Description

The presentation is a survey of the expanding “politics of memory” in Bulgaria during three periods of the country’s recent history: the Stalinist period, the period of Communist Nationalism the Post-Communist period. The older cultural symbols reveal the ideological agenda of the time — they represent the infamous style of the monumental propaganda known as “socialistic realism”. The more recent, totally different in spirit and style Post-Communist memorials have been created in order to keep the memory of people who were victims during communism – yet, they are almost invisible.

Evelina Kelbcheva is a historian at the American University in Bulgaria. She received her PhD from the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences in Sofia, Bulgaria.

Description

The explosion at the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant on April 26, 1986 continues to have serious economic, social, and biological consequences for the inhabitants of the affected territories and beyond. The problems caused by the disaster in Ukraine and policies developed to address them have been further complicated by geopolitical conflict and the economic and humanitarian crisis this conflict has precipitated. To commemorate the 30th anniversary of the disaster, this panel brings together scholars to discuss issues such as the future nuclear energy in Ukraine, the impact of radiation on wildlife in Chornobyl’s exclusion zone, and the management of displaced people. In situating their research, panelists will draw comparisons between the Chornobyl and Fukushima accidents, and between the Chornobyl accident and Ukraine’s Anti-Terrorist Operation.

Presentations:

Chernobyl and the Future of Nuclear Power in Ukraine
David Marples, Professor, Department of History and Classics, University of Alberta

Do Nuclear Accidents Generate a “Garden of Eden” for Wildlife? Lessons from the Chernobyl and Fukushima Disasters
Tim Mousseau, Professor of Biological Sciences, University of South Carolina.

A Humanitarian Crisis after the Chernobyl Disaster and the Anti-terrorist Operation (ATO) in Ukraine: What do They Have in Common?
Alexander Belyakov, Ph.D., Certified Sustainability Professional. The Roots Collaborative, Founding Member

Description

Lyuba Yakimchuk, a Ukrainian poet, screenwriter and journalist, was born in Eastern Ukraine, in Pervomaisk, Luhansk oblast. She is the author of several full-length poetry collections, including Like FASHION and Apricots of Donbas.

Lyuba will be reading works from her most recent collection and discussing her poems as a reflection of the ongoing trauma resulting from the war in Eastern Ukraine. (In Ukrainian with simultaneous English translation.)

Description

The Toronto Annual Ukrainian Famine Lecture began in 1998 at the initiative of the Famine-Genocide Commemorative Committee of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress, Toronto Branch. Past lecturers have included James Mace, Norman Naimark, Alexander Motyl, Anne Applebaum, and Tymothy Snyder.

Description

Speakers:

Dr. Tünde Juhász – Administrative Government Commissioner for Csongrad County (Hungary)

Commander Massimo Tozzi – Italy’s operation Mare Nostrum, Frontex’s Operation Triton (Italy)

Mario J. Calla – Executive Director, COSTI Immigrant Services (Canada)

Moderator:
Craig Damian Smith – PhD Candidate, Department of Political Science, UofT

Please click here to register for this event.

Description

Mr. Herman will give a short talk followed by a question and answer period. A reception will follow (cash bar).

BIOGRAPHY OF Daniel Herman
Daniel Herman has been Minister of Culture of the Czech Republic since 2014. Born at České Budějovice he started studies at the Teachers’ College but left after the first year. For three seasons he worked as a tourist guide at Hluboká nad Vltavou Chateau and after the intervention from the State Security Police, StB, as a helper in South Bohemian Bakeries. In 1984 he started studies at the Theological Faculty at Litoměřice and in summer 1989 he was ordained as a priest. In spring 1990, after less than a year of church service, he became a secretary to Msg. Miloslav Vlk, the Cardinal.
From 1996 to 2005, when he returned from an internship in Germany and the US, he acted as the spokesmen for the Czech Bishops’ Conference. From 2005 to 2007 he worked at the Help Line for people in critical situations operated by the Czech Police Headquarters. In 2007 he asked the Pope to be relieved from his commitment to the Church and received papal consent to leave the priesthood. He subsequently worked for the Ministry of Interior, then as Head of the Information Office at the Ministry of Culture, and subsequently managed the office of Prof. Jan Švejnar, a prominent economist. In 2010 he was elected from ten candidates for the post of the Director of the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, a position he left in spring 2013. He then joined the Christian Democrats (KDU-ČSL) where he acted as the spokesman of the Party and its Senate Club. In the 2013 October Parliamentary election he was the leading candidate of the Party in Prague and he was elected a Member of Parliament. . On 29th January, 2014 he was appointed the Minister of Culture of the Czech Republic. Mr. Herman speaks English, German and Italian, in addition to Czech as his native language.

Description

Spain has enjoyed an intense process of social modernization and development in the last three decades, following its transition to democracy and its accession to the European Union. However, the 2008 financial crisis had a strong economic, social and political impact which has profoundly altered one of the most stable party systems in Europe. The new scenario includes the arrival of new liberal and populist parties that put an end to the monopoly of power by the conservative party and the socialdemocrats, the need for coalition governments in the absence of a consensual tradition, increasing political polarization, illiberal political demands, widespread political corruption, secessionist threats, and a generalized disaffection towards the political system. The incapacity to form a government might send voters to a third parliamentary election in less than a year, while the serious problems the country is facing cannot be addressed and the European Union’s economic sanctions loom in the background. Is the Spanish social and political system imploding, or we are witnessing a fundamental change in the rules of the game?

Speakers:

Jon Allen, speaker, Former Ambassador of Canada to Spain

Pablo Ruiz-Jarabo, speaker, General Consul of Spain in Toronto

Mark Manger, speaker, Associate Professor, Munk School of Global Affairs

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

Randall Hansen, moderator, Professor, Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies

Description

In this roundtable discussion, the Ambassador of Kazakhstan to Canada, as well as Canada’s former Ambassador to Kazakhstan, reflect on the twenty-five years that have elapsed since Kazakhstan became an independent state.

Description

We still do not know what Germans thought they were fighting for in the Second World War. Despite decades of intense research on Nazi Germany, till now historians have not placed Germans’ views of the war centre stage. In his recent book, The German War, Oxford historian Nicholas Stargardt argues that the war became the principal focus of society’s hopes and fears. The war was only popular in the brief periods when victory appeared imminent and yet its basic legitimacy was called far less into question than that of the Nazi regime. In this lecture, he will address a number of questions: How did Germans see the outbreak of the war through the prism of the First? How did the changing course of the conflict—the victories of the Blitzkrieg, the first defeats in the east, the bombing of German cities—change their views and expectations? When did Germans first realize that they were fighting a genocidal war and how did they this knowledge alter their view of their own war effort? How did private life— the relationships which led people to write love letters between home and the front—sustain the German war effort? What difference does it make to draw on personal sources such as diaries and family letters, to how we write the social history of this period?

Nicholas Stargardt is Professor of Modern European history at the University of Oxford. He is the author of many articles and three books. The first, The German Idea of Militarism: Radical and Socialist Critics, 1866-1914 (1994), dealt with the hopes for a peaceful, democratic and demilitarised Europe, which were destroyed when the First World War broke out in 1914. For the next twenty years, he has tried to understand the experience of those who lived in Germany and under German occupation during the Second World War. This has resulted in two major books. Witnesses of War: Children’s Lives under the Nazis (2005) was the first work to show how children experienced the Second World War under the Nazis, exploring the widely divergent experiences of German and Jewish, Polish and Czech, Sinti and the disabled children. The German War: A Nation under Arms, 1939-45 (2015) answers the key question without which we cannot understand how Germans were able to continue the war till the bitter end: What did they think they were fighting for? Drawing on family letters and diaries, he explores how ordinary people experienced and understood the war, including the moral choices and possible futures they imagined they had at the time.

Description

A memorial to the six million murdered Jews of Europe was inaugurated in Paris in 1956. It is now known as the Mémorial de la Shoah, but then it was called the Tombeau du Martyr juif inconnu. This memorial was one of the first of its kind, and its construction was completed in the mid-1950s, when, according to received wisdom, a general silence about the fate of European Jewry in the Second World War was said to prevail. How and why was the memorial constructed; how is it to be interpreted; and why was the memorial built in France?

Philip Nord is the Rosengarten Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at Princeton University, where he has taught since 1981. He is the author of several books on the history of modern France, including: The Republican Moment: Struggles for Democracy in Nineteenth-Century France (1995), Impressionists and Politics: Art and Democracy in the Nineteenth Century (2000); France’s New Deal: From the Thirties to the Postwar Era (2010); and France 1940: Defending the Republic (2015).

Description

The panel examines the life and work of the distinguished Israeli historian, Gilad Margalit (1959-2014). Margalit pioneered the study of Jews and Turks, Sinti and Roma in twentieth-century German history as a story of entanglement, conflicts, and elective affinities. His work was a history of difference and diversity in a century in which fantasies of national and racial purity triumphed. Beyond that, his work explored how Germans and other Europeans came to terms with such traumatic memories of violence and suffering as the developed forms of redemptive commemoration that contemporaries labelled Vergangenheitsbewältigung. The panel will reflect on the major themes and the on-going reception, the contemporary relevance and the lasting legacy of Gilad Margalit’s work.

Organized by Randall Hansen and Till van Rahden in collaboration with Joint Initiative in German and European Studies at the University of Toronto and the Centre canadien d’études allemandes et européennes, the Canada Research Chair in German and European Studies, and IRTG Diversity at the Université de Montréal.

Description

Kafka’s stories allude to his culture with a fullness that is astonishing when one considers their economy of form. This work of allusion, a sort of movement through the cultural vehicles or media of his time, conforms to several logics. One such logic—the logic of risk insurance–comes from Kafka’s daytime preoccupation with accident insurance. Between 1908 and 1922, Kafka, a Doctor of Laws, rose to a high-ranking position at the Workmen’s Accident Insurance Institute for the Royal Imperial Kingdom of Austria-Hungary in Prague. Though ensconced in a semi-opaque bureaucracy, Kafka struggled to enforce compulsory universal accident insurance in the areas of construction, toy and textile manufacture, farms, and automobiles. Images from his work world, such as mutilation by machine, the perils of excavating in quarries while drunk, and the disappearance of the personal accident, penetrate such stories as “The Metamorphosis,” The Trial, and “In the Penal Colony.” This illustrated talk will discuss Kafka’s life and literature, emphasizing Kafka’s work world and his forms of thinking about risk.

Stanley Corngold is Professor Emeritus of German and Comparative Literature at Princeton University. In 2009, with Benno Wagner and Jack Greenberg, he edited, with commentary, Franz Kafka: the Office Writings. In 2010, he published, with Benno Wagner, Franz Kafka: The Ghosts in the Machine and edited, with Ruth V. Gross, a collection of essays titled Kafka for the Twenty-first Century. Since then he has edited, with his translation, a Modern Library edition of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, translated Goethe’s The Sufferings of Young Werther, and completed an intellectual biography of the philosopher Walter Kaufmann. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Description

Ukrainian nationalism has been a hot-button issue during Maidan protests and the conflict with Putin’s Russia. This presentation looks at how the term is interpreted, whether contemporary nationalism can be linked to the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) of the Second World War, and how cultural memory is reshaping attitudes toward the 1930s and 1940s.

Myroslav Shkandrij is Professor of Slavic Studies at the University of Manitoba.He is author of Ukrainian Nationalism: Politics, Ideology and Literature, 1929-1956 (Yale University Press, 2015), which has been awarded the Canadian Association of Slavists Book Prize for 2016. His other books include Jews in Ukrainian Literature: Representation and Identity (Yale University Press, 2009), and Russia and Ukraine: Literature and the Discourse of Empire (McGill-Queens University Press, 2001). He has published numerous articles on literature, art of the avant-garde in the 1920s, and nationalism, and has curated three art exhibitions: Propaganda and Slogans: The Political Poster in Soviet Ukraine, 1919-1921 (New York: The Ukrainian Museum, 2013), Futurism and After: David Burliuk, 1882-1967 (Winnipeg and Hamilton Art Galleries, 2008-9), and The Phenomenon of the Ukrainian Avant-Garde, 1910-35 (Winnipeg and Hamilton Art Galleries, 2001-2). His translations include Serhiy Zhadan’s Depeche Mode (Glagoslav Publications, 2013) and Mykola Khvylovy’s Cultural Renaissance in UkraineL Polemical Pamphlets, 1925-26 (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta, 1986).

Description

During two terrifying days and nights in early September 1941, the lives of nearly two thousand men, women, and children were taken savagely by their neighbors in Kulen Vakuf, a small rural community straddling today’s border between northwest Bosnia and Croatia. This frenzy—in which victims were butchered with farm tools, drowned in rivers, and thrown into deep vertical caves—was the culmination of a chain of local massacres that began earlier in the summer. In Violence as a Generative Force, Max Bergholz tells the story of the sudden and perplexing descent of this once peaceful multiethnic community into extreme violence. This deeply researched microhistory provides provocative insights to questions of global significance: What causes intercommunal violence? How does such violence between neighbors affect their identities and relations?

Max Bergholz is Associate Professor of History at Concordia University in Montreal. He has conducted extensive fieldwork in the Balkans since 2003 on the dynamics of intercommunal violence, nationalism, and memory. His research has won support from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies, and his articles have been published in journals such as American Historical Review. In November 2016, Cornell University Press published his first book, Violence as a Generative Force.

Copies of Prof. Bergholz’s book will be available for purchase at the event.

Description

Joshua Sanborn is Professor and Head of the Department of History at Lafayette College (Pennsylvania, USA). He is a historian of violence, society, and politics in modern Russia. His most recent monograph is Imperial Apocalypse: The Great War and the Destruction of the Russian Empire (Oxford UP, 2014), which argues that the process of state failure, social collapse, violent transformation, and imperial disintegration experienced by Russia between 1914 and 1918 is analogous to processes of decolonization in Africa and Asia in the period after World War II. His most recent co-authored work is Gender, Sex, and the Shaping of Modern Europe: A History from the French Revolution to the Present Day (with co-author Annette Timm) which just came out in a revised and expanded second edition from Bloomsbury in 2016 (the first edition was published in 2007). He is also one of the charter contributing members of the Russian History Blog, which just celebrated its fifth anniversary of existence.

Description

In a 1951 article series for Franc-Tireur, Jean Rouch described his fears as an ethnographic filmmaker. One must, he wrote, navigate between the detached observation of the ‘dry-eyed savant’ and the myopic immersion of a new ‘Robinson Crusoe’ bereft of his perspective-glass. If Rouch’s anxiety touched on a familiar cliché of both ethnographic fieldwork and documentary filmmaking, it would nonetheless operate idiosyncratically in Rouch’s work as a recurrent preoccupation with the possibilities of visual witnessing and the cooperation of human and camera eyes. In this talk, I explore the genealogies of Jean Rouch’s vision of témoignage, his experiments with the camera-as-witness, and the contribution of his filmmaking to a culture of visual witnessing prior to what Annette Wieviorka has called the ‘era of the witness’ in the 1960s.

Description

“The More We Did, the More We Were Able To Do”: A New Look at the Legacy of Charter 77 and Václav Havel.”
The occasion is the 40th anniversary of the release of Charter 77, the manifesto of the Czechoslovak human rights initiative that blossomed into a broad-based movement that helped to undermine the totalitarian regime in that country. Two of the participants, Martin Palouš and Martin Šimsa, were signatories of the manifesto and activists in the movement. David Dušek is the grandson of one of the main instigators of Charter 77, and the event will also celebrate the publication, by the Václav Havel library in Prague, of a facsimile edition of a diary Havel kept when he was arrested and imprisoned in January 1977, just after the release of Charter 77. Dušek has also discovered a lengthy essay Havel wrote shortly after his release. Both these documents shed new light on how the regime tried to suppress the Charter movement, and indeed, all opposition.
We’re hoping the event will be more than just a look back at an important turning point in Central European history, but that it might also provide a look at Havel’s legacy in the light of what we are facing now. The title of the event comes from Havel’s characterization of another era of great change and uncertainty: “The more we did, the more we were able to do, and the more we were able to do, the more we did.

Chair: Robert C Austin, CERES

Discussant: Veronika Ambros, Slavic Languages and Literatures

Panelists

David Dusek

David Dusek is founding partner and managing director of a consultancy firm specializing in legislative process. At the same time, due to his family heritage, he became amateur archivist and publisher. He is also the grandson of one of Vaclav Havel’s closest friends, the Czech translator and writer Zdenek Urbanek. Two years ago, David discovered a lost notebook kept by Havel when he was imprisoned in 1977 for his leadership in Charter 77. He helped to organize its publication in Prague last year. In January David published the first chapter of the “lost” report on first days of Charter 77 written by Vaclav Havel and then lost.

Martin Palous
Martin Palouš studied Natural Science, Philosophy and International Law. In 1974 he received Doctorate of Natural Sciences (RNDr). In 2001 he earned Higher Doctorate in Political Science/Philosophy (Associate Professorship) at Charles University. In 2007 he got PhD in Public International Law.
Since January of 2011, Martin Palous is Senior Fellow and Director of Vaclav Havel Program for Human Rights and Diplomacy at School of International and Public Affairs at Florida International University. He is also President of Vaclav Havel Library Foundation and President of International Platform for Human Rights in Cuba.
He belonged to the original signatories of Charter 77, served as its spokesperson in 1986 and participated at the creation of Civic Forum during the Velvet Revolution (November 1989). After the fall of Communism he was a member of Parlament (1990), Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs (1990-1992, 1998-2001), Ambassador of the Czech Republic to the United States (2001-2005) and Permanent Representative of the Czech Republic to the United Nations (2006-2011).

Martin Simsa
Martin Šimsa teaches philosophy at Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Jan Evangelista Purkyně in Ústí and Labem, Czech Republic. The main topics of his research and teaching is political philosophy, deliberative theory of democracy, philosophical hermeneutics and Czech philosophy. He cooperated with conscientious objectors of compulsory military service and he signed the human rights document Charter 77 in 1978. He took part in protest activities in Brno along with other signatories of Charter 77, was active in the underground and among young Christians. He participated in seminars of professor Božena Komárková and philosopher Ladislav Hejdánek. He printed and distributed an illegal newsletter titled Information about Charter 77 (INFOCH) and as well as samizdat literature. He presented human rights topics at synods of the Evangelical Church of Czech Brethren as a representative of youth in 1985, 1987 and 1989, which took place during the time of the Velvet revolution 1989. On November 18 at 0:30 hours The Church Synod condemned the brutal police attack against students and young people on Národní třída and challenged the government to lead a dialogue with the human rights activists groups. He studied philosophy after Velvet Revolution (1990-1995) at Charles University and in 2001 he received a Ph.D. in philosophy there.

Paul Wilson
Paul Wilson lived and worked in Czechoslovakia for ten years, from 1967-1977, when he was expelled during the regime’s campaign against Charter 77. Since then, he has translated the work of many Czech writers, including Josef Škvorecký, Bohumil Hrabal, Ivan Klíma, and Václav Havel. He co-authored Fifty-seven Hours, about the Moscow theatre siege in 2002. A collection of his essays on Czech subjects, Bohemian Rhapsodies, was published in Prague in 2011. His most recent translation is a collection of short stories by Bohumil Hrabal, Mr. Kafka and Other Takes from the Time of the Cult. (New Directions, 2015)

Sponsors

Rudolf and Rosalie Cermak Fund
CERES