktoria Batista (vib21@pitt.edu)

Teacher Training--Area Studies: Interdisciplinary Strategies for Teaching Traditional Cultural Heritage
- Iryna Voloshyna
- 6:30 pm to 8:00 pm
This webinar will concentrate on UNESCO-recommended methodological strategies of including topics on traditional cultural heritage of Eastern Europe and Eurasia into the curricula, for courses spanning from language, arts, and geography, to mathematics and physics. Educators will come away with resources and strategies for integrating these themes into a variety of classroom settings.
This webinar is the first in a six-part webinar series, The Arts of Eastern Europe and Eurasia, designed to support K-14 educators in bringing the vibrant and diverse artistic traditions of Russia, Eastern Europe, and Eurasia into the classroom. Each 90-minute session will spotlight a different art form—including music, dance, literature, visual arts, cultural artifacts, and theater/film—offering both historical and cultural context as well as practical classroom strategies.
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