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Events & Programs
Weiser Center affiliates offer lectures, conferences, film series, and other events during the academic year. Please use the search box below for information on other upcoming as well as past events. Our multimedia page includes audio and video files from recent events.
Click here to see a complete calendar of Fall 2009 events.
Upcoming Events
November 24, 2009
2:30 PM - 4:00 PM, 1636 International Institute/SSWB, 1080 S. University
Film. Song from the Southern Seas.
Further Information:
Description:
Marat Sarulu, director. A darkly comic feud is ignited when a Russian man suspects that his son is the result of an affair between his wife and a Kazakh neighbor. Russian with English subtitles (80 min., 2008). Free and open to the public.
December 02, 2009
12:00 PM - 1:30 PM, 1636 International Institute/SSWB, 1080 S. University
Further Information:
Jessica Fisher, (MA REES/MPP Public Policy) 2009 CRIF Grantee. “The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE): A Comprehensive Approach to Security.”
Monica Lopez-Lerma, (PhD Comparative Literature) 2009 Jean Monnet Fellow. “The Forgettings of the Law of Historical Memory.”
Mark Rudolf, (BSE Biomedical Engineering/German minor) 2009 CES-EUC Summer Grantee. “Summer in Saarland: Summer Internship at the Fraunhofer Institute for Biomedical Engineering.”
Description:
Graduate and undergraduate student presentations on summer research and internship experiences. Sponsors: CES-EUC, CREES.
December 04, 2009
9:00 AM - 5:00 PM, Henderson Room, Michigan League
9s Conference. “The Nines: Brinks, Cusps, and Perceptions of Possibility—from 1789–2009”
Further Information:
The 20th anniversary of 1989 stimulates reflections on the momentous events from Germany to China that promised change in the world. But the end of other decades—1979 in Iran and Afghanistan, the financial crisis in 1929, and in exemplary ways, 1789 in France—inspire similar commemorative reconsiderations. These and other “nines” include moments of transition and change, possibility and crisis. While the promise of democracy might frame our reflections on 1989, it is not enough to help us appreciate how other radical transformations were conceived or experienced, and indeed, what the iconic “1989” also embodied beyond democracy’s extension. We need to better understand how world-historic events shape the imagination, and how visions of the world and its perceived trajectories can shape the course of events.
In Fall 2009, the Weiser Center for Europe and Eurasia, together with other partnering units at the University of Michigan, will present programs addressing the relationship between world-historic events and alternative visions of the world embedded in these times. This series will explore 1989 alongside historical transformations of the many other iconic “nines” of the modern era and the alternative futures they inspired.
Description:
Conveners: Dario Gaggio, CES-EUC director; Mary Gallagher, CCS director; Michael D. Kennedy, CREES research associate and Howard R. Swearer Director, Watson Institute for International Studies, Brown University; and Douglas Northrop, CREES director.
December 05, 2009
9:30 AM - 12:30 PM, Henderson Room, Michigan League
9s Conference. “The Nines: Brinks, Cusps, and Perceptions of Possibility—from 1789–2009”
Further Information:
The 20th anniversary of 1989 stimulates reflections on the momentous events from Germany to China that promised change in the world. But the end of other decades—1979 in Iran and Afghanistan, the financial crisis in 1929, and in exemplary ways, 1789 in France—inspire similar commemorative reconsiderations. These and other “nines” include moments of transition and change, possibility and crisis. While the promise of democracy might frame our reflections on 1989, it is not enough to help us appreciate how other radical transformations were conceived or experienced, and indeed, what the iconic “1989” also embodied beyond democracy’s extension. We need to better understand how world-historic events shape the imagination, and how visions of the world and its perceived trajectories can shape the course of events.
In Fall 2009, the Weiser Center for Europe and Eurasia, together with other partnering units at the University of Michigan, will present programs addressing the relationship between world-historic events and alternative visions of the world embedded in these times. This series will explore 1989 alongside historical transformations of the many other iconic “nines” of the modern era and the alternative futures they inspired.
Description:
Conveners: Dario Gaggio, CES-EUC director; Mary Gallagher, CCS director; Michael D. Kennedy, CREES research associate and Howard R. Swearer Director, Watson Institute for International Studies, Brown University; and Douglas Northrop, CREES director.
December 07, 2009
5:15 PM - 7:00 PM, Helmut Stern Auditorium, UMMA, 525 S. State
Zell Visiting Writer Series - Piotr Sommer Poetry Reading
Further Information:
Piotr Sommer is a poet, translator, anthology editor and essayist. Born in 1948, he grew up in Otwock, a small town outside of Warsaw, studied English at the University of Warsaw, and now edits Literatura na Swiecie (Literature in the World), a Polish magazine of international writing. He taught poetry at several American universities; has published twelve books of poetry in Polish; and has written two books of essays on poetry and translation. He is also the author of numerous translations from American, English, and Irish poetry, and has had two collections published in translation: Things to Translate and Other Poems (1991), and Ein freier Tag in April (2002), which have appeared in German, Slovak, Slovenian, and English.
Description:
Poetry reading by Piotr Sommer, Polish poet. The sponsors
of the Zell Visiting Writers Series are the Department
of English Language and Literature, the Office of the Provost of the University of Michigan, and Helen Zell. Co-sponsored by the Copernicus Endowment and Department of Comparative Literature.
December 08, 2009
4:00 PM - 5:30 PM, Rackham Amphitheatre
Further Information:
Description:
Ronald G. Suny, Charles Tilly Collegiate Professor of Social and Political History and professor of history, U-M. Sponsor: LSA.
December 09, 2009
7:00 PM - 8:30 PM, Rackham Auditorium
Further Information:
About his lecture, Andrei Codrescu writes, “I covered the events in Romania in 1989-1990 for NPR and ABC News, and I documented the return to my native country in The Hole in the Flag: an Exile's Story of Return & Revolution (Morrow 1991, Avon 1992). I have returned numerous times since and I started writing in Romanian again, picking up the thread severed at age 19 in 1965. Now, twenty years after the coup, or “revolution” that ended in the execution of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu, Romania is a different country, a member of the European Union, and an ardent convert to capitalism. My talk will focus on reality and appearances in Romania, and the role of the media, of which I am a part, in shaping the images of the “revolution” and those of the new Romania.”
Andrei Codrescu’s career spans four decades as novelist, poet, journalist, filmmaker, commentator, and educator. His work has been distinguished with numerous awards, including the Peabody Award and the Pushcart Prize. He was MacCurdy Distinguished Professor of English at Louisiana State University from 1984 until 2009, and continues to edit Exquisite Corpse: A Journal of Life and Letters, an online journal he founded at LSU in 1983. His most recent book is The Posthuman Dada Guide: tzara and lenin play chess (Princeton 2009).
“The Nines: Brinks, Cusps, and Perceptions of Possibility—from 1789–2009”
In Fall 2009, the Weiser Center for Europe and Eurasia, along with other partnering units at the University of Michigan, will present programs exploring the relationship between world-historic events and the alternative futures they inspired. From the explosion of alternatives in 1919 to the normalization of democratic destinies in 1989, from the crisis of 1929 to the anxieties of 2009, this series will delve into the many iconic “nines” of the modern era.
Description:
Andrei Codrescu, poet, essayist, and novelist. Sponsors: CREES, Avant Garde Interest Group, CES-EUC, Department of English, GLL, International Institute, MFA in Creative Writing Program.
December 10, 2009
4:00PM - 5:30PM, 1636 International Institute/SSWB
Further Information:
This lecture assesses Romania's transformation in the two decades since the dramatic events of December 1989. In particular, it tries to address the seeming paradox between the country's significant post-communist achievements, including the January 2007 EU accession, and the pervasive sense of cynicism and disappointment with the country's trajectory among Romanian elites and ordinary citizens. I argue that much of the frustration is due to the gap between unrealistic expectations – fueled by the hopes of a moral renaissance in the wake of the 1989 revolution and the growing salience of Western comparisons – and the much more mundane reality of a fledgling democracy that still bears noticeable traces of the country's difficult communist and pre-communist legacies.
Grigore Pop-Eleches is the author of From Economic Crisis to Reform: IMF Programs in Latin America and Eastern Europe (Princeton University Press 2009). He has published a number of journal articles about the role of historical legacies and international factors, including EU enlargement, in shaping post-communist political transformations in Eastern Europe. He is interested in the dynamics of political liberalization and deliberalizations in the post-Cold War era, and in the role of elections in triggering these changes. He is currently working on a book manuscript about the mechanisms through which the communist past affects post-communist political behavior, and is involved in a series of public opinion surveys in Romania, Moldova, and Bulgaria, which probe several distinctive features of post-communist politics, including the prevalence of protest voting and widespread distrust in political leaders and institutions.
Part of “The Nines: Brinks, Cusps, and Perceptions of Possibility—from 1789–2009”
Description:
Grigore Pop-Eleches, assistant professor of politics and public and international affairs, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University. Sponsors: CES-EUC, CREES, WCED.
December 13, 2009
3:00 PM - 5:30 PM, Helmut Stern Auditorium, UMMA, 525 S. State.
9s American-Romanian Festival Films.
Further Information:
“The Nines: Brinks, Cusps, and Perceptions of Possibility—from 1789–2009”
In Fall 2009, the Weiser Center for Europe and Eurasia, along with other partnering units at the University of Michigan, will present programs exploring the relationship between world-historic events and the alternative futures they inspired. From the explosion of alternatives in 1919 to the normalization of democratic destinies in 1989, from the crisis of 1929 to the anxieties of 2009, this series will delve into the many iconic “nines” of the modern era.
Description:
Children of the Decree. Florin Iepan, director (68 min., 2004). Architecture and Power. Nicolae Margineanu, director (52 min., 1994). Tickets $5 at the door. For more information, see www.umma.umich.edu. Sponsors: ARF, Inc.; Ager Film; U-M’s UMMA, CES-EUC, CREES.
December 15, 2009
12:00 PM - 01:30 PM, 1636 International Institute/SSWB
CES-EUC End-of-Semester Luncheon. "Rethinking European Urbanism for the 21st Century"
Further Information:
In the past the European city has influenced much of the development of the American city--what can the American point of view provide for rethinking the future of the European city? This discussion will be based on the reciprocal viewpoints of the participants: a European urban designer from Rotterdam who is currently studying Detroit, and two Americans, an urban planner who studies Berlin and an architectural historian who examines Florence. The panelists use these three cities as prototypes of larger challenges in American and European urban life: reconciling historic preservation with contemporary global redevelopment pressures, the transformation of former industrial cities, the emergence of mega-projects as an economic growth strategy, and the challenge of shrinking cities.
Description:
A roundtable discussion. Moderator: Dario Gaggio, CES-EUC director and associate professor of history, U-M. Presenters: Henco Bekkering, professor and chair of Urban Compositions, TU Delft, and Netherlands Visiting Professor of Urban Planning, U-M; Scott Campbell, associate professor of urban planning, U-M; Lydia Soo, associate professor of architecture, U-M. Free and open to the public. European Union Center at the University of Michigan is a European Commission designated Center of Excellence.
December 15, 2009
2:30 PM - 4:00 PM, 1636 International Institute/SSWB, 1080 S. University
Film. Song from the Southern Seas.
Further Information:
Description:
Marat Sarulu, director. A darkly comic feud is ignited when a Russian man suspects that his son is the result of an affair between his wife and a Kazakh neighbor. Russian with English subtitles (80 min., 2008). Free and open to the public.
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