Central Europe Workshop

Wednesday, October 28 5:00-6:30

Social Sciences Building Room 224 (John Hope Franklin Room)

Roundtable on the European Refugee Crisis

Thursday, November 5 4:30-6:00

Location TBA

Discussion Session on Research and Archive Challenges

This session will focus on the technical, linguistic, and other practical issues of research in an on Central Europe. We hope to take full advantage of our multi-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary workshop to share resources and ideas and to discuss possible to solutions to individual difficulties. The format of this meeting will be an open discussion beginning with several broad questions. Feel free to submit ideas or questions in advance if there are particular issues you would like to address in this session.

Thursday, November 19 4:00-5:30

Expressionist Impulses: German and Central European Art, 1890-1990

To See in Black and White: German and Central European Photography, 1920s-1950s

Location: Smart Museum of Art

In this meeting, we will visit and discuss two new exhibits at the Smart Museum of Art which focus on Central Europe. Workshop participants are encouraged to share information about artists and works in the exhibit with particular relevance to their areas of interest. Our museum visit will be followed by refreshments and discussion.

Thursday, December 3 4:30-6:00

Cheryl Stephenson

Location TBA

Body and Figure in Jiří Trnka’s Old Czech Legends (Staré pověsti české)

Please join us for an organizational meeting on Tuesday, October 6 at 4:30 pm in Foster Hall 408. We will be introducing ourselves, reviewing our tentative fall schedule, discussing meeting times and special events, and establishing goals for the year to come.

Welcome to the Central Europe Workshop. The forum offers a space for discussion of Central Europe, from its origins to the present, for students from all disciplines, from history to literature, from religious studies to linguistics. We are currently accepting submissions and suggestions for presentations in events for the Autumn Quarter, and are looking forward to another year of productive collaborations.

April 6 : 4:30 PM, Wieboldt 206. Sunny Yudkoff, Lecturer in Yiddish Language in the Germanics Department, will be giving her presentation “His Own Magic Mountain: David Vogel and the Hebrew Sanatorium.”

April 20: 4:30 PM, Wieboldt 206. Mirjam Berg, graduate student in the German Department, will be giving her presentation “Writing Female Modernity: The Diary Novel in Early 20^th Century German Literature.”

May 11: 4:30 PM, Wieboldt 206. Antje Postema, graduate student in Slavic Literatures and Languages, will be giving her presentation “Collected Memory, Collective Memory: Recall, Collaboration, and Belonging in Two Postwar Bosnian Commemorative Projects, Pictures from the Corner and It Was a Beautiful, Sunny Day.”

May 18: 4:30 PM, Foster 505. The Central Europe Workshop is pleased to announce a joint presentation with Simon Hajdini and Lidija Šumah. They will be presenting their paper: “The Fetish Character of anti-Semitism and its Secret. Two Žižekian Interventions.”
Simon Hajdini is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. Lidija Šumah, PhD, is a researcher at the Department of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia.

May 24, 5 PM Logan Center: Film Screening, Ulrich Seidl “Import/Export.”

June 1: Lisa Scott, graduate student in History, will be giving her presentation “The Letter of Majesty: Promises of Religious Freedom.”

January 26th. 4:30 PM , Wieboldt 206. Phillip Henry, graduate student in the History Department, will be giving his paper “World War I and the Grenzen of Freudian Thought.”

* February 11th, 4:30 PM Foster 103. Joe Grim Feinberg, visiting scholar, will be presenting “The Windmills of Humanity: Presenting a New Translation of Czech Philosopher Ivan Sviták’s Writings on Politics and Culture.”

February 16th. 4:30 PM, Wieboldt 206. Roy Kimmey, graduate student in the History Department, will be giving his paper “Sculpting the Masculine Living Statue: history and Gender Representation in Dušan Makavejev’s Innocence Unprotected (Nevinost bez zaštite)

*February 25th, 5:00 PM. Franke Institute. John Feffer, visiting scholar will present “Backlash in East-Central Europe: What Happened to the Promise of 1989?”

* March 4th, 4:30 PM. Rosenwald 405. Aleida Assmann will be giving her talk “Forms of Forgetting.” Aleida Assmann is Chair of English Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Konstanz. Her research focuses on transnational and cultural memory studies, historical anthropology, and the history of media, with special emphasis on the Holocaust and trauma.

March 8th, 4:00 PM. Logan Center. Screening Room 201: Razredni sovražnik, Class Enemy, 2013. Discussion.

*Please note that the following presentation will not take place during regular meeting times.

October 20^th: General Introduction to Central Europe

November 3   4:30 PM, Wieboldt 206 Mikolaj Golubiewski, Visiting Student from the Berlin-Schlegel School will be giving his talk ““American Far West and Polish Eastern Borderland: A Hybrid Home of Czesław Miłosz.”

November 12th: 5-6:30 PM. Social Science 224 “John Hope Franklin Room.” Edith Sheffer, Assistant Professor of Modern European History at Stanford University, will be discussing autism diagnosis in Interwar Vienna.

November 17^th :  4:30 PM, Wieboldt 206 Tamara Kamatovic, graduate student in the German Dept., will be giving her paper “Between Four Walls: Literature and Censorship in the Austrian Biedermeier”

November 24th :4:30 PM, Wieboldt 206 Ingrid Christian, Faculty member in the German dept., on  Robert Musil

Tuesday, April 8, 4:30 Cobb 103: Reading Session: Maria Todorova, “Hierarchies of Eastern Europe: East-Central Europe Versus the Balkans”

Tuesday, April 22, 4:30, Cobb 103: Ilana Miller, “The Prague Spring, the Polish Anti-Zionist Campaign, and the Crucible of Israel Activism: Discourse on Israel after the Six-Day War in Poland and Czechoslovakia”

Wednesday, April 30, , 5:00, John Hope Franklin Room: Michaela Appeltova and Katie Tucker (co-sponsored with the Transnational Approaches to Modern Europe) Essays can be found by clicking here.  For password help or more information, please contact Daniel Pratt at dpratt@uchicago.edu

Thursday, May 8, Franke Institute, 4:30: Krassimira Daskalova (Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski (Bulgaria), Joy Foundation Fellow at Radcliffe Center for Advanced Study, Harvard University), “Clio On the Margins: on the Developments of Women’s and Gender History in Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe.” (Co-sponsored with Slavic Colloquium, Anthropology Department, History Department, Center for Sexuality and Gender Studies, CEERES)

Thursday, May 22, 4:30, Cobb 119, Kateřina Svatoňová, Charles University, “Experiments with Crumbling World: Czech (Not So) New Wave and Its Cinematographer Jaroslav Kučera”

Thursday, May 29, 4:30, Cobb 119: Jessica Resvick, Letters of Crisis, Crisis of Letters:The Epistolary Form in Joseph Roth’s Radetzkymarsch

Tuesday, January 14, 4:30 PM, Cobb 119: Esther Peters, “Before Writing”

Tuesday, February 11, Cobb 119, 4:30 PM: Alison Davis, “National Hermaphroditism in Bohemia and Moravia, 1939-1945”

Monday, February 17, Pick 319, 5PM (Co-sponsored with Early Modern Workshop): Howard Louthan, University of Florida, “A Model for Christendom? Erasmus, Poland and the Reformation”

Wednesday, February 19, Franke Institute, 4PM (Co-sponsored with CEERES), Jarosław Kuisz, University of Warsaw, “Dissident Culture, the Collapse of the Paper Press, and New Media: From New Europe to the Arab Spring (The Kultura Liberalna Internet Weekly Story)”

Tuesday, February 25, Cobb 119, 4:30 PM (Co-sponsored with the Theater and Performance Studies Workshop and the Center for East Europe and Russia/Eurasian Studies): Beth Holmgren, Duke University, “Theater under Siege: Cabaret in Occupied Poland and the II Polish Army Corps, 1939-1945.”

Wednesday, March 5, John Hope Franklin Room (Social Science 224) 5:00PM (Co-sponsored with Transnational Approaches to Modern Europe): Holly Case, Cornell University, “The Nineteenth Century as the Century of Questions, A Few Words Inspired by the Eastern Question.”

Tuesday, March 11, Cobb 119, 4:30: Malynne Sternstein, Lítost and Ressentiment, or, what’s the matter with reel realpolitiks?

Tuesday, March 18, Cobb 119, 4:30: Cheryl Stephenson, “Vadí/Nevadí: Puppet play in Věra Chytilová’s Daisies!”  Paper can be found by clicking here.  For the password please contact Daniel Pratt at dpratt@uchicago.edu

Our next paper will be Michaela Appletova’s “Germans into Swahilis: Showbiz Imperialism and Czech Nationalism at the 1891 Prague Jubilee Exhibition.”  The paper can be found by clicking here.  For the password, please contact dpratt@uchicago.edu