Description

Although political parties of the extreme right closely connected to (Neo)-Nazism have drawn most of the attention of researchers and pundits for a long time, the German public became aware of the self-stylized “New Right” only with the recent rise of new right-wing populist movements. However, immediately after the Second World War, intellectuals constituted a “New Right” that replaced National Socialist ideology of racial supremacy with concepts of ethnopluralism, referred to volkish movements, specifically the “Conservative Revolution,” prior to National Socialism, and adopted new strategies in the struggle for cultural hegemony. While antisemitism, a key element of Nazi ideology, allegedly has been erased from the “New Right’s” political agenda, it still functions as an important ideological and mobilizing factor. In this talk, Marcus Funck will discuss recent developments in the antisemitic discourse of the political right in Germany.

Marcus Funck, historian, is a research associate and Graduate Program Director at the Centre for Research on Antisemitism, Technische Universität Berlin. From 2006 to 2010, he was the DAAD Visiting Professor at the Canadian Centre for German and European Studies at York University. He is the co-editor of the Jahrbuch für Antisemitismusforschung and has published in the fields of modern German and European history. Currently, he is engaging in a “history of the present” exploring the historical archives of present-day radical nationalist thought and is preparing a book-length essay on the history of difference and sameness in Germany since 1800.

Description

Description:
By the end of World War II about 600,000 Hungarian citizens were captured by the Soviet army. One third of the prisoners were civilian internees who were deported from Hungary to the Soviet Union in 1945. The Soviets did not make a distinction between civilians and soldiers and the war was seen as useful for the purpose of supplying a labor force, as well as expanding the communist system in the occupied territories. The presentation will give a detailed picture on the process of the deportation of the civilians and on their fate in Soviet forced labor camps. The presentation also tries to uncover the motives and plans of the Soviet military leadership directing the deportation of hundreds of thousands of civilians from East-Central Europe during the last months of the war.

Speaker:
Tamás Stark received his PhD from the Eötvös Lóránd University of Budapest in 1993. From 1983 he was a researcher at the Institute of History, Research Centre for the Humanities of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and in 2000 he was appointed a senior research fellow. His specialization is forced population movement in East-Central Europe in the period 1938-56, with special regard to the history of the Holocaust, fate of prisoners of war and civilian internees, and the post war migrations. He was involved in numerous international research projects. In 1995/96 he was Pearl Resnick Post-Doctoral fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. In 2014 he was Fulbright professor at Nazareth College, Rochester, NY. USA. His main publications include Hungary’s Human Losses in World War II (Uppsala, 1995) Hungarian Jews during the Holocaust and after the Second World War, 1939-1949: A Statistical Review (Boulder, CO 2000) Magyarok szovjet fogságban /Hungarians in Soviet Captivity/ (Budapest, 2006) A magyar polgári lakosság elhurcolása a Szovjetunióba a korabeli dokumentumok tükrében. /Deportation of Hungarian civilians to the Soviet Union. Documentary Collection./ (Budapest, 2017).

Description

DESCRIPTION: The Nordic countries are often viewed as a group of small states successfully pursuing an international agenda in accordance with the fundamental values of their welfare states. Over the past three decades Nordic foreign and security policies have evolved considerably providing new opportunities for cooperation but also disclosing significant differences in worldviews and strategic choices. This lecture unpacks the state of Nordic foreign and security policies today and discusses current challenges and opportunities.

Anders Wivel teaches international relations at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. His main research interests are foreign and security policies of small European states, the intersection of European integration and security, and the realist tradition in international relations theory. His last book, co-edited with Peter Nedergaard, is The Routledge Handbook of Scandinavian Politics, Routledge, 2017.

SPEAKERS:

Anders Wivel, Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen. He is a member of the Department of Political Science research group on International Relations, Centre for Advanced Security Theory (CAST) and Cente for European Politics (CEP). Professor Wivel cooperates on a regular basis with Centre for Military Studies (CMS). His research focuses on foreign policy, in particular the foreign and security policies of small European states; european integration and security, in particular the exercise of power politics and the role of small states in the EU as well as International Relations theory, in particular the realist tradition..

Francisco Beltran, moderator, Lecturer, Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies

SPONSOR: Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies

SPONSOR: Royal Danish Embassy in Ottawa

Description

As the polls close on 2017 elections in Germany and New Zealand, the Friedrich-Ebert Foundation, the Foundation for European Progressive Studies, the Munk School of Global Affairs, and the Broadbent Institute invite you to join us for a unique panel discussion.

Next Steps for the Global Left

Trump, Brexit, climate change, an ongoing refugee crisis — there are no small problems facing the world right now. How should progressives respond? What does securing a just and democratic future look like, here in Canada, in Europe and around the globe?

Sabina Dewan, Executive Director, JustJobs Network

Angella MacEwen, Senior Economist with Canadian Labour Congress

Stewart Wood (Lord Wood of Anfield), Chair of the United Nations Association UK, British Parliamentarian, Former Advisor to Ed Miliband

Moderated by Randall Hansen, Interim Director, Munk School of Global Affairs

Description

This lecture is organized as part of a series of three screenings devoted to the First World War and will be held in English

Description

The meaning of the struggle for recognition and identity politics or politics of difference in Central and Eastern European countries has gained significance after the political transformation of the nineties, with the appearance of demands for the emancipation of many ethnic groups aiming to recognize their differences and specificity of culture. The lecture will describe two of such groups: Silesians and Carpatho-Rusyns, for which the democratization of social life opened the way to fight for recognition by the states in which those groups live. The aim of the presentation is to reconstruct the strategies of the struggle for recognition and identity politics of Carpatho-Rusyns and Silesian activists in relation to the signalized by Thomas H. Eriksen universal “grammar of identity politics”. Simultaneously, basing on analysis of states policy towards aspirations of Silesians and Carpatho-Rusyns it will show the fundamental difficulties in achieving legal recognition and protection, which involve groups of unknown status, stateless minority, divided in terms of identity, whose right to emancipation is challenged by various social actors.

Ewa Michna PhD habil., is a sociologist associated professor at the Institute of American Studies and Polish Diaspora, Jagiellonian University, Cracow. Her research interests focus around ethnic and national minorities in Central and Eastern Europe, the struggle of minority communities for their recognition and the identity politics of ethnic leaders. Authors of Łemkowie. Grupa etniczna czy naród? (The Lemkos. An Ethnic Group or a Nation?), Kwestie etniczno-narodowościowe na pograniczu Słowiańszczyzny wschodniej i zachodniej. Ruch rusiński na Słowacji. Ukrainie i w Polsce (Ethnic and National Issues in the Borderlands of Eastern and Western Slavic World. The Rusyn Movement in Slovakia, Ukraine and Poland).

Description

After Brexit and Trump, everyone is into “populism,” not only the few specialists who had previously studied the radical right. Populism usually has two targets, “experts” and conspicuous “others.” Concentrating on the latter aspect, this talk lays out an agenda for studying the effects of populism on the law and politics of “membership” in the liberal state. Particular attention is given to the regulation of immigration, citizenship, and majority culture within the European Union and its member states.

Christian Joppke holds a chair in sociology at the University of Bern (CH). He is also a Visiting Professor in the Nationalism Studies Program at Central European University, Budapest, and an Honorary Professor in the Department of Political Science and Government at Aarhus University (Denmark). He is a Member of the German Expert Council on Integration and Migration (SVR). He recently published Legal Integration of Islam (with John Torpey) (Harvard UP 2013), and The Secular State Under Siege: Religion and Politics in Europe and America (Cambridge: Polity 2015), and Is Multiculturalism Dead? Crisis and Persistence in the Constitutional State(Cambridge: Polity 2016).

Description

FRIDAY, 6 OCTOBER 2017

9:00 – 9:15
Welcome
Randall Hansen – University of Toronto
Craig Damian Smith – University of Toronto

9:15 – 10:45
Panel 1: Causes, Theory, and Politics of Migration
Chair: Till van Rahden – Université de Montréal

Gary Freeman – The University of Texas at Austin
How Social Science Failed to Predict the Great Migration Crisis of the Twenty-first Century

Sara Wallace Goodman – University of California, Irvine
The Architecture of Failure: The Institutional Origins of the Refugee Crisis

Daniel Göler – Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg
Migration in Europe and the Refugee Crisis: What Remains?

Sebastian Zeitzmann – Europäische Akademie Otzenhausen
Will Brexiters Be Able to Fight Their Nemesis EU Migration Post-Brexit?

10:45 – 11:15
COFFEE BREAK

11:15 – 12:30
Panel 2: Integration Policy and Practices
Chair: Anna Korteweg – University of Toronto

Christian Joppke – Universität Bern
Refugees and Integration Policy

Marco Martiniello – FRS-FNRS and Université de Liège
Refugee Integration and Refugee Integration Policies in the EU: Ambiguities and Perspectives

Liav Orgad – WZB Berlin, EUI Florence, IDC Herzliya
The Citizen-Makers: Ethical Dilemmas in Immigrant Education

12:30 – 13:15
LUNCH

13:15 – 14:45
Panel 3: Attitudes toward Migrants & Asylum Seekers
Chair: Phil Triadafilopoulos – University of Toronto

Magdalena Lesińska – University of Warsaw
Backlash against Immigrants and Asylum Seekers in Central-Eastern Europe

Rahsaan Maxwell – The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Cosmopolitan Immigration Attitudes in Europe’s Large Cities: Adaptation or Selection?

Antal Örkény – Eotvos Loránd University, Budapest
The Social Representation of Strangers and Attitudes towards Immigrants in Europe

14:45 – 15:00
COFFEE BREAK

15:00 – 16:30
Panel 4: Legal Perspectives
Chair: Jennifer Elrick – McGill University

Kay Hailbronner – Universität Konstanz
The Common European Asylum System: Wishful Legal Thinking or Reality?

Dia Anagnostou – Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences
Human Rights Law and Its Consequences for Asylum Policy in Europe

Shauna Labman – University of Manitoba
The Export Experiment: Globalizing Canada’s Private Sponsorship

Steve Peers – University of Essex
Litigating the Refugee Crisis

16:30 – 17:30
RECAP DISCUSSION

SATURDAY, 7 OCTOBER 2017

9:30 – 10:30 BREAKFAST AND CONSULTATIONS

10:30 – 12:15 Panel 5: National and Regional Perspectives
Chair: Daniel Göler – Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg

Danica Šantić – University of Belgrade
Serbia’s Response to the Current Migration Crisis: New Strategies and Policies for Managing Mixed Migration Flows?

Simon Green – Aston University
Reflections on Asylum Policy in Germany

Adrian Favell – University of Leeds
Crossing the Race Line: Brexit, Citizenship and “Immigrants” in the Referendum

Oliver Schmidtke – University of Victoria
The Fallout of the “Refugee Crisis” in Germany’s Competitive Party Politics: A Post-electoral Assessment

12:15 – 13:00
LUNCH

13:00 – 14:30
Panel 6: Mobility and Borders within the EU
Chair: Marco Martiniello – FRS-FNRS and Université de Liège

Nils Holtug – University of Copenhagen
A Fair Distribution of Refugees in the European Union

Alfonso Giordano – Libera Università Internazionale degli Studi Sociali, Rome
Borders and Spaces in Mediterranean Migration between Supranational Consultations and National Interests

Christof Roos – Europa-Universität Flensburg
The (De-)Politicization of EU Freedom of Movement: Political Parties, Framing, and Policy Change in Germany and the UK

14:30 – 14:45
COFFEE BREAK

14:45 – 17:00
CONCLUDING DISCUSSIONS

Description

**THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED**

This talk explores ways in which the Baltic region enabled the rise and consolidation of the French colonial empire in the Americas. The Baltic, a supplier of masts, tar, hemp, iron, planks, and other naval stores, has long been viewed as central to early modern European expansion overseas. Nevertheless, its particular association with French empire building remains little studied. Drawing on data from the Danish Sound Toll Registers and French consular records, the talk delineates how French colonization began as an attempt to secure commercial independence from the Baltic, only to produce the opposite effect of binding the French colonial enterprise and the Baltic ever closer together.

Pernille Røge is Assistant Professor of French and French Colonial History at the University of Pittsburgh. Her scholarly interests focus on interconnections between eighteenth-century political economic theory and colonial policy and practice. Her publications on the French, British, and Danish colonial empires have appeared in edited volumes and peer reviewed journals, including Dix-huitième Siècle, Slavery and Abolition, Atlantic Studies, and History of European Ideas. She is co-editor of a collection of essays entitled The Political Economy of Empire in the Early Modern World (Palgrave MacMillan, 2013). Her book manuscript Reinventing the Empire: Political Economy, France, and the African and Caribbean Colonies, c. 1750-1800 is currently under review with Cambridge University Press.

All Joint French History Seminar events are held in English unless otherwise noted.

Description

The Republic of Serbia is a country with a long tradition of emigration, with specific economic political, religious, cultural context and significant number of people living abroad. Although a comprehensive census of Serbian diasporas and Serbs in the region has never been conducted, it is estimated that this emigrant community today counts around 5 million people. One of the main characteristics of this particular diaspora is heterogeneous geographical distribution, with the majority being in Western Europe, North America and Australia. Also, Serbia is one of the largest remittance-recipient countries in the world. The Serbian diaspora possesses immense untapped economic potential and is an important factor in improving economic ties between origin and destination countries. It has the potential to contribute to countries’ economies and overall development, not only through the positive impacts of remittances but also through the transfer of know-how acquired abroad and possibly through the migrants’ return to their home country.

Danica is an Assistant Professor at the University of Belgrade – Faculty of Geography, Serbia. Her main fields of research are migration and population geography, in the first place distribution characteristics, forms of spatial structures, connections and relationships between demographic elements, and other spatial systems as dynamic and temporally variable categories. Her current research centers on integrating migration into the academic curricula in Serbia, and developing international networks ’’Migration, interconectivity and regional development’’ and ’’West Balkan migration network’’. In empirical terms her recent work has been focused on Balkan migration route and on Serbian diaspora.

Description

Dictators Without Borders: Power and Money in Central Asia
Alex Cooley, Columbia University and Barnard College

Weak, corrupt, and politically unstable, the former Soviet republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan are dismissed as isolated and irrelevant to the outside world. But are they? Based on years of research and involvement in the region, Cooley discusses his book co-authored with John Heathershaw (U. Exeter), in which they reveal how business networks, elite bank accounts, overseas courts, third-party brokers, and Western lawyers connect Central Asia’s supposedly isolated leaders with global power centers. Cooley uncovers widespread Western participation in money laundering, bribery, foreign lobbying by autocratic governments, and the exploitation of legal loopholes within Central Asia. Cooley’s talk exposes the global connections of a troubled region that must no longer be ignored, arguing for fundamental changes to how we analyze the global political economy.

Speaker:
Alex Cooley is director of Columbia University’s Harriman Institute and a professor of Political Science at Barnard College

Chair: Ed Schatz

Description

Within the past few years, the Ukrainian authorities have been heavily critisized by international watchdogs and independent observers for some legal steps and practical policies that allegedly curtail freedom of speech and access to information in the country. The government and its supporters argue, however, that the policies are justified by the actual situation of war waged by the neigboring Russia against Ukraine and have nothing to do with a censorship in a conventional sense but, rather, represents a defensive measure against the enemy’s propaganda, subversion, and provocative disinformation. The debate represents a partiular case of a broader controversy between the demand for unrestrained freedom of speech indispensable for modern democracy and the need of those very democracies to protect themselves from the rogue individials, groups, and regimes that increasingly learned how to weaponize media and (dis)information for their malevolent goals.

Description

So far, security studies have given surprisingly little attention to ethnic diversity as a constituent factor in the overall dynamics of security management. Many basic contributions to the field still refer to ethnic difference mainly as a source of conflict and therefore as an object of securitization. As a consequence, cultural codes, linguistic barriers, and processes of self-identification and ethnic grouping as well as ethnic othering have not constituted an important aspect of analysis. Especially in multi-ethnic societies, however, ethnic affiliations play a crucial role in pre-structuring audiences and security agendas. The presentation thus addresses this emerging field for interdisciplinary security studies. It aims at identifying components coming from different disciplines that will help us to understand why and when ethnic difference becomes a security issue at the intersection of different societal categories and agencies. It will do that in reference to historical as well as current European examples, thus inviting to reflect on the development of a new research design.”

Since 2007, Peter Haslinger has been the Director of the Herder Institute for Historical Research on East-Central Europe in Marburg, Professor of East-Central European History at the Historical Institute of the Justus Liebig University and the Interdisciplinary Center for Eastern Europe in Gießen (GiZo). His research and teaching focuses security and violence studies; minority issues and questions of nationalism, regionalism and language policies; memory and history of discourse; the spatial turn and the history of cartography. His publications focus on the Habsburg monarchy and successor states in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Description

Registration for this event is now full. Please note that seating is provided on a first-come, first-served basis.

On October 1st, the Government of Catalonia held a referendum on the issue of secession from Spain. The Constitutional Court had ruled the referendum illegal, and the police intervened to uphold the law when the regional government openly defied the tribunal. The images of riot police trying to prevent the voting from happening made headlines all over the world. The Catalan premier proclaimed that a majority of voters were in favor of secession, and that the regional parliament will declare unilateral independence soon, despite the many observers and legal experts who allege that the whole process violates the Constitution, the Catalan laws and the regional parliament’s bylaws. How did we arrive at this situation? Does the Catalan referendum embody a people’s struggle for its liberation, as the secessionists claim, or is it just an outright attack on a well-established democracy, as those contrary to independence say? Would the European Union recognize the new state as a member of the club? Is the international media impartial or biased when reporting on the matter? Will this be just another local crisis or will it have wider political consequences? The lecture will address all these issues, and will claim that the outcome of the Catalan crisis will have a decisive impact on the future of European democracy and on the liberal regimes of the West.

SPEAKERS:

Carolina de Miguel, speaker, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science

Francisco Beltran, speaker, Lecturer, Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies

Jon Allen, discussant, Former Ambassador of Canada to Spain

Robert Austin, moderator, Associate Professor, Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies

SPONSOR: Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies

Description

This event will be held in German.

STEFANIE BUCHENAU ist maître de conférences an der Université Paris 8 in Saint Denis. Ihr Vortrag behandelt die folgende Thematik: Wenn wir von Menschenwürde sprechen, sprechen wir die Sprache der Aufklärung. Wir verwenden einen Begriff oder ein Begriffskompositum, das seine historischen Wurzeln im 18. Jahrhundert hat. In dieser neuen lexikalischen Verknüpfung der Nomina „Mensch“ und „Würde“ kommt die moderne Idee zum Ausdruck, dass der Mensch als Mensch einen „unveräußerlichen“ und „unantastbaren“ Titel besitzt, der bestimmte Rechte begründet und einen Anspruch auf Achtung seitens seiner Mitmenschen. In diesem Vortrag soll dieses neue Begriffsfeld der Aufklärung in einigen charakteristischen Grundzügen und insbesondere mit Blick auf Mendelssohn, Kant und die Debatte um die Bestimmung des Menschen rekonstruiert werden. Das soll einerseits helfen, die Sprache, in der wir heute unseren Intuitionen und Forderungen nach Würde kleiden, besser und konkreter zu verstehen. Andererseits soll anhand dieser Rekonstruktion auch ein neuer historischer Zugriff auf die Aufklärung und Kants kritische Philosophie entwickelt werden.

If you have any accommodation needs, please e-mail german@chass.utoronto.ca five business days prior to the event, and we will do our best to assist you.

Description

Registration for this event is now full. Please note that seating is provided on a first-come, first-served basis.

The widespread complicity of German racial scientists in Nazi eugenic and racial policy is well documented. By contrast, the question of what influence these scientists had on the shaping and radicalization of Nazi biopolitics is more difficult to answer. Wetzell challenges the thesis that Nazi racial science “created the conceptual framework” for Nazi racial policy. Racial science could not have provided a coherent conceptual framework because the field was characterized by competing conceptions of race and heredity, which frequently led to controversies and conflicts, three of which will be examined in this presentation. Instead of using “race” as an analytical category for understanding Nazi Germany, historians must investigate how both scientists and Nazi officials deployed competing conceptions of race for various strategic purposes at different points in the development of the Nazi regime.

Richard F. Wetzell is a Research Fellow at the German Historical Institute in Washington DC and Adjunct Associate Professor at Georgetown University. His most recent publication is the co-edited volume Beyond the Racial State: Rethinking Nazi Germany (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming fall 2017). His other publications include Inventing the Criminal: A History of German Criminology, 1880-1945 (2000), Engineering Society: The Role of the Human and Social Sciences in Modern Societies, 1880-1980 (co-edited, 2012), and Crime and Criminal Justice in Modern Germany (2014).

Description

This event will be held in French.

La conférence se présente en deux temps, d’abord depuis l’archive ensuite depuis trois œuvres artistiques en cours de réalisation, le film de Pierre Shoeller « Un peuple et son roi », en cours de montage, le spectacle de Séverine Chavrier « Egmont » dont la première était le 21 septembre, 2017, le film en préparation de Vincent Dieutre sur Saint-Just. Dans les trois cas Sophie Wahnich est conseillère scientifique et littéraire.

Madame Sophie Wahnich, professeur distingué invité au CEFMF, directrice de recherche au CNRS est spécialiste en histoire, anthropologie et études politiques sur la Révolution française. Elle est directrice de l’Institut interdisciplinaire d’anthropologie contemporaine et membre d’un groupe de recherche « Transformation radicales des mondes contemporains » à l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales et elle contribue régulièrement au Chronique « historique » du journal Libération.

Description

Sophie Wahnich. Directrice de recherche au CNRS. Spécialiste en histoire, anthropologie et études politiques sur la Révolution française.

Description

During her talk, 2012-2013 Jacyk Postdoctoral Fellow Professor Mayhill Fowler will present her recently published book. In Beau Monde on Empire’s Edge, Mayhill C. Fowler tells the story of the rise and fall of a group of men who created culture both Soviet and Ukrainian. This collective biography showcases new aspects of the politics of cultural production in the Soviet Union by focusing on theater and on the multi-ethnic borderlands. Unlike their contemporaries in Moscow or Leningrad, these artists from the regions have been all but forgotten despite the quality of their art. Beau Monde restores the periphery to the center of Soviet culture. Sources in Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, and Yiddish highlight the important multi-ethnic context and the challenges inherent in constructing Ukrainian culture in a place of Ukrainians, Russians, Poles, and Jews. Beau Monde on Empire’s Edge traces the growing overlap between the arts and the state in the early Soviet years, and explains the intertwining of politics and culture in the region today. The book has been published with University of Toronto Press.

Dr. Mayhill C. Fowler (Ph.D., Princeton) is assistant professor of history at Stetson University, where she also directs the program in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies. She teaches and researches the cultural history of Russia and Eastern Europe, with a focus on Ukraine, and is interested in how social and political structures shape entertainment, representation, and live performance. She has published widely on culture in Ukraine. Her first book– Beau Monde at Empire’s Edge: State and Stage in Soviet Ukraine (Toronto, 2017)—tells the story of how a very rich cultural center became a cultural periphery through a collective biography of young artists and officials in the 1920s and 1930s. Her second project investigates how we entertain soldiers, through the lens of the former Red Army Theater in Lviv. She also thinks about the Soviet actress, Yiddish theater, and 19th century itinerant theater clans. She was the Petro Jacyk Postdoctoral Fellow at Toronto in 2012-2013, held a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard’s Ukrainian Research Institute, and taught cultural history at the Catholic University in Lviv.

Description

In his lecture, Patrice G. Poutrus will lead us through the developments of migration and asylum policy in the two postwar German states from the end of late 1940s to early 1990s, with the main focus on West Germany. His aim is to show how changes in constitutional law, migration policy and political culture were accompanied and influenced by migration itself. Looking at how public and political opinions on the issues of migration and asylum were shaped can help us to better understand the nature subsequent developments in public opinion and asylum policy, including their consequences for the refugee crisis of 2015.

Dr. Poutrus is a member of the German Research Foundation’s ‘Foundations of Refugee Research’ network. He served as senior fellow at the Institute for Contemporary History at the University of Vienna and at the Simon-Wiesenthal-Institute for Holocaust Studies and has taught at the Martin-Luther University (Halle) and the Free University (Berlin). Next semester, he will be affiliated with the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt Oder, where he will be doing a substitution as a lecturer and will lead classes on the History of Nationalism and another on Media History.

Description

George Liber will speak about his book Total Wars and the Making of Modern Ukraine, 1914–1954. Between 1914 and 1954, the Ukrainian-speaking territories in East Central Europe suffered almost 15 million “excess deaths” as well as large-scale evacuations and population transfers, the consequences of two world wars, revolutions, famines, genocidal campaigns, and purges. George Liber argues that these events made and re-made Ukraine’s boundaries, institutionalized its national identities, and pruned its population according to various state-sponsored political, racial, and social ideologies. In short, the two world wars, the Holodomor, and the Holocaust played critical roles in forming today’s Ukraine.

George O. Liber is Professor of History at the University of Alabama in Birmingham. His previous books include Soviet Nationality Policy, Urban Growth and Identity Change in the Ukrainian SSR, 1923-1934 and Alexander Dovzhenko: A Life in Soviet Film.

No registration is required for this event.