Description

During the German occupation, to a large part of the Polish people, everyday struggle for existence was more challenging than participation in resistance and armed conflict. The lecture will analyze and categorize strategies of survival that, according to contemporary definitions, form systems of values, which identify existing threats and provide survival mechanisms. The scope of the lecture will be limited to the Polish intelligentsia mostly in the German-occupied General Government, with limited focus on the Polish areas incorporated directly into the Reich.

This event is sponsored in part by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) with funds from the German Federal Foreign Office (AA).

Description

The Sorbs of Lusatia are a Slavic minority community which has traditionally lived in parts of present-day Saxony and Brandenburg in Germany. Their identity is primarily expressed through the use of Upper and Lower Sorbian, West Slavic languages currently spoken by approximately 20,000 people in total. It is also reflected in these individuals’ self-identification as Sorbs, as members of the Sorbian society, who cultivate and receive Sorbian culture, wear Sorbian costumes, attend Sorbian religious services or participate in the teaching of Sorbian.

In my talk, I will discuss a number of factors that play a role in the maintenance of the Sorbian identity. These include the political representation of Sorbian interests on the state level, education (from preschools to elementary and high schools), higher education and research, religion, media (magazines, newspapers, radio, television, internet) and cultural institutions (music ensembles, book publishers, museums, theaters).
I will also explore the conditions necessary for the maintenance of the Sorbian language, culture and identity. Above all, and as history has shown, the state must be able to create policies which promote a minority-friendly atmosphere. Every citizen living in a bilingual territory is deserving of support. However, from the more contemporary perspective, the efforts for the continued existence of the Sorbian people can only succeed if their own initiatives, the tolerance and support of these initiatives from all citizens, and initiatives favoring government intervention work in cooperation with one another.

The Sorbs’ own efforts will be able to develop only to the degree that they are accepted by the German population, as the minority is always dependent on the goodwill of the majority. The specific situation of the Sorbs as an ethnic group lacking a “home country” in which they would be the majority is accompanied by the fact that, to date, no adequate answers to many fundamental questions have been found.

This event is sponsored in part by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) with funds from the German Federal Foreign Office (AA).

Description

Inger Enkvist is professor em. of Spanish and Latin-American literature at Lund University, Sweden and also a well-know author of books on education published mainly in Spanish and Swedish. She has some 40 books published and more than 200 articles. In Spanish she has written on the Peruvian-Spanish writer Mario Vargas Llosa and the Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo. She has published on Spanish philosophers and Latin-American Icons. In education, she has published books on the Swedish education reforms and books on international comparison in education. Her current research focuses on new trends in teacher education and how to reform teacher education in Sweden.

Sweden introduced the “comprehensive school” in 1962. Obligatory school up to the age of 16 was to lead to social harmony and equality, and there was to be no specific learning targets to be acquired in order to graduate. Reforms in 1969 and in 1976 put still more emphasis on a social and caring approach. In 1985, the teacher education was changed in order to prepare teachers for the new role that teachers were to adopt.This basic model was not changed in the 90s, but the 90s also saw a radical decentralization and the introduction of a kind of charter schools plus a new type of curriculum. In 2001 there was a reform that introduced a teacher education based on the basic equality between different kinds of teachers. A number of reforms 2010-2011 introduced some changes but did not touch the basic model neither for schools nor for teacher education.

Description

For nearly five years, the Minsk Agreements have been successful in sustaining violence in Ukraine at a low level. The public awareness of the conflict in which nothing really happens has also been steadily going down. And, when invoked, the war in Ukraine is usually discussed solely in geopolitical or military terms.

Missing from this picture are six million people who live in the war zone in eastern Ukraine. Still dealing with the trauma of direct violence in 2014-2015, they are currently exposed to indirect consequences of war. Disrupted infrastructure, restrictions on movement, diseases, lack of access to basic services, unemployment, and shadow economy – these are the everyday realities of life in the vicinity of the war in Ukraine. At the same time, these factors shape a unique local culture of resilience. People come up with creative strategies of traveling, safety, parenting, entrepreneurship, and mutual assistance.

Alisa Sopova is a journalist from Donetsk and currently an MA candidate in Regional Studies (Russia, Eastern Europe, Central Asia) program at Harvard University. Previously news editor for Donbass, the biggest newspaper in Donetsk Region of Ukraine, since 2014 she has been extensively covering the military conflict in the area for a number of media including the New York Times, Time magazine, and the Guardian. Alisa has joined Harvard as a first Nieman fellow from Ukraine and stayed to continue her research of everyday coping strategies employed by residents in the frontline communities.

Description

Drawing on 125 unpublished diaries from the Soviet archives, this lecture offers an intimate look at the Leningrad Blockade, one of the longest and deadliest sieges in history. The talk examines how Leningraders trapped inside the city came to intellectual grips with extreme starvation and isolation. In the process of contemplating the meaning of their suffering, they placed themselves, their city, and the Soviet experience under a critical microscope.
 
Alexis Peri received her PhD in history from the University of California Berkeley, and is an Associate Professor of History at Boston University. The War Within: Diaries from the Siege of Leningrad, the book upon which the talk is based, was published by Harvard University Press in 2017 and won the Pushkin Book Prize, the University of Southern California Book Prize in Literary and Cultural Studies, and the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages Book Prize for Cultural Studies. She is working on a new book project about Soviet and American pen-friendships during WWII and the Cold War. It is entitled Dear Unknown Friend: Soviet and American Women Discovered the Power of the Personal.

Description

Jelena Subotic (PhD, Political Science, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2007) is Professor of Political Science at Georgia State University in Atlanta, USA. She is the author of two books: Hijacked Justice: Dealing with the Past in the Balkans (Cornell University Press, 2009, Serbian translation 2010) and Yellow Star, Red Star: Holocaust Remembrance after Communism (Cornell University Press, forthcoming, 2019). Professor Subotic is the author of more than twenty scholarly articles on international relations theory, memory politics, national identity, human rights, and the politics of the Western Balkans.

This event is funded in part by the DAAD through the German Federal Foreign Office (AA).

Description

In 2015 the decommunization laws in Ukraine gave open access to the GPU-NKVD-KGB archives, and historians immediately seized the opportunity to study new types of secret police documents which had been inaccessible earlier. Among them were the almost unknown dela-formulyary, i.e. surveillance files on the Ukrainian scholars who worked at the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences in the 1920s–1930s.
These files were prepared for many years and contained all information about researchers and their milieu. They consisted of several types of documents – track records, questionnaires, characteristics, references, secret police supervisory materials, copies of testimonies of the detainees, copies of opened and inspected correspondence, as well as numerous “bulletins” and “informational messages” from the secret informants.

Despite the fact that there are practically no official archival materials on secret informants (their personal files were either obliterated or moved to Russia), it is very likely that their names can be identified. In her talk Oksana Yurkova will present her analysis of the surveillance files and discuss the problem of secret informants among Ukrainian scholars in the 1920s–1930s. Also she will present her research on deciphering of the academic secret informants’ nicknames.

Dr. Oksana Yurkova is a Leading Researcher at the Institute of History of Ukraine, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, in Kyiv, Ukraine.
She studies Ukrainian historiography of the 20th century, especially focusing on the interwar period (1920s–1930s), the Ukrainian historian Mykhailo Hrushevsky and his Kyiv historical school, as well as the activity of Ukrainian historical institutions of that period; iconography; anthropology of academic life; electronic information resources. In 2015, she initiated the Mykhailo Hrushevsky Digital Archives which collects and presents all printed and archival materials dealing with this famous historian and political figure (http://hrushevsky.nbuv.gov.ua/ ).
In 2019 the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies awarded her the Kolasky Visiting Research Fellowship in the Humanities and Social Sciences, Law, Education, and Library Sciences 2019–2020. In Toronto she works on the project “Canadian Sources for the Mykhailo Hrushevsky Digital Archives.” For more details see her web-page http://resource.history.org.ua/person/0000512

Description

On the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the failed coup d’état against Hitler on 20 July 1944, there has been a considerable surge of publications on the topic. Some such books, at times by amateur historians, have focused on the personality of Stauffenberg, the mastermind behind the conspiracy and the man who planted the bomb. Was he driven by religious and ethical motives, by his allegiance to the circle around esoteric author Stefan George, or was he motivated by purely military considerations?

Winfried Heinemann argues that, in the same way the political resistance was influenced by Weimar-era thought, so too were the military conspirators shaped by their experience in the Reichswehr (Army of the Weimar Republic). He will place the revolt in the context of the Third Reich’s polycratic structures, and explain how that in turn prevented the postwar West German Bundeswehr (Federal Armed Forces) from identifying too easily with the conspirators.

Winfried Heinemann was born in Dortmund and studied history and English language at Bochum University and King’s College, London. From 1983 to 2018, he served as an officer in the German Army. Since 1986, he was attached to the German Armed Forces ‘ Centre for Military History in Freiburg, later in Potsdam. After taking his PhD with a thesis on the early diplomatic history of NATO, he went on to direct the East German Military History branch, then the departments for research and for historical education. He retired as the Chief of Staff and Deputy Commander of the Centre.

Gavin Wiens (commentator) completed his PhD in the Department of History at the University of Toronto in 2019. His dissertation argued that the German army remained a decentralized, contingent-based institution between the Wars of Unification and the end of the First World War and that the distribution of military power among Germany’s lesser kings, grand dukes, and princes played a crucial role in legitimizing and perpetuating monarchical rule during a period of rapid economic and social change. He has published essays on the composition and operations of the German army during the First World War and he has held grants and fellowships from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the Central European History Society, the German Historical Institute, Washington, DC, and the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto. His current research focuses on the activities of German military attachés and advisors in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and South America between the Napoleonic Wars and the end of the Cold War.

This event is co-financed by the DAAD with funds from the German Federal Foreign Office (AA).

Description

Canada has been praised globally for the outcomes of its settlement and integration policies. Religion is often a factor influencing the initial arrival of migrants, and their transition to life in Canada. What ideas, principles, and beliefs motivate those involved with faith-based settlement organizations? What role do religious communities play in supporting the process of settlement and integration? Are there ways in which they inhibit the process of social integration, or reinforce social divisions? What can secular and faith-based organizations involved in the settlement of recent immigrants learn from each other? How should the academic study of the settlement and integration of immigrants take account of the role played by religion in this process?

Panel Discussion:

Anne Woolger, Founding Director, Matthew House

Bayan Khatib, Executive Director, Syrian Canadian Foundation

Neda Farahmandpour, Manager, Toronto North Local Immigration Partnership, JVS Toronto

This seminar series is organized in partnership by the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy with the Baha’i Community of Canada and the University of Toronto Multi-Faith Centre.

Description

Early modern Europeans were preoccupied with the problem of safely crossing
the oceans. Such trips—for trade, war, and colonial expansion—could end in
disaster if the navigator fell ill or relied on outdated maps and
instruments on the treacherous seas. Each polity felt that their neighbours
were more successful in creating new navigators. In this talk, Margaret
Schotte will examine French, British, and Dutch records about training
mariners, arguing that they shared a common set of strategies, which had
originated in Iberia. And yet, in spite of this pan-European educational
model, her analysis reveals unexpected variation in how mariners from
different states approached particular tasks—from assessing the speed of
their vessels to estimating their position. Where the Dutch chose
logarithmic tables, the French turned to instruments. What effects did
these choices have? At a time when maritime knowledge had significant
geopolitical ramifications, we find that nautical science and practice, had
distinct national characteristics.

Margaret E. Schotte is an associate professor of history at York
University. Her new monograph, Sailing School: Navigating Science and Skill, 1550-1800 (Johns Hopkins UP, 2019), is a comparative study of the development and
dissemination of Dutch, English, and French sailors’ navigational
practices—in the classroom, on board ship, and across international
borders. Schotte traces the impact of print culture on navigational
instruction, and reconsiders the rise of mathematics in European
intellectual and artisanal cultures. She has worked on French travel
narratives and hydrography lessons in New France. Her next project examines
the unexpected mathematical lessons that took place aboard a Dutch East
India Co. ship during the Seven Years’ War. www.margaretschotte.com or:
http://profiles.laps.yorku.ca/profiles/mschotte/

Description

Internet voting in Estonia 2005-2019
How Does It Work and Why Does 50% of the Population Vote Online?

In 2005, Estonia was the first country in the world to offer universal remote internet voting in all national elections. Since then, the usage numbers have gradually grown in all e-enabled elections. A new milestone was reached in 2019 when close to 50% of all votes given were electronic. The lecture explores the uptake and usage patterns of internet voting, employing both survey and system log data on voter behavior. Specific attention is devoted to what drives usage growth given that every second vote in Estonia is now given online, but voter turnout has hardly changed over the course of 15 years of internet voting.

Mihkel Solvak (PhD) is a senior research fellow in technology studies and head of institute at the Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies. His research interest include remote internet voting, electoral behavior, uptake and diffusion patterns of digital public services, data driven and machine learning enabled public services. He is affiliated with the Center of IT Impact Studies (CITIS), a research group that prototypes and builds digital public services for Estonian e-government.

Description

Ivan Chorvát is Associate Professor at the Department of Social Studies and Ethnology, Faculty of Arts, Matej Bel University in Banská Bystrica (Slovakia) and at the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Arts, The University of Trnava (Slovakia). He studied Sociology at the Faculty of Arts at Charles University in Prague, Society and Politics at the Central European University in Prague (Czech Republic), and completed his doctoral studies at The Institute for Sociology of the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Bratislava (1998). His main areas of research include the sociology of family, tourism, leisure and consumption, and the study of sociological theory. I. Chorvát is the author of monographs Man – Father in the Contemporary Family (1999), Travel and Tourism in the Mirror of Time (2007), Leisure in Slovakia from a Sociological Perspective (2011), Consumption and the Consumer Society (2015) and co-editor of Family in Slovakia in Theory and Research (2015) and Leisure, Culture and Society: Czech Republic and Slovakia (forthcoming).

Description

Friday October 25

2:00-2:15 Opening Remarks

2:15-3:00
Idit Dobbs-Weinstein, The Same Is the Different: Nature, Fortune, History in Machiavelli

3:00-3:45
Oleg Gelikman, The Quake of the Real: on the Ontology of Relation in Montaigne

3:45-4:15 Coffee Break

4:15-5:00
Willi Goetschel, Writing Otherwise: Montaigne and La Boëtie

5:00-5:45
Warren Montag, “To Quit the Principles of Human Nature:” Locke’s Notion of the Inhuman

Saturday October 26

10:15-11:00
Tracie Matysik, Substance as Contingency in the Young Karl Marx

11:00-11:45
Michael Rosenthal, On the Advantages and Disadvantages of Using Aesthetics to Make Sense of Immorality in Politics: Exempla, Thought-Images, and the Eichmann Trial

12:00-1:30
Lunch

1:30-2:15 James McNaughton, Beckett’s Political Aesthetic

2:15-3:00 David Suchoff, De-Colonizing Dialect: Beckett’s Palestinian and Irish Canines

3:00-3:15
Coffee Break

3:15-4:00
Omar Rivera, Resistance as Alterity in Decolonial Aesthetics

4:00-4:45
Amogh Sahu, Skepticism and the Philosophy of Difference

5:00-5:30
Open Discussion

Description

This talk addresses the tensions which arose in the Russian emigre community in France during and after WWII. These tensions resulted from the divergent experiences and interpretations of the war by the Russian and Russian-Jewish cultural elites who had emigrated to France after the communist coup of 1917. Examining, on the basis of largely unpublished archival materials, attitudes toward Nazi Germany and the Vichy regime among exiled Russian-speaking writers and intellectuals, those who stayed in war-time France and those who took refuge in the United Stated, the talk will focus on Russian reactions to German and French anti-Semitic policies. The goal is to deepen our understanding of the precipitous decline of the Russian emigre cultural community, which thrived in interwar France, by exploring a taboo aspect of its final years, obfuscated in scholarly literature — namely, its fracturing along ethnic lines under the impact of the Holocaust. The talk will argue that traumatic war experience, including the manifest or perceived political attitudes of ethnic Russians in France, modified the cultural identity of the exiled Russian-Jewish intelligentsia, which had been the backbone of interwar Russian emigre cultural life, weakening its commitment to Russia Abroad and thereby accelerating the cultural community’s fragmentation and decline in France.
Leonid Livak is a professor at the University of Toronto’s Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Centre for Jewish Studies, and an associated researcher at the Centre d’études des Mondes Russe, Caucasien & Centre-Européen (EHESS-Paris). He has published extensively on Russian-French and Russian-Jewish cultural history, and on Russian and transnational modernism. Among his books are: How It Was Done in Paris: Russian Emigre Literature and French Modernism (2003); Le Studio franco-russe (2005); Russian Emigres in the Intellectual and Literary Life of Interwar France (2010); The Jewish Persona in the European Imagination (2010); In Search of Russian Modernism (2018). As part of his current research project, “The Final Chapter of Russia Abroad,” he is writing the cultural history of the decline of the Russian emigre community in France.

Description

“Transformations of the Mind: Technology and the Future of Creativity”
A conversation with Jacek Dukaj

To RSVP, please email Prof. Aleksandra Swiecka at aleksandra.swiecka@utoronto.ca

Description

Translation is one of the spheres where the effects of an ideology are most visible because what is allowed and proscribed to exist in a culture is immediately reflected on the constraints surrounding the agents of translators e.g. the translators editors publishers and their resulting translational behavior. Rethinking the issue of translator agency within a framework of censorship can shed light on both the unusual and imperceptible constraints that impinge on translational activity. Through a review of a variety of scandalous translation cases that have generated much legal academic and public debate in Turkey this talk explores the question of translator agency under an emerging authoritarian regime with a focus on the institutional forms of censorship in the production of translated literature. By casting light on the multifaceted power relations between the agents of translation and institutions of power a study on censorship and translator agency also contributes to ongoing studies of how larger systems of culture and literature evolve.