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Conference Dispatches

In and Out Clouds

Curated by Hélène B. Ducros

By creating spatial continuity and playing with light, volumes, and temporalities, the artists fashion atmospheric moments and prompt unexpected place-based experiences.

The Return of the Russian Gulag

By Oksana Ermolaeva

The Gulag has demonstrated a remarkable continuity based on the cultural foundations of pre-revolutionary Russia. This continuity is seen not only in the “serfdom syndrome” repeatedly cited by memoirists but also in the way inmates have lived. The tragedy of Russian history lies in the fact that numerous inherent features of the repressive Soviet system have been resurrected on a massive—if openly unarticulated—scale in present-day Russia.

Kinderland: A Novel by Liliana Corobca

Translated by Monica Cure

Our house has become a shelter for kids whose parents beat them. Everyone knows we’re home alone, because we’re almost never visited by an old person, I mean an adult.

 

Impressions from France: A Review of the Exhibit “Impri…

By Benjamin Bernard and Matthew McDonald

The exhibition moves beyond earlier models by offering the public a comprehensive survey of early print that places Gutenberg in his historical and geographic context. The visitor could easily forget that print would soon propel an upheaval within European Christendom.

Eastbound by Maylis de Kerangal

Translated by Jessica Moore

Next come the irreversible rails, laying out the countryside, unfolding, unfolding, unfolding Russia, pressing on between latitudes 50° N and 60° N, and the guys who grow sticky in the wagons, scalps pale beneath the tonsure, temples glistening with sweat, and among them Aliocha, twenty years old.

 

 

Humanity in the State of Nature: Notes on José Saramago…

By Patricia Chiantera-Stutte

Since the 1990s, the increasing success and diffusion of dystopian literature and allo-histories have attracted the attention of political scientists. This “genre-blurring” literature offers new political and ethical perspectives on human relations.

November 2023

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here is this month’s editor’s pick from Research Editorial Committee members Jennifer Ostojski, Aslihan Turan, Hélène B. Ducros, and Oksana Ermolaeva.

Feminist Transformations and Domestic Violence Activism…

Reviewed by Lauren Stokes

The women who organized the first domestic violence shelter in West Berlin consciously distanced their project from the women’s movement. When these founders sought state support for their shelter, they muted their larger critique of women’s inequality within patriarchal society to instead deliberately present images of vulnerable women and children the state could save.

Two Poems by Pierre Haroche

By Pierre Haroche

When the world was young / Places did not exist / Earth heaven ocean / Stood side by side / In every direction / Humans lived all together…

Undesirables: A Holocaust Journey to North Africa by Ao…

Reviewed by Biz Nijdam

Undesirables offers a corrective to our understanding of prewar and wartime Jewish-Muslim relations. The literal picturing of these relationships and visual acknowledgement of the shared humanity of Jews and Muslims complement the historical facts contained within the pages.

Art as a Passport for Learning and Healing in Refugee C…

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 Lesso…

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’Archéologi…

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.”

A Collection of Ancient Iranian Seal Impressions at the…

By Guido Antinori

At the Institut d’art et d’archéologie, the collection of ancient Iranian seal impressions not only offers the students of the University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne direct access to a large corpus of Oriental iconography but also allows them to train in the creation of relational databases.

The Digital Management of Archaeological Collections: T…

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.

Interpretive Archaeology: Historiography of the Ancient…

By Alain Duplouy

The objective of the seminar was to bring a historiographical dimension to the training of students enrolled in archaeology and art history of the ancient world or Classics, 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.

Eurasian Past Presents

Curated by Hélène B. Ducros

Artists cross-examine Kazakh pasts and presents, positioning post-Soviet identities at the juncture of different timelines and questioning agency, resistance, and potential.

Thinking Eurasia Now

By Arina Rotaru

Beyond religious and economic divisions, the question of the differences between Asia and Europe has remained constant in attempts to define Eurasia. While warning of the reactionary potential of Eurasianism, this feature looks into possibilities of convergence between Europe and Asia.

Two Divided Countries in the Divided Supercontinent: Hu…

By Chris Hann

For those who insist on classifying Europe as a separate continent, Eurasia has come to mean a fuzzy interface covering more or less any expanse eastwards of the territories where Western Christianity has spread. For people in the political West, such a Eurasia has strongly negative connotations: it is authoritarian, and its prevailing values are incompatible with liberal freedoms.

September 2023

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here is this month’s editor’s pick from Research Editorial Committee members Taylor Soja, Elizabeth B. Jones, and Hélène B. Ducros.

The Poetic Cinema of Sergei Paradzhanov: An Opportunity…

By Adrianna Hlukhovych

Because they are not mass produced, poetic films convey an aura of exclusivity that shakes ideological and political norms under certain circumstances. In the 1960s and 1970s in the Soviet Union, such exclusivity was remarkable both in terms of film aesthetics and film plots.

 

Exploring the New Middle Ages: Japanese Intellectual Di…

By Noriaki Hoshino

This paper explores how Japanese intellectuals have discussed the notion of the “New Middle Ages,” foregrounding the trans-regional, inter-disciplinary implication of the theme of Eurasia as it derives from debates implicating the connection between Europe and Asia, which I refer to as “the Eurasian intersection.”

Bathhouse and Other Tanka by Tatsuhiko Ishii

Translated by Hiroaki Sato

The green of the cypresses being so dark. . . . The island of death, is, that, the island of poets? / The noble (poet’s) fury. Just when the evening glow enwraps the world in darkness

Tribar by Andra Rotaru

Translated by Anca Roncea

on the first day we were met by a dying child. basking in the sun, sitting
on a manhole cover. around, there were three other children: one with
a torn eye, one with dermatitis and an ear torn off and another very
pale, soaked in blood.

Homelessness and Poverty in Europe

By Hélène B. Ducros and Elizabeth B. Jones

While policymakers rightly blame the COVID-19 epidemic, the war in Ukraine, and persistently high levels of inflation for the lack of progress in alleviating homelessness and for the dire shortage of safe and affordable housing in many places, these factors have exacerbated rather than created a complex problem that touches a wide array of people at different life stages and under various socio-economic conditions.

Exclusion, Isolation, Loneliness

Curated by Hélène B. Ducros

The artists succeed in making the urban poor and the homeless visible by challenging social indifference and mobilizing the public’s awareness.

 

Homelessness and EU Citizenship in a Borderless Europe

By Dion Kramer

The vast majority of EU citizens experiencing homelessness originally left their home country with the aspiration to find (better) work abroad and improve their quality of life. This fact helps us to connect homelessness to the very raison d’être of the freedom of movement principle in the European Union.

How do We Talk about Housing Equality in an Increasingl…

By Lindsay B. Flynn

Inequality is one of the defining issues of our time, and social scientists have consistently confirmed that housing is a key driver of contemporary inequalities. How then, should we talk about housing as part of a constellation of economic and social inequalities plaguing contemporary Europe? There are at least three ways to probe this question.

July 2023

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here is this month’s editor’s pick from Research Editorial Committee member Hélène B. Ducros.

Reflections on the Next Round of European Capitals of C…

Interviewed by Anastasia Paparis

Culture always reflects what occurs in the world, and sometimes art and culture even function as a “seismometer” for future development. It is unimaginable that future European Capitals of Culture not embody Europe’s disillusion about never engaging in war again.

The Dragoman Renaissance Diplomatic Interpreters and th…

Reviewed by Duygu Yıldırım

Despite the growing number of ambassadors at the Porte, the first Ottoman diplomatic residency in Europe was only established as late as 1793. This asymmetrical relation in early modern diplomacy was not uncommon since residential diplomacy was a European exception.

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.

Commander of the River by Ubah Cristina Ali Farah

Translated by Hope Campbell Gustafson

When I ask my mother what happened to my father, she says that there’s been war in our country for fifteen years and as far as she knows he could be dead. She says it with a coldness that upsets me, so I immediately stop asking questions.

A Roundtable on the European Capitals of Culture

By Anastasia Paparis

The general objectives of the European Capitals of Culture program are to safeguard and promote the diversity of cultures in Europe, highlight common European cultural features, and enhance citizens’ sense of belonging to a common cultural area.

How Putin’s War in Ukraine Melted the Frozen Conflicts …

By Jordan T. Kuck

For all of modern history, the Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians, fearing that they are not strong enough to stand alone in the dangerous geopolitical borderlands, have debated whether to ally with the powers of the East or West. This internal conflict has been the proverbial Gordian knot of Baltic politics.

 

Europe is a Castle

By Pierre Haroche

Europe is a castle / Where the wide plains of Asia strangle, stand its chiselled outline, its inner moat, its ocean-backed dungeons.

Mobility, Home, and Belonging

Curated by Hélène B. Ducros

Whether migrants, refugees, descendants of migrants, or simply people from another place, the characters in these installations reveal their voids, fears, uncertainties, and hopes.

May 2023

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here is this month’s editor’s pick from Research Editorial Committee members Nick Ostrum, Oksana Ermolaeva, Hélène B. Ducros, and Sorcha de Brún.

The Politics of Postmigration

By Markus Hallensleben and Moritz Schramm

The concept of postmigration has allowed for a rethinking of migration studies, the political borders of Europe, and the ongoing history of colonialism.

The Trousseau by Samina H. Bakhsh

By Samina Hussain

It suddenly occurred to her that the tawa had been wrapped in a red and white cloth when it made its first journey to England with her all those years ago.

Five Poems by Salvador Espriu

Translated by Sonia Alland and Richard Jeffrey Newman

To save me from the sea, / perhaps a verse, / perhaps some clear words, / are all I have. / Their value / is my entire life.

 

 

Decolonizing European Memory Cultures

By Katrine Sieg and Hélène B. Ducros

Academic specialists, artists, activists, and museum professionals have engaged for at least two decades in the project of “decolonizing” the memory cultures that shore up European identity.

An Anticolonial Museum

By Ana Sladojević

The anti-colonial aspect of the museum was mainly anchored in the prevailing socialist and nonaligned discourse of the time.

Ada’s Realm by Sharon Dodua Otoo

Translated by Jon Cho-Polizzi

The women of Totope treated Ada as though she had emerged from Mami Ashitey’s own loins. In their eyes, her daily floggings were glowing proof of familiarity and love.

Conference Dispatch: An Anticolonial Museum

By Emilia Epštajn

The conference aimed to bridge the professional gaps between scholars, researchers, artists, and curators and use the museum as a meeting space for different experiences and expertise and for communication with the public.

February 2023

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here is this month’s editor’s pick from Research Editorial Committee members Oksana Ermolaeva, Arina Rotaru, Brittany Kennedy, Angela Cacciarru, Vanja Petričević, and Hélène B. Ducros.

The Banality of World War “Z”

By Julia Khrebtan-Hörhager and Evgeniya Pyatovskaya

This essay illuminates how—in the words of Nietzsche—“the use and abuse of history” (and of cultural memory) in Putin’s Russia has naturally led to what Hannah Arendt so brilliantly coined The Banality of Evil.

Business in Politics and Society

An Introduction to our special feature, Business in Politics and Society.   Since the turn of the century, there has been a strong resurgence of scholarly interest in the role of business in European politics and society. After a period in which the study of business had been pushed to the margins in many disciplines, the role of individual firms and business groups as economic, political, and social actors has once more become a matter

Two Poems by Teemu Helle

Translated by Niina Pollari

That spring you met with national mourning, and your capital turned gray. / You looked at your spouse in the coffin and understood

Pina by Titaua Peu

Translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman

The trees up and down the esplanade are scraggly and bare. A few kids all bundled up are playing on a grayish stretch, with their au pair watching them. Plenty of Black girls in the mix.

Breaking through the Latest Regulatory Plans of the Cli…

By Maria Dolores Sanchez Galera

The new Green Deal shows how the EU is striving to update a wide range of instruments and adopt new policies to boost the transition towards a new economic system and an energy and industrial transition through four main pillars: carbon pricing, sustainable investment, a new industrial policy and a just transition.

May 2022

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here is this month’s editor’s pick from Research Editorial Committee member Hélène B. Ducros.

The Act of Living

By Eliza Bourner

Bourner’s work is informed by our cultural and psychological landscapes and how contemporary society’s dysfunctional values of materialism are at odds with our basic human needs.

Victorious by Yishai Sarid

Translated by Yardenne Greenspan

Shauli came home that weekend. I was astonished when he appeared in the doorway with his uniform and rifle. I hadn’t seen him in two weeks…

Building Sustainable Water Futures

By Pauline Münch and Jörg Niewöhner

In the Anthropocene, more-than-human habitability on this planet is at stake. Societies must develop ways of existing within planetary boundaries.

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.

Riverine Struggles Against Plunder and Dispossession: W…

By Larisa Kurtović

In the rugged and haunted lands of Bosnia-Herzegovina, rivers are places of extremes. Rousing of acute, aching love—the kind that inspires folk songs and popular devotion—rivers are often celebrated for their ability to ensure both survival and joy to the communities that live on their banks.

Wolfskin by Lara Moreno

Translated by Katie Whittemore

There is a small plastic horse in the corner of the modest fenced-in yard. It looks like it’s been there for eternity, yet it’s not actually old. That particular corner is the only part of the yard that has been conserved as a garden, that wasn’t sealed with cement and tile and made into a patio.

Securitization of Migration and Development Cooperation…

The SECUREU summer school in Amsterdam welcomed students from diverse research backgrounds and in this interview series, we would like to further introduce their perspectives and work. In this interview, we introduce Ngeti Zwane, Doctoral Candidate at Philipps Universität Marburg in Germany.

Cities and Migration Governance: An Interview with Gülc…

The SECUREU summer school in Amsterdam welcomed students from diverse research backgrounds and in this interview series, we would like to further introduce their perspectives and work. In this interview, we introduce Gülce Şafak Özdemir, PhD researcher at Universitat Pompeu Fabra.

Securitization of Identity

By Lesley-Ann Daniels

The war in Ukraine has brought Europe together as a political project with countries opening their arms to fleeing migrants. Likewise, when the Libyan regime collapsed in 2011, the previous controls on migration failed and people smugglers took advantage of the chaos to send thousands out to sea in flimsy boats.

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.

 

April 2022

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here is this month’s editor’s pick from Research Editorial Committee members Temenuga Trifonova and Hélène B. Ducros.

Unwelcome

By Simone Perolari

These are stories of migrants who dream of Europe, hoping to be welcomed, but who quickly understand that it will ultimately be an unwelcome.

From De-securitization to “Flexicuritization” of Migrat…

By Georgia Dimari and Stylianos Ioannis Tzagkarakis 

Research on the Greek migration experience has shown that new concepts are necessary in order to describe both the weaknesses of the current response mechanisms and the need to identify and formulate more specific solutions to the problems induced by massive migration and refugee flows since 2015.

When Minorities Become a Threat: From 9/11 to the COVID…

By Andrea Carlà

Since the turn of the century, the concept of securitization has not only become a recurrent theme in scholarship on minorities in regard to both so-called “old” (national, ethnic, linguistic, and religious) minorities, as well as new minorities stemming from recent migratory flows.

Contemporary Balkan Cinema: Transnational Exchanges and…

Reviewed by Philip E. Phillis

The transnational turn in European filmmaking and film studies has given renewed currency to peripheral cinemas and the opportunity to circumvent the western Eurocentric understanding of European cinema(s) and the hegemony of Hollywood in popular discourse.

The Unbearable Lightness of Translating: Szilárd Borbél…

By Judit Hajnal Ward

Kafka’s Son––what a captivating title! It translates well into any language. Additionally, it sends an instant message about the book’s subjects and dimensions: paying tribute to an unparalleled author in East Europe, capturing the complexities of the father-son relationship, tracking an author’s path in creative writing through space and time, all in a posthumous, unfinished novel placed in a Kafkaesque world.

Democracy, Nazi Trials, and Transitional Justice in Ger…

Reviewed by Douglas G. Morris

The grand narrative behind much human rights scholarship is that the Nazi regime plumbed the depths of evil, but its defeat yielded the Nuremberg trials, which held that evil to account and ushered in a new era of international justice.

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 Catas…

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.

February 2022

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here is this month’s editor’s pick from Research Editorial Committee members Emily Schuckman Matthews, Temenuga Trifonova, and Hélène B. Ducros.

 

Brothers and Ghosts by Khuê Phạm

Translated by Imogen Taylor

Let me start this story with a confession: I can’t pronounce my own name. For as far back as I can remember, I have felt uncomfortable introducing myself to people.

A Sense of Place, Imprints of Iceland

By Charlotta María Hauksdóttir 

The physical space of landscapes can be closely tied to a person’s identity, sense of being, and infused with personal history. The composite, textured landscapes are a re-creation of…

A Strange Woman by Leylâ Erbil

Translated by Nermin Menemencioğlu

My mother was on a rampage again today. My father’s been fired, she carried on endlessly about it. “He crosses swords with the bosses, talks back to them, as if there’s some mansion…

The Externalization of Border Control and the Dynamism …

By Isabel Hilpert

In spring 2021, events in the Spanish exclave of Ceuta dominated international headlines for a few days, presumably due to an upset over the behavior of the Spanish government in the context of the Western Sahara conflict in which the Moroccan government loosened border controls with the European Union.

Excerpt from We Were Never Brothers by Pia Edvardsen

Translated by Mauricio Ruiz

I sit alone at the airport in northern Norway to see my paternal grandmother before she dies. The bus rides on the new road, no one drives on the old road anymore. Just my dad. He will always drive on the old road, because that’s where his father used to drive.

Mastery and the Banksia Tree

By Prudence Gibson and Sharon Willoughby

Banksia serrata (B. serrata) is a species of native Australian tree that catches stories of colonial dominion, botanical naming controversies, and Indigenous knowledge in its branches.

On Becoming Lichen

By John Charles Ryan

In its radically-open otherness, lichens materialize more-than-human wisdom—the knowledge of the world expressed by intelligent beings other than humans.

Moving the Green: Plant Behavior in the Human World

By Vicente Raja

To show that (at least some) plants are able to exhibit goal-directed behaviors to cope with their environments may have dramatic implications for our understanding of plants as biological systems, but also as cognitive, or even sentient systems.

Billy Wilder on Assignment: Dispatches from Weimar Berl…

Reviewed by Nora Gortcheva

The anthology Billy Wilder on Assignment: Dispatches from Weimar Berlin and Interwar Vienna (editor Noah Isenberg, translator Shelley Frisch) provides a long-overdue translation of Billy Wilder’s early writings in German (1924-1933).

Diary of a Young Naturalist by Dara McAnulty

Reviewed by Elizabeth B. Jones

Diary of a Young Naturalist brims with curiosity, heartache, and joy. Over the course of a year, Irish teenager and climate activist Dara McAnulty chronicles how the natural world both cushions him from the pains of early adulthood (he turns fifteen) and feeds his determination to protect it for future generations

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.

In a Europe of Waters

By Matthew D. Miller

A hydrocentric mapping of Europe’s rivers, seas, and watersheds yields a refreshingly defamiliarized continental cartography

Living with Bear

By Kathryn Kirkpatrick

Our largely rationalist discourses leave us without tools for reciprocal forms of communication with the nonhuman. How do we go about opening ourselves to such exchanges? Poetry might be a better vehicle for exploring the uncanny.

The Long Century’s Long Shadow: Weimar Cinema and the R…

Reviewed by Ervin Malakaj

Kenneth S. Calhoon’s exciting new study links the cinema of Germany’s Weimar era (1918–1933) to previous aesthetic traditions. Commonly referred to as “the golden age of German cinema,” the Weimar era is affiliated with various cinematic innovations underpinning popular and arthouse cinema cultures that influenced international filmmaking in various ways (Kaes, Jay, and Dimendberg 1995, 617).

Animals as Dark Tourism Attractions: A Prototype

By David A. FennellBastian Thomsen and Samuel R. Fennell

Dark tourism, or thanatourism, is a complex subset of the tourism industry, which capitalizes on human death and suffering from human and environmentally induced events.

November 2021

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here is this month’s editor’s pick from Research Editorial Committee members Emily Schuckman Matthews and Hélène B. Ducros.

Rethinking the Human in a Multispecies World

By Hélène B. Ducros

Non-human, more-than-human, other-than-human, posthuman, transhuman, anti-human, multispecies, transspecies—all are terms that have been circulating in the humanities and social sciences, but have lacked clarity in their definitions, interpretations, purposes, uses, and range of application.

Displacement, Memory, and Design

By Ava McElhone Yates, Maria Höhn, and Chase Estes

Across Europe and the US, large scale projects addressing the history and memory of displacement are underway. All of these efforts are concerned not only with rectifying the prevailing historical narratives but also with using design as a way to tell a more appropriate and inclusive narration.

How to Solve the Environmental Problem of Climate Migra…

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.

October 2021

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here is this month’s editor’s pick from Research Editorial Committee member Hélène B. Ducros.

ZU/FLUCHT: A Temporary Exhibition on Displacement and E…

By Antonia Noll, Veronika Zaripova, and Ayham Dalal

Berlin Anhalter Bahnhof, 1938, children board a train to London. They wave goodbye to grief-stricken parents huddling on the platform. For many families, this was a last farewell; they would never see each other again.

From ‘Trophy’ To ‘Patrimony’: Material Feelings and Pro…

By Olga Sezneva

While the fate of the German population displaced in the former East Prussia, today’s Kaliningrad Oblast, has attracted considerable scholarly attention, less is known about the property and personal belongings left behind or “proprietary emotions,” and material feelings of Kaliningrad’s new occupants.’ What emotional responses did the forcibly acquired things produce in their new owners? How did these feelings initially form and gradually change, and under which conditions?

The Movement by Petra Hůlová

Translated by Alex Zucker

I had a suitcase, that’s it. My mother’s old suitcase with wheels, the one she used to take with her jetting around the Old World for work, till the doctor made her stop flying.

The Migration and Mobilities Working Group at Sarah Law…

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.

European ‘Code Unknown’ Cinema

By Peter Verstraten

Traditionally, art cinema has been used as a term of endearment to pit European cinema as the “good” object against Hollywood as the commercial giant.

“Kultur Als Kopfkino:” Hermann Glaser’s Critical Vision…

By Irina Herrschner and Benjamin Nickl

The blueprint of a house precedes its construction. That much is clear. With a European Project that started in 1950 as the European Coal and Steel Community, a common culture was that blueprint, and it was meant to construct a union of all and for all: in a shared culture that was alive and thriving.

Making and Mapping European Border Series: From Bridges…

By Michael Gott

In recent years, borders and borderland settings have proliferated in European television, arguably making the “border series” a category of its own. HBO Europe’s Polish series Wataha (2014-) was translated as The Border for its 2016 UK release.

Europe’s Moving Images

By Randall Halle

Already during World War II, leading European cultural figures oriented themselves toward a post-war future in which a federation of Europe would become a reality.

Babylon Berlin: Weimar-Era Culture and History as Globa…

By Hester Baer and Jill Suzanne Smith  

the fall of 2019, the European Film Academy announced its creation of a new award category, one that would allow the EFA to “remain relevant” in the eyes of younger viewers and in light of clear changes in visual media creation and distribution.

The New European Cinema of Precarity

  This is part of our special feature on European Culture and the Moving Image.   “Precarity” and “the precariat” have become two of the buzz words in studies of neoliberalism’s restructuring of the global economy and of the human sensorium. Originally signifying a social condition linked to poverty, precarity now refers to the rise in flexible and precarious forms of labor, the growth of the knowledge economy, the reduction of welfare state provisions, the suppression

What Moves Artists? Mapping Vienna through the Moving I…

By Lora Sariaslan

The first section of Nilbar Güreş’s video Stranger (Yabancı, 2004-2006), titled “Person of Cloth” (fig. 1), documents a woman on the Vienna subway covered in blue and red floral cloth that wraps her body completely with a traditional Turkish black scarf (yazma) on her head.

European Culture and the Moving Image

By İpek A. Çelik Rappas, Michael Gott, and Randall Halle

From the earliest days of film as a sideshow attraction to the present multiplatform mode of reception, moving images in Europe—in their broadest sense—have been imagining communities in various forms.

Art in the Cinema

Curated by Nicole Shea

Each cinema hall is its own self-contained world with clearly defined boundaries, in colourful dialogue with the interior.

September 2021

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here is this month’s editor’s pick from Research Editorial Committee members Temenuga Trifonova and Hélène B. Ducros.

Cremation by Rafael Chirbes

Translated by Valerie Miles

The sudden commotion, the sound of the motor, they displace you, leaving me alone; I concentrate on the movement of my hands now, gripping the wheel…

East German Film and the Holocaust by Elizabeth Ward

Reviewed by Mariana Ivanova

Despite the Allies’ efforts for denazification and reeducation, East and West Germany have both been haunted by the shadow of their Nazi past and it has often been assumed that denial and silence prevailed in the early post-war years.

Exhausted Ecologies: Modernism and Environmental Recove…

Reviewed by Leanna Lostoski-Ho

Exhausted Ecologies explores how the aesthetic efforts of British and Global Anglophone modernist authors contributed to scientific advancements, activist causes, and cultural critiques that exposed “the exhausting and exploitative conditions of modern life” in the early twentieth century.

The Memory Monster by Yishai Sarid

Translated by Yardenne Greenspan

I returned to Sobibor to dig. Really dig, with a hoe, and with my hands, on my knees, mining for bits of bone, collecting pins and buttons left behind by the dead.

Stranger to the Moon by Evelio Rosero

Translated by Victor Meadowcroft and Anne McLean

Mothers stay with their children during the first years, and then, when the children can — apparently — defend themselves, they release them, they cast them into the naked tumult, and forget them. I’ve seen mothers who despair at having to provide for their children, letting out huge yawns while contemplating them.

The Inheritance by Elizabeth Povinelli

Reviewed by Caroline DeVane

Povinelli situates family stories about place and blood told to her by her grandparents within the broader social narratives of European immigration to the US.

Against the Avant-Garde: Pier Paolo Pasolini, Contempor…

Reviewed by Alessandro Giammei

Pier Paolo Pasolini was the most important intellectual of twentieth-century Italy. He was the very definition, in fact, of an intellettuale—this mercurial, out of fashion concept that Antonio Gramsci, one of Pasolini’s main political and poetic inspirations, lucidly placed at the center of any effective marxist strategy for revolution.

Husserl and the Idea of Europe by Timo Miettinen

Reviewed by Boris Pantev

A somewhat unforeseen reawakening of the debate around the enfranchizing potential of political universalism has taken place in the past decade. Many theorists, such as Chantal Mouffe, saw this renewal as a valid antagonistic response to the surge of nationalist populism in Europe and the consolidation of liberal ideologies worldwide.

Arcadia by Emmanuelle Bayamack-Tam (trans. Ruth Diver) …

Reviewed by Chloé Vettier

“I don’t believe in the Amish model. And I don’t believe that the Amish model can solve the challenges of contemporary environmentalism,” French President Emmanuel Macron said in September 2020, after major French political leaders protested the environmental costs of 5G.

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.

Europe’s Pandemic Failure

By Stuart P.M. Mackintosh

Europe’s ever-closer union began with the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community in 1955, which was followed by the creation of the European Economic Community (1957) and eventually the European Union.

Among the Hedges by Sara Mesa

Translated by Megan McDowell

She started to feel bad when her brother left. Her brother said he loved her, but it wasn’t true, because he left unapol-ogetically, claiming that he had to go. Had to?

Four Minutes by Nataliya Deleva

Translated by Izidora Angel

Naya and I have been living together since we were born. First in the Home, then in the attic room we shared in the Reduta neighborhood. She was given up for adoption as a three-day-old baby.

July 2021

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here is this month’s editor’s pick from Research Editorial Committee members Emily Schuckman Matthews, Temenuga Trifonova, and Hélène B. Ducros.

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.

History and Story in Amazon’s El Cid (2020)

By Anita Savo

Those who know anything about the Cid, Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar (c. 1048–1099), imagine him as a crusader hero of Christian Spain. His popular image, on horseback with sword raised against a presumed Muslim foe, deliberately evokes the iconography of “Saint James the Moor-killer” (Santiago Matamoros).

Geothermal Heating and Cooling Networks for Green and L…

By Kai Zosseder, et al.

As stated in part one of “how geothermal heating and cooling networks may support the green and livable urban transformation,” geothermal energy can be very efficiently used as a resource for district heating and cooling networks and can have the ability to be a key technology for a necessary heat energy transition.

The Quest for Efficient Deliberation and Proximity Demo…

By Pekka Tuominen, Mikko Rask and Titiana Ertiö

Participatory budgeting is a rapidly growing democratic innovation with promises to alter citizens’ participation significantly. In the last thirty years, it has spread to thousands of cities with around 11,000 reported cases around the world, and with very different models of collaboration, co-creation, and democracy.

Parallel Thoughts: A Conversation about Columbia Univer…

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.

New Impressions and Future Directions: Columbia Univers…

By Majdolene Dajani and Erhan Tamur

The modern discipline of Ancient Western Asian art and archaeology began as a colonial enterprise in the mid-nineteenth century. The European, American, and Ottoman expeditions in modern-day Iraq and Syria brought to light the ancient Mesopotamian civilizations of Sumer, Akkad, and Assyria.

Sustainable European Cities and Digitization

By Nicole Shea and Zsuzsanna Varga

This feature offers insights into developing the sustainability of European cities through a number of case studies of recent social and technological practices, while also foregrounding the role of the digital in modernization.

Land Art Generator

By Various Artists

Works of art in civic space distribute clean energy and provide other sustainable services to buildings and the utility grid while beautifying the built environment.

May 2021

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here is this month’s editor’s pick from Research Editorial Committee members Jean Beaman, Temenuga Trifonova, Nick Ostrum, and Hélène B. Ducros.

Novel 11, Book 18 by Dag Solstad

Translated by Sverre Lyngstad

This was how Bjørn Hansen’s existence had shaped up. This was his life. At Kongsberg. With Turid Lammers, this woman he had to live with because he feared he would otherwise regret

Anti-Roma Racism in Romania

By Marius Turda

The real labor of education begins with a question and finding an answer to it. Regarding the Roma, education is also essential in the un-making of anti-Roma racism.

Salvador de Madariaga and the “Solidarity of Being:” Li…

By Cristina Blanco Sío-López

Though largely neglected in recent studies about the European integration process, Salvador de Madariaga was a key forerunner and contributor to the “European idea,” as well as a highly influential Spanish diplomat, writer, historian, and pacifist at different critical junctures of the twentieth century.

Guardians of Memory and the Return of the Xenophobic Ri…

Reviewed by Alexis Herr

The Guardians of Memory and the Return of the Xenophobic Right by Valentina Pisanty addresses the dramatic rise in racism and intolerance among countries where memory of the Holocaust is pursued with the greatest vigor and, in some cases, where Holocaust denial is a criminal offense.

You Are What You Eat and Where You Eat It: Health Deter…

By Alexandria Cogdill, Zach Kulstad and Jennifer Wargo

While these quotes are grounded in the philosophical teaching that food influences one’s state of mind, today, more than ever, we can appreciate the literal meaning of the words, “you are what you eat.”

Politics of Memory Under Two Pandemics

By Manuela Boatcă

During the first three months of lockdown in 2020, the European Roma Rights Centre (ERCC) identified twelve countries across Europe in which Roma communities faced movement restrictions or disproportionate impacts from emergency measures despite the lack of evidence of higher case counts in those communities.

Subjects of Racialized Modernity: Romani People and Dec…

By Ioanida Costache

The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, and more specifically, the public lynching of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, sparked a collective investigation into the racial logics of white supremacy that supports racist systems in the United States.

In Concrete by Anne F. Garréta

Translated by Emma Ramadan

Concrete’s no job for sissies. Maybe that’s why our father decided, soon as we were old enough, my little sis and I, to educate us in cement, concrete, and casing.

 

Egun

By Àsìkò

The images in “Egun” are the manifestation of a long held desire to revisit formative cultural experiences from the artist’s childhood in Nigeria; encounters with the Egun masquerade.

A Roundtable on Ideas of Race, Ideologies of Racism: Ro…

By Ioanida Costache

While across the Atlantic, the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police sparked an unprecedented reckoning in America with the country’s racist past and the enduring legacy of this history through current manifestations of systemic racism, the pandemic served as a catalyst for anti-Roma racism to resurge.

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.

From Nowhere to Nowhere by Bekim Sejranović

Translated by Will Firth

Now, a year and a half after Alijas funeral, I stood in the courtyard in front of the house where I grew up. I tried to sing Morrisseys Late Night, Maudlin Street” in my head…

The Belarus Crisis: How Can the EU Turn it Into an Oppo…

By Vlada Șubernițchi

Belarus, 2020 Presidential elections: What could have been another ordinary rigged election won by the unchangeable leader of Belarus since 1994, Aleksander Lukashenko, this time turned out to be a promising chance to remove the “last dictator of Europe.”

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.

Gegenwartsbewältigung by Max Czollek

Reviewed by Johanna Schuster-Craig

Czollek’s books fall neatly in line with a genre of political nonfiction that has steered German political commentary at least since the 1990s.

Looking Out from Within

By Julia Fullerton-Batten

I felt numb but I knew that I couldn’t stand around and do nothing, I decided to document today’s existence as lived now by many people.

In Memory of Memory by Maria Stepanova

Translated by Sasha Dugdale

I must have been about twelve. I was hunting around for some-thing interesting to look at. There was plenty of interesting stuff: with every death a pile of new objects appeared in our apartment, deposited just as they were, trapped in a sudden end state, because their previous owner, the only person who could have freed them, was no longer among the living.

Self-fulfilling Prophesies: Domestic Terrorism, Islamis…

By Carol Ferrara 

It’s been nearly six years since the January 2015 Charlie Hebdo terror attack that killed twelve people working for the famous satirical magazine. Carrying out a coordinated multi-sited attack, another team of attackers also took sixteen hostages at a Hypercacher—a Kosher grocery store in the Paris suburbs—killing four individuals there, as well as a policewoman in Montrouge, and staging a second hostage situation nearby.

Europe and the Myth of the Racialized Sexual Predator: …

By Saskia Bonjour and Sarah Bracke

Throughout history, and across the globe, perceived threats to the nation have often been sexualized and represented in terms of a rape threat to “our” women. Such representations have been part and parcel of the gendered and sexualized constructions of the nation and its others.

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 the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here is this month’s editor’s pick from Research Editorial Committee members Hélène B. Ducros and Nick Ostrum.

The Ruins Lesson: Meaning and Material in Western Cultu…

Reviewed by Tanvi Solanki

In today’s Europe, ruins present themselves both as timely and untimely. In cultural discourse, as materials, they are often associated with quaint tourist attractions. As metaphor and process, however, they are timelier than ever before.

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.

Looking at Racism, Eugenics, and Biopolitics in Europe …

Interviewed by Hélène B. Ducros

The history of eugenics intersects the history of racism from its inception. Most eugenicists, particularly the “founders” of the eugenic movements across the world, from England to Greece, and from Romania to the US, were also supporters of racial ideas of white/European superiority.

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.

An Inventory of Losses

By Judith Schalansky

In the evening they are hungry and restless. No meat for days. No hunting since they themselves were captured. Instincts worn down by captivity until they lie bare like gnawed bones.

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 P…

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.

Race and Racism in Europe: The Urgency of Now

By Jean Beaman and Jennifer Fredette

Since the police killings of Breonna Taylor in March and George Floyd this past May, hundreds of thousands of protesters have taken to the streets across the United States to call for an end to police violence—and, sometimes, the abolition of police altogether.

Creative Economy, Policy, and the Pandemic in Scotland’…

By Siún Carden

Far from cities and geographically distinguished from mainland rural places, Scotland’s islands are varied in landscape, economy, and community make-up, yet share key challenges and are increasingly positioned to address these together in the context of national and regional government.

Are the Balkans Still the Other of Europe? Untangling …

Interviewed by Dragoș Ioniță

Working for the last five years with professor Miruna Butnaru-Troncotă, a young researcher from Romania who specializes in this region and in EU’s foreign policy discourses, I managed to discover the less-approached ways of understanding and even problematizing the Balkan region, its people, its politics, and its passions, while mapping various stereotypes that all our lenses are formed of when approaching the topic.

The Great British Kakistocracy

By Stuart P. M. Mackintosh

Facing the ongoing pandemic, Johnson and his pals have handled the emergency in a manner Trump would also approve of, with friendship trumping competence and capability, and money flowing to toadies with no oversight or assurance on their ability to get the job done.

The Turkey-Russia Agreement: Towards a New Refugee Cris…

By Lucian A. Despa

In October 2015, former European Commission Vice-President Frans Timmermans stated, “the challenge (the migrant crisis of 2015) facing the European project today, is existential.” Five years later, the crisis could be repeated if coordinated measures on behalf of the EU and Turkey will not be taken.

Environment, Landscape, and Place in the Windfarm-Touri…

By Tom MordueOliver Moss, and Lorraine Johnston

Wind energy has not only been promoted as sustainable by officialdom across Europe, it has received broad public approval. In the UK, for example, a high of 76 percent support for wind energy among the public was recorded in a YouGov survey in April 2018.

Reclaiming Rural Skills: Crafts from the European Count…

By Corinne Geering

The image of rural Europe has been defined by local traditions that distinguish each locale from another. Hardly anywhere else is this idea as pertinent as in crafts, as reflected by the following assessment by a Hungarian official in an American magazine in 1908.

Peasantry and Rural Social Movements in Twenty-First Ce…

By José Duarte Ribeiro

Referring to the death of peasantry in the twentieth century as the “most dramatic and far-reaching social change of the second half of this century, and the one which cuts us off for ever from the world of the past,” Eric Hobsbawm (1994, 289) declared Turkey the last “peasant stronghold”

State of the Union and Speaking Europe: An interview wi…

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.

From Engineering Student to Teacher in European Studies…

By Marie Labussière

Interdisciplinarity can be described as “a kind of sequential back-and-forth movement from one discipline to the other.” For this back-and-forth movement to take place between researchers from different disciplines, it seems to me that there are some basic prerequisites.

The Agrarian Reform in Italy: Historical Analysis and I…

By Angela Cacciarru

The current Italian rural land tenure system is rooted in land reform that was implemented in the peninsula in 1950, known as the “Agrarian Reform.” The Southern Development Fund (Cassa per il Mezzogiorno) provided the funding that made carrying out this reform possible. Mezzogiorno is used to define southern Italy, which extends from Abruzzo to Sicily, and includes Sardinia.

Practicing Regenerative Design in Greece

By Evy Vourlides

I could not have anticipated my boots being layered with dirt for much of my eighteen months of PhD dissertation research. My initial project explored how young adults in Athens, Greece, navigated a precarious job market.

European Studies at Maastricht University: Problem-Base…

By Elissaveta Radulova

Between Belgium and Germany on the most Southern border of the Netherlands is situated the historic city of Maastricht. Its citizens speak several languages by default, and the international atmosphere is a permanent feature in the numerous cozy cafés in the city-center.

Where Are the Women in “Empty Spain”?

By Jeremy MacClancy

La España vacia, “Empty Spain,” is the contentious, popular term summing up so much of the nation’s countryside today: thousands of villages left with no inhabitants or only a few.

European Integration after Maastricht: Insights, Novel …

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.

Changing Agriculture in Rural Europe

By Hélène B. Ducros

In this roundtable on “Changing Agriculture in Rural Europe,” EuropeNow wishes to convey a portrait of an agricultural Europe that shows its dynamism and adaptable capacity in the way it mirrors and incorporates the major concerns of our time and faces the historical legacies of past agricultural practices and policies.

November 2020

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here is this month’s editor’s pick from Research Editorial Committee members Hélène B. Ducros and Elizabeth Jones.

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.

Changing Ruralities in Germany

By Gesine Tuitjer

This story begins shortly after the Second World War and covers the tremendous changes, both economically and socially, that the rural areas of Germany have undergone until today.

Post-Political Populism as the Elephant in the Room: A …

By Dominik Schmidt

Greta Thunberg’s Skolstreik för klimatet in front of the Swedish parliament in August 2018 inspired people around the whole world. Thunberg became the most prominent face of the global climate movement and has been successful in establishing climate change as an essential topic on the public agenda.

Painting-Like

By Magali Chesnel

Discover Chesnel’s photographs taken in the Camargue, above the salt marshes of Giraud and Aigues-Mortes, creating a confusion between reality and illusion, photography and painting.

Rurality in Europe

By Hélène B. Ducros

In this roundtable on “Changing Agriculture in Rural Europe,” EuropeNow wishes to convey a portrait of an agricultural Europe that shows its dynamism and adaptable capacity in the way it mirrors and incorporates the major concerns of our time and faces the historical legacies of past agricultural practices and policies.

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.

Landscapes of Care and Isolation in the 21st Century: A…

By Valeria Bonatti

Throughout much of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, most societies witnessed a steady growth in life expectancy. In much of the Global North, but also in wealthier parts of the Global South, this generated and continues to generate a growing demand for affordable elderly care workers—a demand that many societies meet through low-wage migrant labor from the Global South.

A Selective Bibliography of Forced Migration: Resources…

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.

Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politic…

Reviewed by Maria Mitchell

Short-listed by the American Academy of Religion for the Best First Book in the History of Religions and recipient of the Waterloo Centre for German Studies Book Prize, this beautifully written monograph deserves wide readership, especially by students and scholars of Europe and sexuality.

Bard College Border Pedagogy: Experiential Learning, Sy…

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

The Wine Dark Sea

By Hew Locke

A ship is a symbolic object; vessel of the soul, means of escape, both safety and danger. No crew are visible—the boats themselves stand for crew and passengers.

 

Allegria by Giuseppe Ungaretti

Translated by Geoffrey Brock

Behold a uniform man / behold a desert soul / an impassive mirror for the world / Sometimes I wake and join forces and possess / The rare good that grows

Networks of Solidarity in Times of Crisis

By Matthew Brill-CarlatAva McElhone Yates, and Maria Höhn

Even in the more prosperous countries of the Global North, poor communities and communities of color—be they Indigenous, Black, migrants, or another minoritized group—are being ravaged by COVID-19 to a far greater extent than white and more privileged communities.

The Fabric of Healing

By Rachel A Cohen and Catherine Butterly

Violence against women and girls is a ubiquitous and pervasive problem, affecting about one in three women worldwide. The psychological, social, medical, and economic consequences are deep and enduring.

October 2020

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Nick Ostrum and Hélène B. Ducros.

Why Free Movement is the Beating Heart of Europe: Say N…

By Lauri Tähtinen

As of late April, eighteen of the twenty-six member countries of the Schengen Area were conducting internal border checks. In May, European Union institutions awoke to the need to “reopen” Europe before summer, the high season for the tourism industry which has been responsible for one tenth of Europe’s GDP.

The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic for the European No…

By Răzvan-Victor Sassu and Eliza Vaș

The new coronavirus has drastically reshuffled both economies and societies in the past months. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has described the situation as being a “crisis like no other” with “an uncertain recovery” and a “catastrophic hit” to the global labour market, with more than 430 million jobs losses in the first two quarters.

Explanations for the Uneven Impact of COVID-19 in North…

By Angela Cacciarru and Antonio Paesano

There are many factors intervening in a society’s ability to combat disease. While Italy was featured everywhere in global media as the place where COVID-19 was out of control and the situation desperately stark, the spreading of the virus was showing more and more its uneven impact.

Europe’s Essential Workers

By Ruxandra Paul

Migrants have always been both essential to modern economies and objects of suspicion, but the Coronavirus pandemic has brought this tension to a head both in migrant-sending and migrant-receiving countries.

From Fake News to False Elections

By Agnes E. Venema

When Gabon experienced an attempted coup d’etat in late 2018, very few media outlets picked up on the fact that suspicion of a deepfake fuelled underlying unrest.

Proletarische Welten: Internationalistische Weltliterat…

Reviewed by Hunter Bivens

Discussions of world literature often have little that is concrete to say about class. Recent scholarly interventions have attempted to address this lacuna by grounding theories of world literature in the dynamics of the capitalist world system and the uneven distribution of conditions of labor across the globe.

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.

The Humanitarian Ideology

By Siraj Ahmed

Murderous Consent’s aim is, first, to critique political violence, whether hegemonic or revolutionary. The book’s aim is, second, to enunciate another politics that never legitimizes violence in any form. These aims could not be more profound, attempting, as they do, to overturn both Western political theory and contemporary geopolitical practice.

Mapping the “Material Substrate” as Analysis of the Cap…

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.

Italian Ecocinema Beyond the Human by Elena Past

Reviewed by Emily Meneghin

The book analyzes five films and references even more academic disciplines, including history, industrial economics, oral memoir, acoustics, environmentalism, chemistry, geology, socio-economic politics, culinary studies, and more.

August 2020

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Nick Ostrum and Hélène B. Ducros.

A Roundtable on Marc Crépon’s Murderous Consent: On the…

By Niloofar Sarlati

The global pandemic has simultaneously made visible and intensified longstanding economic and social inequalities across the world. Ethnic, religious, and racial minorities, people with disabilities, and the poor have been suffering at a much higher mortality rate and a more dreadful death. The murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery have once again brought to light the systemic anti-black racism.

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.

Confronting Nationalisms: Romania and the Autonomy of t…

By Cătălin-Gabriel Done

Between Romania and Hungary, for one hundred years, historical issues have impeded the development of consistent bilateral relations, even if the bilateral relations have the character of a “strategic partnership for twenty-first-century Europe.”

Manifestations of the Unseen

By Seb Janiak

This series makes use only of the manifestation of unseen forces. The imaging of the manifestation of these unseen forces undergoes no digital transformation in the photographs.

Murderous Consent: A Translator’s Note

By Michael Loriaux

It is true that dismantling myths of belonging presents no real challenge to the historian. All such myths labor to attribute some foundational homogeneity to collections of people that are very large and historically contingent.

EuropeNow on COVID-19

In this series, we feature a spotlight on the Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and its connections to European politics, society, and culture.

The Autoimmunity of Murderous Consent

By Jacob Levi

The formulation “murderous consent” is striking because it confronts us with an uncomfortable truth: while most of us would not actively consent to murder, just as we would prefer to think that we do not condone violence, we are all participants in a range of systems of violence which we generally accept with resignation, passivity, and silence. Murderous consent is the operating principle of the modern state, which on principle it must vigorously deny for its own legitimation.

Count Luna by Alexander Lernet-Holenia

Translated by Jane B. Greene

His path led him first through sparse woods where the tall grass, interspersed with clumps and clusters of gentians, came up above his knees, then over upland pastures.

Unmasking the Rifts in the European Union: New Coalitio…

By Thomas Henökl

During the second-longest summit session in the European Council’s history, in the early morning hours of June 21, 2020, and after almost four days of tough negotiations, the twenty-seven heads of state and government finally agreed on a €1,074 billion long-term budget and COVID-19 recovery fund.

Giovanni Boccaccio’s “Decameron” and Life Beyond the Pl…

By Alyssa Granacki

Reading these recent pieces, one might believe that the Decameron is mostly about the Black Death of 1348, but the plague takes up a relatively tiny fraction of the work. After the Introduction, Boccaccio’s brigata—the group of seven young women and three young men who narrate the Decameron’s tales—escapes ravaged Florence.

The Impact of COVID-19 on Student Mobilities

By Alexandru Pieptea

Although many EU countries have faced challenges brought on by the coronavirus, there are differences in the extent of required measures. Several countries have decided to take measures in terms of closing some or all educational institutions for varying time periods.

Placing Islam in European Studies

By John R. Bowen

Our views of European history and society ought to change as we pay greater attention to the long-term presence of Islam, especially in the Balkans and Russia.

From Past Practices to Future Directions in European St…

By Hélène B. Ducros

As Europeanists ponder about the state of integration and disintegration of the European Union—under pressure from multiple crises and the “tensions and fractures” latent in the European project—it is only logical that they also interrogate their discipline and the ways in which “European studies” has been framed, as well as which “Europe” has been of concern to their field in practice.

A Roundtable on European Integration

By Mark I. Vail

The scholars in this roundtable explore, from a variety of substantive perspectives, the meaning and evolution of the concept of European integration and the tensions within it, interrogating an idea beholden to more than its share of conventional wisdoms, clichés, and airy nostrums.

Imagining Europe, Citizenship, and Scholarship in the T…

By Louie Dean Valencia-García

The immense project of the history of HIV/AIDS in Europe has largely been unwritten. While attempts have been made to make sense of the historical impact of the virus in Western Europe, most transnational, comparative studies were done in the midst of the crisis with the goal of informing policy, and before effective treatment of HIV/AIDS became widely available.

An Empty Spain Filled with Ideas?

By Jeremy MacClancy

Instead of a standardizing policy to re-create long-term stable communities, we should accept variegated, patchy development, where settlements are occupied, but whose inhabitants are not necessarily lifelong, and where the high contrasts between the city and the countryside are drastically lowered.

The Europeanness of British Cinema: Considering “Nation…

By Neil Archer

British films, in short, need Europe. Celebrated British film companies such as Working Title, whose output ranges from Notting Hill and Bridget Jones’s Diary, to Atonement and Darkest Hour, may seem to exemplify a “British” success story, in terms of their settings, stories, and British stars.

Illusory Enlargement of the European Union

By Milos Rastovic

The future enlargement of the European Union (EU) has become a critical question for debate among its members. Whether the EU maintains its existing boundaries or expands to the East is a concern that divides many.

Studying Europe Through the Lens of European Catholicism

By Hélène B. Ducros

This roundtable juxtaposes reviews of three recent books―two monographs and one edited volume―that delve into the role of Catholicism in influencing the social history of Europeans and Europe’s place in the world, and challenge the very conceptualization of European Catholicism as a hegemonic monolithic force in Europeanization and globalizing patterns since the seventeenth century.

Europe in a Global Context: Geographical Perspectives

By Rafael de Miguel González

Europe, thus, has played an important geopolitical role, in particular through the European Union from the twentieth century on, even though the latter faces two major challenges to become a one and only voice in the world: a lack of political cohesion among its member states and limited European citizenship.

Catholic Missionaries in Early Modern Asia Patterns of …

Reviewed by Michel Chambon

Throughout this edited volume, contributors explore how Catholic missionaries have engaged with Asian societies during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries and how, through these interactions, Catholicism became a local reality.

From French Studies to World War II and Beyond: A Remin…

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 App…

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.

Confessional Mobility and English Catholics in Counter-…

Reviewed by Eilish Gregory

Against a backdrop of recent referendums and the mass immigration of people fleeing their homelands because of religious persecution, economic hardships, and war, there has been a historical reassessment about people travelling for similar reasons in the early modern period.

The Myths of Western Civilization: Decolonizing and Que…

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.

Fatih Akın’s Cinema and the New Sound of Europe by Bern…

Reviewed by Kristin Dickinson

At the core of Güneli’s film analyses are the diverse “soundtracks” of Akın’s films. In her specific focus on polyphony, Güneli builds on previous scholarship, which has situated Akın’s work in the tensions between a “Fortress Europe” marked by borders and exclusivity and a “New Europe” marked by mobility and integration.

Jean-Luc Persecuted by C.F. Ramuz

Translated by Olivia Baes

[The fog] had taken shape little by little, rising from the bottom of the gorge like water does in a basin. Strangled between boulders, the great rumble of water filled the air…

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.

June 2020

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Louie Dean Valencia-Garcia, and Hélène B. Ducros.

Pensées Françaises Contemporaines: An Interdisciplinary…

By Elsa Tulmets

At the University Viadrina, the program strengthens the examination of diversity in French scientific thinking in teaching and research. In doing so, it takes into account the Viadrina’s founding mission to promote European perspectives as a German-Polish university situated at the German-Polish border.

Imagining, Thinking, and Teaching Europe

By Hélène B. Ducros and Louie Dean Valencia-García

This issue gathers a wide spectrum of interdisciplinary scholarship where all Europeanists have a place, whether they consider themselves European studies scholars, integration studies scholars, or European Union studies scholars.

Dutch Landscapes

By Mishka Henner

A landscape occasionally punctuated by sharp aesthetic contrasts between secret sites and the rural and urban environments surrounding them.

El Autobús

By Sol Calero

Calero’s work explores themes of representation, displacement, and marginalization, all informed by her own perspective as a migrant.

Envisioning the Past to Rule the Future: Post-imaginari…

By Stefanie C. Boulila

Modernity and progress have operated as central ideas for pan-European identification. Citizenship, equality, and human rights are claimed to have their “natural” home in Europe. In its post-structuralist understanding, history is theorized as a site for the negotiation of power.

Solidarity and Its Limits

By Anke S. Biendarra

While mutual support might work reasonably well on an interpersonal level, the Coronavirus outbreak is rapidly revealing the limits of solidarity when it comes to nation states, confirming that it is not a genuine “European” value per se, but is borrowed from the national political vocabulary.

A New Existentialism for Infectious Times

By Jennifer McWeeny

Much like Beauvoir and her famous entourage, we, too, are contending with an unexpected and catastrophic visitor. The coronavirus pandemic therefore allows us to enter the historical experience of these French thinkers more deeply than we have before.

Culturalist Perspectives in Social Analysis on Europe

By Timm Beichelt

The field of European Studies is not only constituted by its inner conditions, but also by the many different meanings attributed to it. European Studies are sometimes seen as one among many Area Studies, which implies cooperation of several disciplines in order to develop a somehow holistic approach to societal and/or cultural developments of a given territory.

Reparations and Remembrance: Determining the Future of …

By Renata Schellenberg

Since gaining independence in 1990, Namibia has engaged in a process of seeking reparations from the German government, requesting compensation for the material damages and loss of life that incurred during Germany’s colonial rule in German South West Africa from 1884 to 1915.

The Afterlives of Refugee Dead: What Remains?

By Karen Remmler

Images of overcrowded boats have become iconic for the plight of refugees. At the same time, however, the portrayal of the overcrowding elicits a sense of the pitiful and helpless victims, masses, in need of saving from the humanitarians of the global north.

Colonial Histories at the Humboldt Forum

By Emi Finkelstein

The reconstruction of the major Berlin landmark has fostered debate about the ways in which Germany continues to come to terms with its (short but brutal) colonial past, particularly in reference to the repatriation of objects, which were looted during the era.

Stalin’s Soviet Justice: “Show” Trials, War Crimes Tria…

Reviewed by Tony Foreman

Another theme developed by a couple of authors in this volume, traces the ways in which Soviet justice and its leading minds contributed to and complicated post-war international law. Perhaps the Soviets’ most important contribution was the introduction of the legal concepts of complicity and conspiracy.

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.

April 2020

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Juliane Mendelsohn, Louie Dean Valencia-Garcia, and Hélène B. Ducros.

Out There Learning: Critical Reflections on Off-Campus …

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.

European Art, Culture, and Politics

By Randall Halle

The European project is one that I have come to describe as dis/union—a dynamic of push-pull factors that remain constant. Precisely because there is a European project, the dynamic of union and disunion, contentious skepticism and optimism, pro and contra, which are part of all polities, obtains within the EU and at the broader European level.

Game Over

By Maria Wasilewska

Creating her spatial models, Maria Wasilewska tries to create a physically and mentally consistent unity, which may contain some particle of information about the world.

Four by Four by Sara Mesa

Translated by Katie Whittemore

In any case, the woods are forbidden. Supposedly, they’re dangerous. Not because of animals or the rough terrain, but the possibility of vagabonds, thieves, terrorists: people who want to blow up what this world is becoming.

From the Well to the Internet: Alternative Modes of Edu…

By Lillian Livermore

What does it mean to be educated or to have an education? Does it mean having influence, power, and knowledge? There are certainly many benefits―material and otherwise―to having an education, but throughout history, one particular group has been excluded from the ranks of the “educated:” women.

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.