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How German Higher Education Institutions Collaborate with Industry: The DAAD’s “Germany Today” Tour

By Amy Bridger, Uta Gaedeke, Thomas O. Haakenson, Christine Menand, Michael A. O’Neill, Frank Peters, Christian Schäfer, and Angela K. Wilson

While the focus of the “informational tour” was on institutions in Germany, the insights gained from these first-person encounters and the ensuing development of partnerships have significant implications for European Studies more broadly.

 

Art as a Passport for Learning and Healing in Refugee Camps

By Paul O’Keeffe

The European Union has led the way in terms of integrating art into teaching practices at schools to better enhance the integration and mental well-being of refugee children. Various projects provide learning opportunities and resources for teachers to enable their students to better cope with the realities of their lives in exile.

The Drowned, the Saved, and the Sonderkommando: A Lesson Plan for Teaching Son of Saul and Primo Levi in Tandem

By Nicholas Ostrum

The first half of the course introduces students to Jewish life in early twentieth-century Europe, Germany’s interwar embrace of Nazi fascism, the hardening of the Nazi state, and the early Nazi and allied prosecution of the racial war in Germany itself and in Eastern Europe. The second half of the course focuses on Holocaust as it unfolded in the Second World War, with a special focus on the Final Solution to the Jewish Question as prescribed at the Wannsee Conference.

From the Sorbonne to the Institut d’Art et d’Archéologie

By Alain Duplouy

From 1924 to 1931, Paul Bigot built an astonishingly audacious building made of steel and concrete behind an envelope of red bricks mirroring Venetian architecture. In its conception, the Institut d’art et d’archéologie was not only a facility for teaching but also a laboratory, a place for “science in the making.”

The Digital Management of Archaeological Collections: The VERGILIUS Portal

By Vincenzo Capozzoli

The collections of the Department of Art History and Archeology have been at the center of a project aiming at establishing an inventory of, studying, and disclosing the department’s cultural heritage. The VERGILIUS portal stands as an example of digital management for archaeological heritage, offering promising prospects for the future of research, education, and cultural preservation.

Syllabus: The Holocaust

By Nick Ostrum

This course examines themes of resistance and rescue, escape and survival, and perseverance and dignity in the face of the very worst that fascism, industrial modernity, and humanity had to offer.

Teaching Maus in an Age of Racial Panic and Reckoning

By Barry Trachtenberg

The January 10, 2022 decision by the McMinn County Board of Education in Tennessee to prohibit the teaching of Art Spiegelman’s graphic memoir Maus from its eighth grade (typically, thirteen-year-old students) curriculum set off a firestorm of media attention.

Politics of Ethnicity and Nationalism

By Şener Aktürk

Competing definitions of ethnicity and rival explanations for the emergence of nationalism are critically engaged. While covering the classical works in the field of ethnicity and nationalism studies, the course readings also incorporate the most recent and cutting-edge works in the field.

 

Premodernism

By Andrew Cole and Brooke Holmes

When we think about the past, we contemplate “history,” and this in turn compels us to talk about “events” and assign them to a given “decade” or “century”—all of these, upon reflection, being hardly straightforward terms or processes.

Toward an Interdisciplinary Conceptual History of Catastrophe

By Jonathon Catlin

In her masterful 2002 book Evil in Modern Thought, the philosopher Susan Neiman traces an “alternative history of philosophy” from the 1755 Lisbon earthquake to the September 11 terror attacks, arguing that the greatest advances in modern philosophy have been driven by the problem of evil, or ways of justifying the suffering of the innocent.

The Danube

By Matthew D. Miller

Part of the “Communities and Identities” component of an undergraduate Core Curriculum program, “Core Danube” explores Europe’s second longest and most interesting river: from its beginnings in the German Black Forest to the Romanian and Ukrainian shores where it meets the Black Sea, the Danube flows through and/or borders ten countries, while its watershed covers four more.

Education for a More-Than-Human World

By Kay Sidebottom

The critical posthumanism of Braidotti and others differs from other strands (actor network theory, transhumanism, anti-humanism, and so on) in that it is not philosophy as such, but a “…theoretically-powered cartographical tool,” or a lens through which to read the world.

How to Solve the Environmental Problem of Climate Migration

By Clarence Dodge

An environmental problem “threatens to tear Nigeria apart,” according to popular media outlets like the Telegraph (Blomfield: 2018). Local farmers in the Middle Belt region (a belt region stretching across Central Nigeria forming a transition zone between Northern and Southern Nigeria) have been engaging in armed conflict with pastoral herders migrating south from an expansive semi-arid area known as the Sahel.

The Migration and Mobilities Working Group at Sarah Lawrence

By Parthiban Muniandy

The Migration and Mobilities working group at Sarah Lawrence College is a core group of faculty from across the social sciences and humanities who have been variously engaged in the interdisciplinary studies of human mobility, displacement crises, migration, and other related themes.

July 2021

By Emily Schuckman-Matthews

EuropeNow features a selection of scholarly articles and books on topics pertinent to the teaching of Europe or teaching in Europe that were published within the last 5 years.

May 2021

By Hélène Ducros

EuropeNow features a selection of scholarly articles and books on topics pertinent to the teaching of Europe or teaching in Europe that were published within the last 5 years.

Parallel Thoughts: A Conversation about Columbia University’s Art Properties Collection and the Educational Experience

By Maria Dimitropoulos and Roberto C. Ferrari

The initiative Parallel Heritages: Humanities in Action, led by professors Holger Klein (Columbia University in the City of New York) and Alain Duplouy (Université Paris I, Panthéon-Sorbonne), explores the history, development, and present state of University collections of classical antiquities at, respectively, Columbia University in New York and the Panthéon-Sorbonne 1 in Paris.

Interpretive Archaeology

By Alain Duplouy

The objective of this graduate seminar is to bring a historiographical dimension to the training of archaeology students, by providing them with the keys to various readings of ancient Greek societies and their material culture and the way these have been constantly renewed since the nineteenth century.

March 2021

By Hélène Ducros

EuropeNow features a selection of scholarly articles and books on topics pertinent to the teaching of Europe or teaching in Europe that were published within the last 5 years.

February 2021

By William Bowden

EuropeNow features a selection of scholarly articles and books on topics pertinent to the teaching of Europe or teaching in Europe that were published within the last 5 years.

Postwar Europe

By Nicholas Ostrum

The course is based on a Postwar Europe course I had taught in the traditional classroom. Although I preserved the primary texts and films, converting the in-person course to a digital, the asynchronous format required rethinking the flow of the course.

Medieval Europe

By Lucy Barnhouse

In this course, we will study Europe from 500 to 1500 C.E., with an emphasis on social institutions. The thousand-year period often known as the Middle Ages (roughly 500-1500 C.E.) was a period of vibrant life and sometimes violent change.

December 2020

By Hélène Ducros

EuropeNow features a selection of scholarly articles and books on topics pertinent to the teaching of Europe or teaching in Europe that were published within the last 5 years.

COVID, Compassion, Connection: Pedagogy in the Long 2020

By Eugene Smelyansky

“It is a matter of humanity to show compassion for those who suffer,” opens Giovanni Boccaccio in the prologue to The Decameron. The prologue, and especially the first chapter of Boccaccio’s mid-fourteenth-century masterpiece, are well known to anyone who studies or teaches medieval history or literature.

The Effects of Coronavirus at a Community College

By Carol Anderson

An advantage to teaching a medieval and early modern Western history survey course during a worldwide pandemic is that there is a corresponding historical event that is comparable to the present situation that furnishes a useful exercise for reflection on the human condition.

On Not Teaching the Black Death During COVID-19

By Maria Americo

The pandemic had disastrous effects on New Jersey, a state hit hard early on in the crisis. Saint Peter’s University is a small, tight-knit Jesuit university in Jersey City, the second-most diverse city in the United States, catering to a demographic of mostly students of color.

“The Camino Provides:” Teaching Pilgrimage Online

By Christina Bruno

The Camino de Santiago, the Way of St. James, is a network of pilgrimage routes that extends from its endpoint in northwest Spain throughout Europe. It has experienced a surge of global popularity since the late twentieth century thanks in part to movies like The Way and high profile descriptions by writers as diverse as Paulo Coelho and Shirley MacLaine.

Medieval Echoes in Modern Experiences of the COVID-19 Pandemic

By Esther Cuenca

Like many of our contributors to this pedagogy roundtable, I was caught rather flat-footed when my institution, the University of Houston-Victoria (UHV) in Victoria, Texas, announced that all classes were moving online in March 2020, just a few days after Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson had caught the disease and the entire NBA season was postponed.

State of the Union and Speaking Europe: An interview with Mathieu Segers

Interviewed by Eline Schmeets and Akudo McGee

No stranger to crises, tough talks, and collaboration, the European Union is seeing a particularly eventful year. The anticipated economic ramifications of Brexit, troubling developments in Poland and Hungary, and declining relationships with China and the United States were the more predictable issues for 2020.

European Integration after Maastricht: Insights, Novel Research Agendas, and the Challenge of Real-World Impact

By Neculai-Cristian Surubaru, Caterina Di Fazio, Miriam Urlings,Catalina Goanta, Thales Costa Bertaglia Thales, and Mathieu Segers

Along the Maas River, in the far South of the Netherlands, one can find the city of Maastricht. One of the oldest cities in the country, it has been a Roman Empire military stronghold, a cultural and religious center, and the birthplace of the current European Union (EU)

A Roundtable on Maastricht University Student Research

By Patrick Bijsmans

Our students tend to look into a broad range of topics, from Euroscepticism in the European Parliament, to decolonization and its impact on contemporary societies in and outside of Europe. They draw from questions regarding the development of democracy in Europe or culture in Europe’s border regions.

November 2020

By Hélène Ducros

EuropeNow features a selection of scholarly articles and books on topics pertinent to the teaching of Europe or teaching in Europe that were published within the last 5 years.

Landmine Clearance, Displacement, and Interdisciplinarity

By Noah CoburnElbunit Kqiku, and Sitashma Parajuli

Landmine clearance is often approached as a technical problem: how do you remove a mine from the ground? Yet, landmines transform time, space, and people, as well as demonstrating much about life in the post-colonial, particularly the ways in which conflict uproots individuals and communities and reshapes their movement and sense of place, through both the presence of landmines and the act of landmine clearance.

Democracy’s Others: Migrating in a Time of COVID-19

By Soumya Rachel Shailendra, Sitashma Parajuli, and Ioanna Katsara

Since the onset of the virus, scholars and engaged publics have heatedly debated how the emergency measures adopted by governments across the globe—“shelter in place” orders, mask requirements, expanded welfare provisions, mandates for companies to produce more PPE, etc. —will impact the rights of citizenship and the machinations of democracy.

A Selective Bibliography of Forced Migration: Resources for A New Generation of Discourse

By Elijah Appelson, Matthew Brill-Carlat, Samantha Cavagnolo, Violet Cenedella, Angie Diaz, Kaiya John, Naima Nader, and Haru Sugishita

In conversations about migration and forced migration, there are often more opinions than there are people in the conversation. In this climate of fear, xenophobia, hypermobility, and immobility, it is imperative that we move beyond knee-jerk reactions and use our capacity for critical thinking and reflection.

Dying in Diaspora

By Emily Mitchell-Eaton

This class examines geographies of death, dying, and mourning as experienced by migrants living in diaspora or exile.

October 2020

By Hélène Ducros

EuropeNow features a selection of scholarly articles and books on topics pertinent to the teaching of Europe or teaching in Europe that were published within the last 5 years.

Bard College Border Pedagogy: Experiential Learning, Syllabi, and a Model Unit on Encounters with Border Patrol

By Peter Rosenblum, Danielle Riou, Hattie Karlstrom, Giselle Avila, and Lily Chavez

Since the launch of the Consortium on Forced Migration, Displacement, and Education in 2016, it has been hard to avoid feeling overwhelmed by urgency. In the United States, the Trump administration has pried at the seams of an already troubled immigration system to impose extreme anti-immigration measures

August 2020

By Hélène Ducros

EuropeNow features a selection of scholarly articles and books on topics pertinent to the teaching of Europe or teaching in Europe that were published within the last 5 years.

Virtual Reality Meets Language Teaching

By Tricia Thrasher

So, how exactly can VR benefit language learning? Is it just another fad? How complicated is it to actually use? Many educators may find themselves asking these questions in light of the recent COVID-19 pandemic that has forced a vast majority of traditional face-to-face language teaching to transition online.

Mapping the “Material Substrate” as Analysis of the Capitalocene

By Megan Dixon

Even as we ask students to examine their individual environmental choices and to review broader-scale proposals for reduction of carbon emissions, it is important to help them appreciate the degree of material commitments embodied by the Capitalocene, so that they realize the full extent of the work necessary to reconceptualize the infrastructure of the future.

Studying Migration in a Study Abroad Setting

By Emanuel Rota

The American experience of the Age of Mass Migration in the first two decades of the twentieth century teaches us that, despite the documentable economic benefits for the host country, nativist politicians are very effective in mobilizing sectors of the local populations against newcomers.

From French Studies to World War II and Beyond: A Reminiscence

By Richard J. Golsan

Like other young academics entering their careers at that point in time, I anticipated a life of researching and teaching the beauties and subtleties of French literature and, with luck and hard work, of establishing myself one day as one of the world’s leading authorities on Montherlant, and who knew, perhaps even on modern and contemporary French theater?

Medievalism, Nationalism, and European Studies: New Approaches in Digital Pedagogy

By Esther Liberman Cuenca

Patrick Geary contended in The Myth of Nations (2002) that the rise of ethno-nationalism, as a response to the ascendancy of the European Union, was inseparable from the weaponization of the middle ages. Nationalism, in both its current and nineteenth-century iterations in Europe, has always paid homage to the ghosts of an imagined past, one that frequently collapses the medieval with the modern present.

The Myths of Western Civilization: Decolonizing and Queering European History

By Louie Dean Valencia-García

Spanning from antiquity, this course deconstructs the concept and history of “Western Civilization.” Through the study of primary and secondary sources, students will consider how history can be written to include oppressed and marginalized voices while still attempting to understand the broad scope of European history and its legacy.

June 2020

By Hélène Ducros

EuropeNow features a selection of scholarly articles and books on topics pertinent to the teaching of Europe or teaching in Europe that were published within the last 5 years.

April 2020

By Hélène Ducros

EuropeNow features a selection of scholarly articles and books on topics pertinent to the teaching of Europe or teaching in Europe that were published within the last 5 years.

Out There Learning: Critical Reflections on Off-Campus Study Programs, edited by Deborah Curran, Cameron Owens, Helga Thorson, and Elizabeth Vibert

Reviewed by Hélène Ducros

It is paradoxical that a book on “out there learning” be reviewed at a time in which, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, most people in the world have been confined indoors, many borders have been closed, international and some domestic travel has halted, and students have been engaging in their curriculum virtually, often alone behind a computer.

Feminist Political Theory

By Nancy Love

This course examines the various types of feminist political theories that inform contemporary feminist politics.

Fat Talk: A Feminist Perspective

By Denise Martz

The purpose of this course is to take the contemporary social psychological phenomena of fat talk and body snarking to examine them through scientific and a feminist/political lens.

March 2020

By Hélène Ducros

EuropeNow features a selection of scholarly articles and books on topics pertinent to the teaching of Europe or teaching in Europe that were published within the last 5 years.

What is the Scholar’s Role in Apocalyptic Times?

By Martha McCaughey and Scott Welsh

In an era of melting glaciers, genocide, starvation, and species extinction, what is a scholar working at a college or university to do? Many of us feel an urgent pull to be useful, lamenting our privileged position in the ivory tower.

Economic and Legal Integration of Europe

By P.W. Zuidhof

From its inception, European integration has heavily relied on economic cooperation and legal collaboration. This course revisits important milestones in the history of European integration to study how at every stage new forms of economic cooperation have been established and how the legal basis of the EU has been extended.

January 2020

By Hélène Ducros

EuropeNow features a selection of scholarly articles and books on topics pertinent to the teaching of Europe or teaching in Europe that were published within the last 5 years.

European Integration

By Claske Vos and Robin de Bruin

Global power relations, the global economy, corporate interests, national interests, historical traditions, public opinion, stereotypes, institutional settings, and personal relations of politicians, policy officers and experts, all impact upon each other in the process of European integration and European policy making.

Women in Red: Femininity and Womanhood in the Soviet Union 

By Shayna Vayser

The wake of the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1989 featured a dramatic decline in the participation rate of women in government.[1] Research attempting to rationalize this demographic shift has often omitted the sociocultural factors that influence social practice and normative values, specifically within discourses on behavioral changes in the absence of a communist, faux-egalitarian society.

Foreign, Strange, Singular, Exceptional: An Interview with Jérôme Ruillier

Interviewed by Brittany Murray and students from the New Americans Summer Program at Vassar College

Factors like climate change, political violence, and economic disparity are compelling more people to migrate, and writers are learning to represent the increasingly common experience of displacement. The story of any migration, of course, is determined by the person who makes the journey as well as those who welcome her, or refuse to do so.

The “I Learn America” Project: Vassar College and Migrant Narratives from Poughkeepsie, NY  

By Tracey Holland

For too many years now, millions of uprooted children and young people have fallen between the cracks, unseen among the data. Not only do they face discrimination and isolation as they seek to make new lives for themselves, but many do not have access to national or local services, and are never accounted for by the various child-protection systems as they cross borders.

Conversations Unbound: Student Engagement with Migration through Language Learning

By Elise Shea, Camelia Suleiman, and Eva Woods Peiró

Conversations Unbound (CU) is an organization that connects college students learning languages with forcibly displaced individuals who work as online tutors. As an initiative launched by Vassar students under Professor Maria Höhn’s guidance as faculty mentor and founder of Vassar Refugee Solidarity (VRS), CU embodied VRS’s commitment to rethink existing vertical models of humanitarian engagement with displaced populations and to innovate horizontal models that allow for more democratic interactions.

October 2019

By Hélène Ducros

EuropeNow features a selection of scholarly articles and books on topics pertinent to the teaching of Europe or teaching in Europe that were published within the last 5 years.

Migrants and Refugees in the Americas

By Miles Rodríguez

The Border. The Ban. The Wall. Raids. Deportations. Separation of Families. Immigrant Rights. Sanctuary. Refugee Resettlement. These words – usually confined to policy, enforcement, and activism related to migrants and refugees – have recently exploded into the public view and entered into constant use.

The Helsinki Centre for Digital Humanities (HELDIG): Developing the Digital World Together

By Eero Hyvönen

The digital world with its digitized resources, such as the Web with its data, services, and applications, is changing the society in fundamental ways and creating opportunities and challenges for globalization. Digitalization provides ever more new research opportunities in the humanities and social sciences, and rapidly changes ways in which research is done. These developments create a growing need for novel research and education in the emerging multidisciplinary field of Digital Humanities (DH).

Linked Data in Use: Sampo Portals on the Semantic Web

By Eero Hyvönen

A fundamental semantic problem in publishing and using Cultural Heritage (CH) data on the Web, is how to make the heterogeneous CH contents semantically interoperable, so that they can be searched, interlinked, and presented in a harmonized way across the boundaries of the datasets and data silos.

September 2019

By Hélène Ducros

EuropeNow features a selection of scholarly articles and books on topics pertinent to the teaching of Europe or teaching in Europe that were published within the last 5 years.

History of Medicine from the Patient’s Point of View

By Raúl Necochea López

When I was in graduate school, the most emphasized skills were learning how to carry out historical research and present it to multiple publics. In colloquial terms, these skills were “the money,” often literally, as they were highly prized in the academic job market that I knew in the 2000s.

Anthropology and Public Health

By Michele Rivkin-Fish and Mark Sorensen

This course examines comparisons and contrasts between the disciplinary approaches of public health and anthropology. We begin by examining the theories and methods of the social determinants of health paradigm, an approach that investigates the relationships between inequality, poverty, and health.

Living, Healing, and Dying in Russia 

By Michele Rivkin-Fish and Jehanne Gheith

This course explores the ways historical, cultural, and political forces shape major moments of the life course and the stories told to make sense of them. Specifically, we examine the changing experiences and representations of living, suffering, healing, and dying in Russia through key moments of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Health and Gender After Socialism by Michele Rivkin-Fish

By Michele Rivkin-Fish

This course examines the experiences of post-socialist countries as a means of understanding the relationship between political-economic, social, and cultural change, on the one hand, and public health and gender relations, on the other.

Global Citizenship

By Kerry Bystrom

What does citizenship mean today when the power of nation-states to define and secure the future seems to be shrinking even as nationalism is on the rise?

What is Europe Now?

By Wilma Ewerhart, Omar Haidari, May Keren, Jude Macannuco, and Mohamad Othman

In the weeks leading up to the assignment, we discussed the meanings and workings of colonialism, borders, migration, and belonging in Europe and beyond.

Knit Happens

By Ariane Simard

What happens when conscientious acts move from being merely a political practice to becoming something that resembles works that are more subtle and personal? What happens when an artist’s work veers into the political realm?

Confronting the “Crisis:” Refugees and Populism in Europe

By Jeffrey Jurgens

As challenging as the current situation may be, however, its characterization as a crisis is also somewhat curious. After all, this is hardly the first time that European nation-states have responded to significant numbers of unauthorized migrants. In addition, far more people remain displaced in Turkey and Syria, for example, than in the entire EU, and many EU member states have far greater material and institutional resources at their disposal than other major “receiving countries.” Why, then, do the recent flows of refugees constitute a crisis for Europe? And why the language of crisis now?

Forced Migration, Student Responses, and the Liberal Arts

By Matthew Brill-Carlat 

Consortium projects strive to push the boundaries of thought and action around forced migration. The introductory “Lexicon of Forced Migration” course, offered for the first time this semester across the Consortium, is valuable precisely because its premise is a critical re-evaluation of the current discourse around migration, and because it launches explorations of different ways to think about these issues and find solutions.

Genesis and Philosophy: An Interview with Members of CFMDE

Interviewed by Matthew Brill-Carlat and Margaret Edgecombe

Each institutional member of the Consortium on Forced Migration, Displacement, and Education has committed to supporting one “Signature Project” over the four years of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant that reflects the individual strengths and passions of the member institutions.

Learning from Challenges in the Arid West: Stanford’s Water in the West

By Leon F. Szeptycki and Newsha Ajami

The American West is an arid region to begin with, and climate change, population growth, and aging infrastructure are further exacerbating water scarcity in some parts of the region. Stanford University established Water in the West in 2010 to conduct research relevant to the growing water challenges in the American West and to develop solutions that will move the region toward a more sustainable water future.

Columbia Water Center

By Upmanu Lall

Founded in January 2008, the Columbia Water Center (CWC) is committed to understanding and addressing both the role and scarcity of fresh water in the 21st century. The CWC was established for the purpose of studying the diminishing levels of fresh water and creating innovative sustainable and global solutions. CWC combines multidisciplinary academic research with solutions-based fieldwork to develop and test creative responses to water challenges around the world.

Making Meaning in a Global Art Market: Presentations of European Artworks by Chinese and Arab “Supercollectors”

By Spencer Kaplan

I argue that these supercollectors do far more than simply move European art out of Europe. Central to their practices is the transformation of the very experience of these cultural objects. Through their museum exhibitions and accompanying catalogs, press releases, interviews, and panel discussions, the supercollectors imbue their European acquisitions with non-European narratives of economic power, national identity, and heritage.

The Radical Right in the Global Context

By Cynthia Miller-Idriss

The evening event, held from 5-7 pm followed by a reception, will include speakers from North America and Europe working on scholarship, policy and practice related to extreme and radical right politics, movements, organizations, and subcultural youth scenes.

Assessing the Impact of Air Pollution on Students’ Interest in Migration to the European Union: A Study on Students at the University of Macau

By Evelin Rizzo

Air pollution has emerged as the world’s fourth-leading fatal risk to people’s health, causing one in ten deaths in 2013. Each year, more than 5.5 million people around the world die prematurely from illnesses caused by breathing polluted air. A study conducted in 2016 by the World Bank and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington reports that “breathing polluted air increases the risk of debilitating and deadly diseases such as lung cancer, stroke, heart disease, and chronic bronchitis.

Physical Hydrology

By Matt Reidenbach

The objective of this course is to introduce students to the principles governing the flow of water on and beneath the earth’s surface. This includes concepts of fluid dynamics applied to open channel flow, ground water flow, and dynamics.

Water Footprint Network: Using the Water Footprint Concept to Promote Sustainable, Fair, and Efficient Fresh Water Use

By Joep Schyns    

Water footprints can be calculated for an individual person, a process, a product’s entire value chain, or for a business, a river basin, or a nation. They provide powerful insights for businesses to understand their water-related business risk, for governments to understand the role of water in their economy and water dependency, and for consumers to know how much water is hidden in the products they use.

Sociology of Food

By Erica Morrell

In this course, we will learn about and apply core sociological perspectives to analyze dynamics of local, regional, national, and global agri-food systems development over the past several decades.

Sociology of Knowledge and Food Systems

By Erica Morrell

What is knowledge? In this course, we will explore the rise of the authority of science across much of the globe. We will regard potential problems with and challenges to science’s dominant position, and we will analyze whether and how other forms of knowledge may shape contemporary social, cultural, and political life. Practical cases to illustrate these dynamics will draw from the food system, and we will conduct significant engagement with our local community’s emergency food system to translate theoretical concepts around knowledge into practice.

The Unexamined Securitization of Economic Migrants

By Lara Davis

In relation to migration, the 2008 Financial Crisis changed the concept of securitization, which historically describes a political process of the construction of a security threat. It is a concept that was originally coined by the Copenhagen School and academics such as Ole Waever, Barry Buzan, and Jaap de Wilde.

On the Path to a European University

By Janosch Nieden

In the heart of Europe, tradition meets innovation. In the trinational Upper Rhine region, shared by Germany, France, and Switzerland, five universities within a distance of only 200 kilometers are forming a European Campus.

The Geopolitics of Central Europe

By Eamonn Butler

This course is designed to appeal to students interested in the geopolitics and international relations of the Central European region. It will provide students with the opportunity to examine the key foreign policies, geopolitical developments and international political relations of Central Europe, with specific attention given to the Visegrád countries of Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic and Slovak Republic.

Comparative European Politics

By Thomas Lundberg

The purpose of this course is to examine and compare the political processes, governing institutions and political economies of contemporary European societies. Through the in-depth study of country case studies, we will analyse how history has shaped the political and economic structures of these societies and the extent to which these structures determine contemporary political outcomes in both the advanced industrial democracies of the west and the transition countries of the east.

The Oxford Water Network: Securing Water for Sustainable Development

By Dustin Garrick

Water is vital for human well-being, economic development and a healthy environment. Each year shocks such as floods and droughts have devastating impacts on people and economies worldwide. Ensuring access to an acceptable quantity and quality of water, and protection from water-related shocks is a defining challenge for society in the 21st century.

Water-related Activities at the University of Copenhagen, SCIENCE

By Mette Frimodt-Møller

A wide range of research is conducted into water at the University of Copenhagen, and collectively, it covers the whole water cycle. The research includes, for example, the interaction between soil, water, and biological production, water quality in developing countries, and modelling of how pollutants are transported via water.

On Urban Research in Europe: An Interview with Pekka Tuominen

Interviewed by Eszter Gantner

In 2013, a network of urban researchers with various national and disciplinary background was founded in Berlin. This small community of committed scholars working in different fields of urban studies, had been linked by the approach of creating an interdisciplinary and transnational discursive space for a free exchange on art, public spaces, and urban activism.

Archaeological Heritage and Museums

By Dacia Viejo-Rose 

The objective of this paper is to provide candidates with a sound knowledge about reasons for and ways of managing the past. During the course, candidates will develop a broad understanding of the diverse issues involved in heritage management, as well as an understanding of the types of agents and instruments involved.

Language, Affect, and Everyday Experience in Post-colonial Africa: An Interview with Janet McIntosh

Interviewed by Hélène B. Ducros

The anthropologist delves into her disciplinary approach to the study of Africa, some of her classroom pedagogical strategies, her fieldwork experience in Kenya, and her work on the dimensions of African whiteness. As she reviews issues of race, technology, language, privilege, land tenure, and national loyalty, she highlights the many layers of post-colonial plural identities and belongings.

Race, Sex, and Colonialism

By Carina Ray

View this course syllabus for Race, Sex, and Colonialism from the History Department at Brandeis University.

Our City, Our Streets!

By Esther Dischereit

Three months after the Nazi march and terror attack in Charlottesville, a film that seeks to unearth what exactly happened there on August 12, 2017 celebrated its premiere in the very same place.The film, directed by Brian Wimer and Jackson Landers, is called Charlottesville: Our Streets.

Global Focus: An Interview with Janet Horne

Interviewed by Maria Lechtarova

The interdisciplinary lens afforded by European Studies has the potential not only to initiate a dynamic redefinition of how we study and conceive of Europe, particularly at this critical juncture in its history, but it also has the potential to be transformational in our corner of the academy.

The Past in the Present: Transatlantic Teaching and Research Collaboration on Memory, Responsibility, and Transformation

By Manuela Achilles and Hannah Winnick

The violence of white supremacists in Charlottesville, the enduring debate over Confederate symbols and statues, and the broader reemergence of a nationalist political rhetoric that harkens back to a mythical Golden Age have left many Americans (especially also young Americans) hungry for a national conversation about their country’s history and collective memory. There is a renewed urgency not only to reckon with the past, but to more deeply understand history’s architectural power over society today.

Collective Response: Moving Forward Initiative of the UVa College of Arts and Science

By Manuela Achilles and Matthew Burtner

After the events of August 11-12, faculty, staff, and students of the UVa College of Arts & Sciences responded quickly and thoughtfully with events and programming that interrogated what happened, the history behind it, the legal and social context, and much more. Performance and art events swiftly organized by students and faculty demonstrated that our community rejects the hatred and violence on display on our campus and the city of Charlottesville.

First Response: A Reading List

By Kyrill Kunakhovich, Manuela Achilles, and Janet Horne

This reading list provides links to first responses of UVa faculty and students to the rallies of white supremacists and neo-Nazis on University Grounds and in downtown Charlottesville.

Jefferson’s Two Bodies: Interpretations of a Statue at the University of Virginia

By Isaac Ariail Reed 

On the night of September 12, 2017, a group of students shrouded the statue of Jefferson. They did so in memoriam of Heather Heyer, who was killed a month before by a white supremacist when she was protesting the fascist rally in downtown Charlottesville on August 12. They did so in protest of the university’s paltry response to the violent fascists on its lawn — and at this same statue — on the night of August 11.

Sustainability Policy Design and Evaluations

By Molly Lipscomb

In this class we will discuss why sustainability is a problem, and how to measure and evaluate the trade-offs related to different environmental policy choices. We will discuss benefits and drawbacks of various traditional policy solutions such as command and control, permitting, and taxation, and we will discuss new policy tools that are gaining in use: integrated platforms, auctions, tradeable quotas.

Launching the Roma People’s Project at Columbia University

By Cristiana Grigore

About twenty-five years ago, I vowed that no one would ever find out that I was a Gypsy from Romania, and I remember clearly the day when, as a little girl, I fiercely decided to keep my embarrassing origins a secret. I would have never guessed that after years of denial and secrecy there would be a time when I would not only speak openly and proudly about my Roma identity, but also create a project for Roma People.

A Digital Space to Imagine What is Possible: An Interview with Frances Negrón-Muntaner

Interviewed by Cristiana Grigore

Roma communities have a very robust oral tradition, which includes stories, history, and philosophical thought. So, in addition to providing sources, the project can also work towards a broader epistemological change by elaborating a critique of Eurocentricity, avoid the politics of respectability that promote “assimilation,” and insist on the value and importance of multiple forms of knowledge.

Teaching Europe: An Interview with Cathie Jo Martin and Vivien Schmidt

Interviewed by Briitta van Staalduinen

Today, the questions circulating among EU citizens and policymakers do not concern a deepening or expansion of the EU, but rather how the EU will move forward in a post-Brexit era. From the Eurozone crisis to the governance challenges posed by immigration, the tension between national and EU-level sovereignty has never been more apparent.

Reframing Gendered Violence at Columbia University

By Lila Abu-Lughod, Marianne Hirsch, and Jean E. Howard

Over the past few decades, violence against women (VAW) and gender-based violence (GBV) have come to prominence as loci for activism throughout the world. Both VAW and GBV regularly garner international media attention and occupy a growing place in international law and global governance.

The Vassar Refugee Solidarity Initiative

By Anish Kanoria

According to the UNHCR, there are now more than 65 million forcibly displaced persons in the world. In sheer numbers, this is the largest displacement of people since the Second World War. It is a generational phenomenon that is global in its impact and local in its effect. The Vassar Refugee Solidarity initiative was inspired by and started in response to this realization.

 

The Pedagogy of Memory: A Workshop on Teaching in an Emerging Field

By Jonathan Bach and Sara Jones

The question of teaching memory extends beyond the question of competing canons from those disciplines for whom memory tends to be a discrete object of study, such as psychology, literature, sociology, and history (though of course not limited to these). Following the spirit of the conference, we were interested in thinking about the teaching of memory from within and across such disciplines, and what it would mean to create interdisciplinary sub-fields.

Cultural Heritage and Politics of the Past: An Interview with Dacia Viejo-Rose

Interviewed by Sherman Teichman

For heritage is central to understanding some of the most pressing societal issues: responses to and consequences of crisis moments, the rise of fundamentalism and xenophobia, the future of cities, the increasingly fragile social contract, tensions between universal and local visions, developing strategies towards climate change, unpacking the ever more numerous claims over historical injustices, and rebuilding fractured societies.

World War I American Immigrant Poetry: A Digital Humanities Project

By Lorie A. Vanchena

The World War I American Immigrant Poetry project at the University of Kansas creates a single source for these digitized poems as well as for accompanying scholarly annotations and contextual material. We seek to preserve these historical voices by making the poetry available online to academics, teachers, students, and the general public.

20th Century Central European Literature

By Meghan Forbes

The contested construct of Central Europe, the violence of the two world wars, and the turbulent political environment in the region throughout the twentieth century has produced a distinct body of literature that expresses both cultural specificity and a more universal tension between unease and optimism brought about by a constant state of flux.

European Avant-­Garde in Print

By Meghan Forbes

The period between the two world wars in Europe marked a moment of intensive artistic and intellectual exchange as new nations were formed, such as Czechoslovakia’s First Republic and Weimar Germany. This active learning course will examine how the Czech, German, Polish, Hungarian, and Serbo‐Croatian avant­‐garde magazines contributed to international discussions about what a new Europe should be through their innovative use of photography, international typographic conventions, and translation.

The Mid-Hudson Refugee Solidarity Alliance

By Maria Höhn

If we want to prepare our undergraduate students for this new reality, we need to be a part of researching, analyzing, and designing curriculum innovations that give our students the capacities and skills to engage with what will be global challenge for decades to come.

The 21st Century Worldwide Refugee Crisis

By Maria Höhn

Currently, around 60 million people across the globe are displaced by war, violence, and environmental destruction; half of them are children. This worldwide refugee crisis of forced migration is the largest displacement of people since WWII. View Maria’s course syllabus for The 21st Century Worldwide Refugee Crisis at Vasaar College.

Sustainable Water and Food Security

By Paolo D’Odorico

Since the 1960’ the human population has been increasing by one billion every 12-14 years and is projected to reach 9.5 billion by 2050. More people will require more food and water while the increasing affluence in emergent economies will further enhance human appropriation of natural resources.

Global Economics of Water

By Peter Debaere

Soaring food prices and the recent droughts in Australia, India and the United States underscore that freshwater scarcity is a major challenge in the 21st century. Almost one-fifth of the world’s population currently suffers the consequences of water scarcity, and this number is about to increase.

Forest Hydrology

By Paolo D’Odorico

This course introduces the fundamental physical principles that are necessary to understand the interactions of hydrological processes with forest ecosystems. The course focuses on hydrologic processes characteristic of forested watersheds, including the impact of forests on evapotranspiration rates, soil infiltration, soil water redistribution, shallow water table variability, runoff generation, streamflow dynamics, and soil stability and erosion.

Water for the World

By Jim Smith

Potable water is essential for human life. Throughout most of the industrialized world, advanced water treatment systems incorporate fundamental physical, chemical, and biological principles into engineering designs to produce high-quality water at relatively low cost to consumers.

Water Sustainability

By Brian Richter

In this course we will explore the dimensions of what “sustainability” and “sustainable development” mean in the context of water use and management. We will examine the different ways in which water is used, valued, and governed, examining sustainability through different lenses and perspectives.

Storm Water Management

By Teresa Culver 

Emphasizes the management of stormwater quantity and quality, especially in urban areas. Course includes impacts of stormwater on infrastructure and ecosystems, hydrologic and contaminant transport principles, stormwater regulation, structural and non-structural stormwater management approaches, and modeling tools for stormwater analysis and management.

Fluid Mechanics

By Teresa Culver 

The emphasis in the course is on the behavior of water, including closed conduit flows and open channel flows. It is hoped each student will gain proficiency with equations of energy, momentum and force as applied to fluids.

The Dynamics of Oceans

By Matt Reidenbach

Studies the physical properties, processes, and structure of the oceans; mass and energy budgets; methods of measurements; and the nature and theory of ocean currents, waves, and tides in the open sea, near shore and in estuaries.