Curated by Hélène B. Ducros
Artists use archival photographs to confront histories of domination and cultural eradication from Saamiland to the Maghreb.
Browsing Tag
georg brandes
By Alexandra Birch
Saami coastal settlements were expropriated by premodern Europeans, who also eradicated Saami ecosystems, religion, and crafts.
By Laura Frey, Vincent Bababoutilabo, and Joel Vogel
People came to Berlin and had to act out the colonial fantasies of the exhibition’s organizers.
By Ana Sladojević
The anti-colonial aspect of the museum was mainly anchored in the prevailing socialist and nonaligned discourse of the time.
By Erica Lehrer and Joanna Wawrzyniak
In singling out the ECE museumscape for decolonial attention, we are mindful of the pitfalls of pathologizing, orientalizing…
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.
Translated by Nhlanhla Maake
When you are standing on the bank of a river, you see yourself reflected twice, my friend.
Interviewed by Hélène B. Ducros
Kim Vaz-Deville addresses the “making of” art exhibitions and the value of cross-cultural collaborations to confront difficult histories.
Interviewed by Katrin Sieg
Part of reorienting ourselves is to build spaces of care.
Reviewed by Nick Ostrum
The twentieth century was an age of promise and advancement as well as of destruction.
By Marie-Laure Allain Bonilla
Decolonial practices and thinking have been invented, experimented with, and promoted in Swiss art spaces for a couple of decades.
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.
By Hélène B. Ducros
EuropeNow features a selection of scholarly articles and books on topics pertinent to the teaching of Europe or teaching in Europe.
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.
By Cresa Pugh
Theft becomes a political act through which resistance to conventional modes of possession and ownership is performed. By inverting the logic of criminality, Diyabanza remakes the museum as a space of inclusion.
Reviewed by Anjeana K. Hans
Hygiene became an organizing principle in Weimar society and culture and shaped the development of cinema in the era.
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.
Reviewed by Mary B. Vogl
Muslim women are marginalized in Britain’s creative industries where male, white, and secular features are maintained as the norm.
Reviewed by Azadeh Sharifi
Theater practitioners of Turkish descent are expected to perform a certain role on stage and in society.
Reviewed by Lucas René Ramos
The exploration of consent and complicity under fascism has intrigued historians of gender and sexuality for decades.
Reviewed by Chloé Roberts
Homza’s clear prose and detailed archival work weave a fascinating micro-history into the larger narrative of the early modern witch-hunts.
Reviewed by Olivia Landry
Cho explores the development of a discourse that addresses the ever-pertinent question of what makes cinema transnational.
By Katrin Sieg
European museums have begun to respond to demands for repatriating parts of their collections, serve more demographically diverse constituencies, and perform new civic functions.
Reviewed by Elizabeth Jones
Yakimchuk’s voice is most moving when she probes the tedium and small indignities of war and peruses the perimeters of language to capture those absurdities before they disintegrate.
Reviewed by Edina Paleviq
Representatives of the European Union declared at the Thessaloniki Summit in 2003 that the Western Balkans had a future within the Union.
Interviewed by Nicholas Ostrum
The topics chosen for our seminars are intended to fulfill our goal of teaching the Holocaust from a number of angles and perspectives.
Reviewed by Georgios Varouxakis
Mazower vividly shows the bewildering variety of motives among people on both sides of the conflict.
By Irina Trocan
Romanian cinema has recently entered a transnational or global phase and thus cannot be free of discernible codes of representation.
Interviewed by John Haberstroh
We learn about the continuing relevance of ancient myths, the power of opera, and the potential of virtual reality productions.
Reviewed by Sanja Tepavcevic
Tsygankov surveys some of the most prominent Russian realist thinkers and offers a warning.
Reviewed by Sebastian Wüpper
German-Americans, as any other immigrant community, cannot simply be pigeon-holed based on their ancestral origin.
Reviewed by Jack O’Dwyer
Prior to the US’ prolonged dominance in the film industry, Denmark was a global leader in film production, largely due to Nordisk Film.
Reviewed by Giulia Giamboni
The book argues that Venetian foundational myths played an important role in forming and informing new civic cults.
Reviewed by Emily Steinhauer
Renaud’s carefully crafted thesis of a repeating life cycle of neoleftist movements naturally brings him to the present moment.
Reviewed by Elizabeth B. Jones
Applebaum describes the cycles of violence unleashed by Soviet authorities against Ukrainians and how lessons learned in the early 1920s were refined and amplified a decade later.
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
By Christakis Georgiou
The drive to create the single currency in the late 1980s and 1990s is usually linked to the drive to complete the single market.
By Gabor Scheiring
While economic nationalism serves to pacify and incorporate national capitalists, populism works as a legitimation strategy.
By Niels Selling
This article proposes that companies are more likely to weigh in on morality issues in America…
By Beverly Barrett
In recent years, a global democratic backslide, as well as the actions of Russia in Ukraine, have shined a spotlight on national governance in Europe.
By Magnus Feldmann and Glenn Morgan
Businesses are important economic and political actors, and it is important to understand their role in resisting or underpinning populist rule.
By Astrid Hedin
There has been a tendency to assume that the relationship between business and the welfare state is unequivocally adversarial.
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
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.
By Xira Ruiz-Campillo
When questioning who should bear the most in facing environmental challenges, we tend to think about international organizations, states, or citizens. But what about cities?
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.
In this campus series, we feature pieces on teaching genocide.
By Joseph Daher
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in late February 2022 has already had a severe impact on the global economy, particularly in commodity markets, with the price for oil and gas escalating rapidly.
By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee
Here is this month’s editor’s pick from Research Editorial Committee member Hélène B. Ducros.
By William Bowden
EuropeNow features a selection of scholarly articles and books on topics pertinent to the teaching of Europe or teaching in Europe.
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.
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…
By Elana Resnick
Images of the plant burning caused horror around the world. Many observers, including Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, evoked the specter of Chernobyl.
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.
Interviewed by Angela Cacciarru
Bieler analyzes how struggles for reclaiming a fundamental common good are carried out and unveils the thread that links these struggles.
Reviewed by Gerd Bayer
Rich Brownstein has strong opinions on the many films he discusses in this comprehensive coverage of Holocaust cinema, and he does not mince his words.
Interviewed by Camilla Carlesi
Drawing from the main academic interests of its founders, this interview particularly focuses on the connection between environmental problems and the fields of law, the economy and energy transition.
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.
Interviewed by Maryna Lakhno
They highlight their motivations for and experiences with teaching the SDGs, as well as the challenges they have encountered when bringing the SDGs to the academic context.
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.
By Dominic Boyer and Maria Dolores Sanchez Galera
This special feature of EuropeNow offers a flavor of what the current European engagement with a Green transition is—its prides and less virtuous instances.
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.
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 Leslie Molina, PhD student at the University of Glasgow.
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.
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.
Reviewed by Elizabeth Jones
Time will tell whether recent Ukrainian victories, aided by European and North American allies, will vanquish Putin’s drive for a twentieth-first century Russian Empire and achieve Ukraine’s long-standing goals of joining the European Union and NATO.
By Jazmine Contreras
Baudet challenges the increased state attention on the Holocaust and Jewish victimhood…
By Heidi Hein-Kircher
“Security” is a very general, but often used catchword of political discourses.
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.
By Hélène B. Ducros
EuropeNow features a selection of scholarly articles and books on topics pertinent to the teaching of Europe or teaching in Europe.
Interviewed by Taylor Soja
Mezistrano and Lee discuss their ongoing collaborative work.
Interview by Taylor Soja
The minds behind KRIA (The Icelandic Constitution Archives) discuss their efforts to preserve documentation of the different phases of Iceland’s constitutional reform process.
By Georgios Karyotis
Since the end of the Cold War, there has been a significant shift in the conception and perception of security as a political value and policy goal. New issues have been brought forward in the security agenda; issues largely neglected in the past due to the Cold War hostility.
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.
In this issue of EuropeNow Campus, we feature a spotlight on Princeton University.
Translated by Rosmarie Waldrop
They were men who did nothing but walk walk walk. They were big, they were bearded, they wore leather caps and long raincoats…
Interviewed by Mara-Katharina Thurnhofer
European migration research has been shining a spotlight on various global and local trends.
Reviewed by Ian Roberts
Like the filmic oeuvre of German director Werner Herzog himself, Kristoffer Hegnsvad’s study is difficult to categorize.
By Marcus Nicolson
In recent years, social inclusion processes of migrants have been at the forefront of political debates in the UK and beyond.
By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee
Here is this month’s editor’s pick from Research Editorial Committee members Temenuga Trifonova and Hélène B. Ducros.
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.
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.
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.
By Taylor Soja and Laurie Marhoefer
The First and Second World Wars were human-made catastrophes that killed upwards of eighty million people, including tens of millions of civilians.
By Adrian Kane-Galbraith
On May 30, 1963, Katherine Jones, the tenant of a cheap one-room flat in London’s West End, was hauled before the Hampstead Magistrates Court on grounds that she “did unlawfully and knowingly permit [the premises] to be used for the purposes of habitual prostitution.”
By Geoffrey Turnovsky
It is no great insight to say that students today are increasingly reliant on the internet to do their reading and research for papers and projects. I measured the full scale of this trend in a 2019 class I taught on early modern French culture.
By Taylor Soja and Laurie Marhoefer
The digital revolution is changing the history profession. Vast amounts of archival materials are now digital, and digital search has both sped up and fundamentally altered many aspects of historical research.
By Julia Khrebtan-Hörhager and Evgeniya Pyatovskaya
Russia, which seemed interested in a cross-cultural dialogue and collaboration with once notoriously neutral Vienna, became increasingly critical of the country’s stance on the armed conflict in Ukraine.
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.
Reviewed by Andrea C. Mosterman
Reviewed by Anna Tito
Code—the written programming instructions that direct computers—is everywhere. It’s in our cars, our pockets, and it sits behind most aspects of our lives.
Reviewed by Richard F. Wetzell
After emigrating to the United States in 1941, the German Jewish lawyer Ernst Fraenkel published The Dual State: A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship, a seminal analysis of Nazi Germany that he had drafted while practicing as a lawyer in the Third Reich.
By Catherine Guisan
It is not too early, even as Russian troops impose horrific destruction and suffering on Ukrainian soldiers and civilians, to think of the future place of Russia in Europe.
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.
The European Studies Book Award shortlist has been announced. The award honors the work of talented scholars who have written their first book on any subject in European Studies published within a two-year period.
By Matthew Slaboch
Remembered by his compatriots as the “Russian Socrates,” Grigory Skovoroda (1722-1794) merits distinction as the founder of Russia’s autochthonous philosophical tradition.
In this series, we feature a spotlight on the Ukraine Crisis and its connections to European politics, society, and culture.
By Nicholas Ostrum
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has wavered recently on the question of Nord Stream 2, the controversial Baltic gas pipeline project connecting the Russian terminal at Ust-Luga to the German port in Lubmin and, from there, Western Europe.
By Thomas Henökl
Digital Transformation is advancing, virtually at light speed, and has a series of repercussions on people’s lives and livelihoods. Disruptive innovation is causing turbulence…
By Stuart P.M. Mackintosh
The history of the European Union is a remarkable story of war and desolation being replaced by peace and seventy-plus years…
In this issue of EuropeNow Campus, we feature a spotlight on Princeton University.
Reviewed by Jessie Hennen
The novel begins as Saga awakens to a bystander asking her name, which she cannot recall. She’s lying on a familiar sidewalk in…
Reviewed by Hayden Bytheway
There is a contradiction invoked by the concept of “guilty pleasure,” which entails both admonishment and amusement.
Interviewed by Luke Forrester Johnson
Christy Wampole discusses Princeton University’s Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities (IHUM).
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.
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.
By Manuela Boatcă
As a cultural entity, political project, and military-economic power, Europe has played different roles throughout ancient and modern history.
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.
By William Stewart
In 1913, the Austrian writer Robert Musil made an intriguing if not unsettling observation: among the mathematically inclined, there appeared to be two, diametrically opposed ideas about the relationship of mathematics to the “real world.”
By Hannah Stamler
In 1922, the Franco-Belgian journalist Clément Vautel published a dystopian story entitled Le dernier gosse (“The Last Kid”). Printed in the satirical journal Le Rire, it foretells of a 1950s France where there are no new births, save one—a miraculous “last child.”
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.
By Christene d’Anca
Medieval genealogies rose out of the need to elevate one branch of a population…
By Félix Jourdan
In France, the question of animal slaughter has been largely publicized by the animalist association L214. Throughout the past ten years, they have frequently published online images of slaughtering taken by hidden cameras.
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.
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.
By Michele Chinitz
The most staged dramatist after Shakespeare, the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen is regarded as the father of modern drama. A Doll’s House is his most popular play.
By Barbora Šedová and Lisa Thalheimer
The number of forcibly displaced people has been steadily on the rise. In 2015, over one million refugees and migrants reached Europe, the largest fraction of whom were fleeing the civil war in Syria.
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…
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…
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.
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.
By Brandon Edwards-Schuth and John Lupinacci
As educators engage in a critique of anthropocentrism, they can develop the…
By Hélène B. 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.
Reviewed by Yotam Tsal
Examines the nexus of environmentalism and decolonization to shed light on the political and economic interests behind the construction of…
By Sean Ireton
Ecosophy thus implies an “identification so deep that one’s own self is no longer adequately delimited by the personal ego or the organism…”
By Shira Shmuely
The plausible inclusion of cephalopods and crustaceans in animal welfare legislation reveals the central role of science in shaping the moral and legal obligations towards nonhuman animals.
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.
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.
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.
By Richard J. White and Hannah C. Gunderman
A fundamental cause of human neglect of, and violence toward, insects can be directly placed at the door of anthroprivilege, which, crucially, is learned behavior.
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).
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
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.
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.
By Matthew D. Miller
A hydrocentric mapping of Europe’s rivers, seas, and watersheds yields a refreshingly defamiliarized continental cartography
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.
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).
By Charlène Dray and Jocelyne Porcher
Through the lens of sociology and animal performance studies, we consider here the specific presence and work of stage animals.
By David A. Fennell, Bastian 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.
By Francesca Ferrando, Rohan Hassan, and Hélène B. Ducros
The first insight that Posthumanism gives us to understand what it means to be human…
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.
By Nandita Biswas Mellamphy
Problematizing AI in light of posthumanistic critiques would be beneficial in confronting questions of whether nonhuman intelligences can be conceptualized in terms other than humanistic.
Interviewed by Elizabeth B. Jones
Botanical artists are positioned very well to mediate new conversations about plants and understandings, in particular the connections between natural sciences, the humanities, and the public
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.
Curated by Hélène B. Ducros
Three artists participate in the special feature to join the reflection on what it means to be human in a multispecies world.
By Adam D. Brown and Alexa L. Elias
Every year, millions of people are confronted with violence, environmental disasters…
In this issue of EuropeNow Campus, we feature a spotlight on Sarah Lawrence College
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.
Reviewed by Brittany Lehman
The United Nations Refugee Agency estimates that at least 12 million people are either legally or effectively stateless. Given the increasing…
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.
Reviewed by Natalia Orasanin
Gordana P. Crnković’s work offers an enlightening path, filled with new possibilities, experiences, and discoveries.
By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee
Here is this month’s editor’s pick from Research Editorial Committee member Hélène B. Ducros.
By Parthiban Muniandy and Valeria Bonatti
In 2019, Sarah Lawrence faculty Parthiban Muniandy led a group of undergraduate students from Vassar, Sarah Lawrence, Bennington, and Bard colleges on an intensive field-research study abroad trip to Malaysia.
By Susan Ossman and Olga Sezneva
Ossman made “Sources” with elements of her own experiences of crossing borders, making new homes and learning to live in new places.
By Nick Ostrum
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.
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.
Interviewed by Maria Höhn and Nicole Shea
After the collapse of Communism in 1989, the city of Berlin, just ten years later, again became the capital of a newly, re-unified Germany.
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?
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.
By Philipp Nielsen
In 1922, in response to a wave of refugees from civil war Russia, the League of Nations created a passport for stateless people: The Nansen Passport.
By James Francis Cerretani
With over 80 million forcibly displaced persons worldwide at the end of 2020 (UNHCR, 2021), there is an increasing need to understand how communities living across borders are staying connected.
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.
By Manasi Sinha
With continuous instability and violence engulfing Afghanistan, large numbers of Afghan women and girls are likely to reach Europe to seek protection from conflict and violence in their native land.
Interviewed by Sanders Isaac Bernstein
Rather than understand the growing strength of the so-called far right as a matter of political program championed by distant extremists, Strick argues that we need to consider how they transform the emotional climate of everyday life.
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.
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.
By Anne-Marie Scholz
In 1992, Richard Dyer and Ginette Vincendeau published an edited volume of essays entitled Popular European Cinema. The notion was new at the time, they argue in the introduction.
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.
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.
By Philip E. Phillis
Prospective audiences may be at a loss if they try to conjure in their minds an Albanian film, especially since production has gained momentum only in the last twenty years.
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.
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
By Casey Harison
Vsevolod Pudovkin’s The End of St. Petersburg (1927) and Jean Renoir’s La Marseillaise (1938) are beautifully filmed and timeless stories that continue to hold the attention of the viewer almost a century after they were made.
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.
By Maria Stehle and Beverly Weber
About halfway through Faraz Shariat’s debut film, No Hard Feelings, Banafshe is notified that her asylum claim has been rejected while her brother will be permitted to stay.
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.
Curated by Nicole Shea
Each cinema hall is its own self-contained world with clearly defined boundaries, in colourful dialogue with the interior.
By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee
Here is this month’s editor’s pick from Research Editorial Committee members Temenuga Trifonova and Hélène B. Ducros.
Reviewed by Adam Cook
As sites of neoliberal formation, German’s national cinemas contain complex negotiations between societal and creative forces
By Temenuga Trifonova
In the first part of the course we will consider some examples of post-1960 European art cinema; in the second part we will turn our attention to questions of personal and…
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…
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.
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.
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.
Reviewed by Johannes M. Kiess
The volume Imbalance, edited by Tobias Schulze-Cleven and Sidney A. Rothstein, masterfully presents multiple imbalances of the German political economy and provides analytical insights into where they stem from and what they mean.
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.
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.
By Magali Chesnel
After a difficult 2020 year, Chesnel reinforced her belief that going outside was regenerative and ever-inspiring.
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.
By Joseph Keady
German activists’ complicated relationship with the United States contributes to their capacity to foment a cohesive transatlantic far-right.
Reviewed by Elizabeth Rice Mattison
A reconsideration of a key publication on late medieval history, of interest to scholars…
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.
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.
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.
Interviewed by Elizabeth B. Jones
Germany’s military and police forces have come under scrutiny for their failure to root out right-wing sympathizers in their ranks…
Interviewed by William Bowden
It seems crucial to imagine “reparative” teaching practices that attend to students’ diverse learning needs through a relational framework.
By Elke Segelcke
The Second World War ended in 1945, but its epilogue lasted for nearly another half century. This course will focus on Tony Judt’s book, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, that is a comprehensive and detailed account of the political and economic, as well as social, cultural, and intellectual history of Europe since the end of World War II.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
By Ida Sofie Gøtzsche Lange and Chrisann Neysa Rodrigues
The world’s population growth and migration to urban areas eat into global limited resources.
By Gregor Goetzl, et al.
A wide global consensus has been reached that it’s time to foster sustainable, just, and “green” transformations of society, irrespective of our cultural backgrounds and prosperity levels.
By Anna Louise Bradley, Clara Julia Reich, and Adam Curtis
Placemaking is far more abstract than simply making a place. It is not focused primarily on the end result, but rather the co-creative, democratic, and inclusive processes along the way.
Reviewed by Barbara Halla
For anyone who has even a fleeting familiarity with Ferrante’s fiction, the symbolism of such an introduction would need no explication.
In this issue of EuropeNow Campus, we feature a spotlight on Columbia University and the Université Paris 1, Panthéon-Sorbonne.
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.
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).
Reviewed by Andrew Schumacher Bethke
In the global resurgence of the far-right and white supremacist ideology over the past two decades, the debate over the past, history, and History as an academic discipline, looms large.
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.
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.
By Joseph Woldman
An antefix discreetly rests face-down on a storage shelf in Columbia University’s Art Properties collection. The object is readily identifiable by its terminal imbrex, or cover-tile, which remains attached to the decorative roof tile.
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.
By Monica Bulger
In the storerooms beneath Columbia University’s Avery and Fine Arts Library, some 650 Greek pottery fragments dating from the Early Bronze Age to the Classical Period are sorted into individually labeled bags in sturdy trays.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Interviewed by Benjamin Bernard
Stanford historian Andrei Pesic recently published an article in the leading historical journal, Past & Present, about how music might help us to rethink this question.
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.
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.
Reviewed by Kathleen R. McNamara
Love and marriage are central to our lives, yet scholars rarely consider how they might matter for politics.
Reviewed by Jan Kühne
In the nineteenth century, Argentina was the country with the second-largest number of immigrants, behind only the United States.
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.
Reviewed by James McSpadden
Who was the most important German left-wing activist of the nineteenth century? Readers of Jacobin and the Wall Street Journal could easily give you the same answer: Karl Marx.
Interviewed by Elizabeth Jones
Migration to the EU has created pressure on governments to ensure safe entry of migrants & establish the credentials of those in legal limbo.
By Francesca Pegorer
Even in these pandemic-ridden winter months, Hermannplatz, in Berlin’s North Neukölln, is bustling with activity.
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.”
By Sunnie Rucker-Chang
COVID-19 laid bare the health inequalities and gaps in access to care among marginalized communities in the United States and Europe.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Translated by Lytton Smith
I went out to the Kringilsárrani reserve while it still existed and was able to experience firsthand this magical world Helgi wrote about.
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.
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.
Translated by Will Firth
Now, a year and a half after Alija’s funeral, I stood in the courtyard in front of the house where I grew up. I tried to sing Morrissey’s “Late Night, Maudlin Street” in my head…
Reviewed by Max Sater
A comparative study of the disease control policies in Britain and the US from 1793, when Philadelphia experienced an outbreak…
By Ioan-David Onel
The parliamentary elections organized in Kyrgyzstan on October 4, 2020, brought a new wave of social unrest and instability.
By Georgiana-Cătălina Marcu
In the last nine weeks we were witnesses to the thawing of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. This is a decades-long conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan, which has escalated sharply in the last weeks.
By Dragoș Ioniță
In order to get a clear understanding of the political climate and the impact of recent developments on the country’s relationship with the EU, one must first delve deeper into Serbia’s democratic track record beyond 2020.
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.”
By Mario Love
In discussing race in America, author James Baldwin suggested that “God gave Noah the rainbow sign, no more water, the fire next time.”
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.
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.
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.
By Nancy Ruther, Sarah Rabke, and Alexa Jeffress
For over twenty years, virtual exchange (VE) has been a growing part of international higher education practice and policy, harnessing the power of increasingly user-friendly and low-cost technologies.
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.
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.
By Ana-Maria Anghelescu
In 2020, the European Union was supposed to take stock of its actions—looking both at the internal and external evolutions—in order to finalize and better prepare for the Multiannual Financial Framework of 2021-2027.
Reviewed by Vassilissa Carangio
Any discussion of feminist theory in both academic and activist feminist circles cannot exist without recognizing women’s differences.
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.
By Ali Meghji
The little Englander imagery of British history is an imagery that bifurcates the country from its unequal colonial relations.
By Audrey Célestine
It’s both an exciting and worrying time in French research. On the one hand, we’ve witnessed the multiplication of high-quality work on race in social science in the last fifteen years.
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.
By Esther Cuenca
COVID-19 has been the biggest crisis that has faced the modern academy since the last economic collapse in 2008.
Reviewed by Martin Rosenstock
She doesn’t shy away from pointing toward the bearings her work has upon the contemporary scene of German politics and culture.
Reviewed by Yao Lu
As the current pandemic and Black Lives Matter movement reveal, the issue of race has been one of the most salient global issues since at least the 1960s.
Interviewed by Laura Bartley
The recent events sparked by the murder of George Floyd, the disproportionate effect of…
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.
By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee
Here is this month’s editor’s pick from Research Editorial Committee members Hélène B. Ducros and Nick Ostrum.
By Esther Liberman Cuenca
Our goal this semester is to understand how people in the pre-modern world (that is, prior to 1800), particularly in Europe, discussed, reacted, and tried to remedy contagious diseases before the advent of modern medicine and scientific understandings of immunology and virology.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
By Lucy Barnhouse
“Isn’t it ironic,” asked a student in my Spring 2020 class on the history of western medicine, “that we’re studying this now?” Other students chimed in with agreement or additional observations.
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.
By Esther Liberman Cuenca
Our goal this semester is to understand how people in the pre-modern world (that is, prior to 1800), particularly in Europe, discussed, reacted, and tried to remedy contagious diseases before the advent of modern medicine and scientific understandings of immunology and virology.
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.
By Bianca Lopez
As a history instructor and researcher of medieval plague outbreaks, facing a modern pandemic with students in town has been both challenging and rewarding.
By Renata Dutrée
Black toxic masculinity is a unique beast rooted in white supremacy, internalized racism, internalized queerphobia, and misogynoir.
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.
By Michelle D. Weitzel
The last century has seen growing ethnic diversity in France as immigrants from former French colonies and economic migrants from all over Europe settled, made homes, became citizens, and built lives across generations.
By Volha Charnysh
For nearly four months now, mass protests have rocked Belarus. Fall weather has not thinned the crowds demanding free and fair elections and the release of political prisoners.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In this issue of EuropeNow Campus, we feature a spotlight on Maastricht University.
By Victoria Leigh Brown
Authoritarian populism has emerged from rural spaces long ignored as “empty” and out-of-fashion within European academe.
By Twan Huijsmans
Scholars, pundits, and policy-makers frequently express concern about growing polarization between urban and rural areas, arguing that it could become the dominant conflict line in Western democracies.
By Tom Mordue, Oliver 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.
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.
Reviewed by Bruce Hayes
Guynn’s book is intentionally polemical, seeking to redress supposed mischaracterizations of farce by scholars like me.
Reviewed by John R. Bowen
Through the many studies, stories, and films made about post-war Muslim migration to Western Europe, each major country projects its own dominant image. France has its North African immigrants, Germany has its Turks…
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”
By Aris Anagnostopoulos
Two young urbanite Herakliots, an architect and a cinematographer, who both hail from highland Crete were deeply engaged in conversation following a recent spate of armed violence in a village back in 2012.
By Marisa Mori
Maastricht University (UM) is well-known for its Problem Based Learning (PBL) education system. Another feature that stands out in the European studies bachelor program is an elaborate skills training trajectory.
By Wyn Grant
The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is the European Union’s (EU) longest lasting policy. It is the policy that has arguably most greatly influenced European farmers’ decisions.
By Elizabeth B. Jones
No one knows when the uncertainties of the COVID-19 era will ease into more predictable rhythms. In Europe, as everywhere else, the pandemic has complicated even mundane tasks like grocery shopping.
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.
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.
By Kirstin Herbst
Scholars in the field of international politics often point to climate change as an example of a problem more efficiently solved by delegating authority to international institutions.
By Johanna Hvalić
Women’s agency in British imperialism has often been neglected in the writing of history. Their experience, roles, and identities are often dominated by male perspectives, resulting in stereotypical representation as eroticized indigenous women and white “Memsahibs” following their husbands.
Interviewed by Hélène B. Ducros
Ralph Lister is a man with a passion: to bring creative Europe beyond its usual metropolitan frontiers.
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.
By Arielle DeSoucey and Michaela DeSoucey
Nestled in the southeast corner of Czechia, South Moravia is located on the western tip of the Carpathian Mountains and at the foot of the Danube river.
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.
By Christine Neuhold
During the summer of 2020, academic staff and students alike have had to face various degrees of a COVID-19 lock-down.
Reviewed by Tracey Heatherington
The rich case studies in this volume explore distinctively European contexts of activism to challenge the dominance of industrial food systems.
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.
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.
By Ruth McAreavey
Migration to small towns and rural places, like those of my childhood in Northern Ireland, has been witnessed across many countries of the Western World, including Norway, Sweden, Greece, and Spain.
Reviewed by Michael Subialka
The European avant-gardes exploded onto the scene in the decade leading up to the Great War and imposed new visions of art and culture in the decades after it.
Interviewed by Hélène B. Ducros
The drawback of European studies, but also politics and international relations, is that we teach a moving target. You may teach something one day and the next day it has completely changed.
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)
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.
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.
By Camilo Erlichman
Present-day Europe is shaped by a number of highly complex political, social, economic, and cultural realities that escape any easy description.
By Pablo del Hierro
It might be hard to believe now, but debates about the dangers of fascism or the rise of far-right political parties were not very popular just over a decade ago.
By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee
Here is this month’s editor’s pick from Research Editorial Committee members Hélène B. Ducros and Elizabeth Jones.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
By Diana-Andreea Mandiuc
Just two days after the virus spread was categorized as a pandemic, Europe recorded the largest number of cases outside of China (Ghebreyesus, 2020), testing the Union’s ability to cope with emergency health issues.
By Marcela Romero Rivera
When does a revolution triumph? Can we say that a revolution is victorious when strategic military objectives have been secured?
In this issue of EuropeNow Campus, we feature a spotlight on Bennington College.
By Adedoyin Teriba
At times, architecture is a response to an existential crisis—especially if one is in dire straits in a European colony. All the more if, perchance, one had the ill fortune of being enslaved.
By Noah Coburn, Elbunit 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.
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.
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.
Reviewed by Sarah S. Willen
A nuanced analysis of the distinctive approach to “cultural competence” undergirding Centre Minkowska’s work.
By Valeria Sibrian and Sarah Lore
When we took the course, “In Translation: Lives, Text, Cities,” at Bennington College in Fall 2017, we were presented with a class that would allow us to study writers who live in translation —writers like us.
Reviewed by Justin Patch
The Beatles: what more is there to say about the band that transformed global popular culture? A casual survey of the Library of Congress reveals over a thousand titles.
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.
By Emily Mitchell-Eaton
This class examines geographies of death, dying, and mourning as experienced by migrants living in diaspora or exile.
By Joseph M. Alpar and Kerry Ryer-Parke
There are now more than 270 million migrants across the globe. This course used music to study critical issues of migration beyond statistical analysis and surveys.
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.
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.
Interviewed by Nicole Shea
Migration has always played a major part in creating a European identity, derived from a thriving pluralistic space.
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
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.
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
By Matthew Brill-Carlat, Ava 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.
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.
By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee
Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Nick Ostrum and Hélène B. Ducros.
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.
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.
Reviewed by Mohamed Amine Brahimi
Nadia Kiwan’s Secularism, Islam and Public Intellectuals in Contemporary France, addresses a topic that receives little attention in the social sciences: the position of Muslim intellectuals in France and their relationship to secularism.
Translated by David Colmer
The one who is addressing you here / is not the one who is writing this / the one who is writing this / not the one who is.
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.
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.
Reviewed by Alec Medine
Covers the history of Eastern and Central European nationalities from their inception as imperial subject-peoples in the 18th century.
In this issue of EuropeNow Campus, we feature a spotlight on the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
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.
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.
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.
Reviewed by Geoff Hare
Footballing culture (men’s professional football/soccer) developed in the greater Manchester area from the mid-nineteenth century to the inter-war period.
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.
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.
Reviewed by Pınar Odabaşı Taşcı
The experiences of Ottoman children and youth, an understudied segment of Ottoman society, open new venues of research that highlight this agency to deal with the enormous challenges of wartime.
Interviewed by Jonathan Larson
Virtual Exchange is a perfect opportunity for curricular innovation. At DePaul University, there is a lot of flexibility for faculty members to make adjustments to their classes in order to incorporate international virtual collaborations.
By Diana-Andreea Mandiuc
Presented as a plan for Europe to become “the first climate-neutral continent by 2050,” the European Green Deal has been the first priority for the new Commission.
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.
Translated by Ghjulia Romiti
I wander through paris, empty / of our laughter of our frenzy / absent from our absence / the spring sun / shines uselessly / stripped of our meanderings / of the lovers’ kisses
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.
By Eda Derhemi
For thousands of years the Mediterranean Sea has been a place where important civilizations have met and where cultures and languages have intermingled and competed.
By Cristina Blanco Sío-López
This article aims to examine the origins and evolution of the dichotomy between liberty and security in the European integration process by focusing on the case of the historical construction of the EU’s Free Movement of Persons (FMP).
By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee
Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Nick Ostrum and Hélène B. Ducros.
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.
Interviewed by Juliane Mendelsohn
It can take a long time, if one is brought up in a place foreign to one’s artistic sensibilities to discover other artists that speak your language.
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.
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.”
Interviewed by Friederike Eigler
We built an international network that includes some participants who have experienced displacement and some who have not but who collaborate at all levels in a multilingual and transdisciplinary manner.
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.
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.
In this series, we feature a spotlight on the Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and its connections to European politics, society, and culture.
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.
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.
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.
Reviewed by Sarah Slingluff
One walks away from La Corte del Califa with a deep appreciation for the ability of the Umayyad rulers of al-Andalus to manage resources, develop networks, and negotiate governance in the Iberian Peninsula.
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.
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.
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.
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.
By Nikolina Zenovic
The long history of peoples and movements throughout the Balkans has situated Yugoslavia in a particularly interesting position culturally, geographically, and politically.
In this issue of EuropeNow Campus, we feature a spotlight on Europa-Universität Viadrina.
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.
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.
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.
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.
By Sara McGeough
Is globalization creating a more interdependent and compassionate world, or is it galvanizing division and a fearful desire to protect our own?
Reviewed by Natalia Núñez Bargueño
The book describes the nature of ongoing tensions over their active role within the Church and within contemporary Italian society.
By Estela Schindel and Timm Beichelt
When it was first founded in 1506 on the banks of the river Oder under the name “Universitas Francofurtensis,” what is now the Viadrina became the first public university of the state (then principality) of Brandenburg.
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.
By Angélica Szucko
On March 25, 2017, the European Union (EU) celebrated the 60th anniversary of the Treaties of Rome, which established “an ever closer union” as a fundamental principle for regional integration.
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.
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.
By Vanessa Bilancetti
In front of the explosion of the financial crisis, between 2008 and 2011, European studies was completely unable to comprehend the unfolding socio-political and economic dynamics.
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.
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?
By Mihaela Tofan
The financial crisis that took place during the first decade of this century pointed out that further financial mechanisms are necessary to emphasize the integration process of cooperation among EU member states.
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.
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.
By Texas State Honor Students
When introduced in the early twentieth century at Ivy League institutions, “Western Civilization” courses were initially considered pedagogically innovative for their attempt at making European history relevant to the United States.
By Kevin Michot
By the late 1980’s, the postwar generations of Romania, no longer willing to accept an oppressive Communist regime, fought for and achieved their freedom.
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.
Reviewed by Joseph Malherek
There is an inherent fatalism in the term “interwar.” Yet, it remains a convenient descriptor for historians of the twentieth century.
By Conny Burian
Although scholars outside the humanities tend to think of European Studies as disciplines housed primarily in the political and social sciences, language and cultural studies programs make important contributions to this field.
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.
By Kerstin Hinrichsen
For more than twenty years, students from Germany, Poland, France, Turkey, and many other countries in Europe and the world have come to Frankfurt (Oder), on the German-Polish border, to take up a unique Master’s (MA) program in European Studies.
Interviewed by Louie Dean Valencia-García
As part of this special issue on Imagining, Thinking, and Teaching Europe, this interview helps highlight the value of language and cultural exchange.
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…
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.
By Elisabeth Krimmer
Koppetsch’s analysis links the emergence of extreme-right populist movements and the attendant preference for nationalist over cosmopolitan narratives to a paradigm shift from industrial-national modernity toward globalism.
By John Pickles
In this course we will focus much of our attention on diverse geographies of Europe and how post-socialism in Central and Eastern Europe, political unification through the European Union, economic globalization, and post-colonial immigration mean for our understanding of Europe Today.
By Nicholas Ostrum
Writing and even reading experimental literature can, in itself, be an act of creative critical analysis. In certain contexts, moreover, it can be an overt act of civic engagement, resistance, and self-realization.
By John Pickles
“Europe Today” is an upper division undergraduate course focused on the processes and patterns of transnational and global Europe, and the ways in which these processes and patterns have reshaped and are reshaping everyday lives, economies, and places across the continent.
By Clara Frysztacka
Europe is not only a central reference point for cultural studies at the Europe-University Viadrina and elsewhere, but it is also an omnipresent concept in the press and political debates.
By Clara Frysztacka
“Europe” and “nation” are deeply connected concepts. In historiography, conceptions seeing the seventeenth century as birth moment both for the nation-state and the idea of modern Europe are utterly widespread.
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.
Interviewed by Hélène B. Ducros
Focusing on the role of critical scholars in effecting change.
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.
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.
By Mishka Henner
A landscape occasionally punctuated by sharp aesthetic contrasts between secret sites and the rural and urban environments surrounding them.
By Sol Calero
Calero’s work explores themes of representation, displacement, and marginalization, all informed by her own perspective as a migrant.
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.
Interviewed by Juliane Mendelsohn
I think we are learning that the European project still requires more from all of us: more unity, more compassion, and more selfless solidarity.
By Jean Beaman
Minority populations are responding to a violence that is not new, but rather an extension of the violence of French colonialism. The quarantine period reveals how some individuals, even those who are citizens, are forever seen as suspicious.
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.
By Peter Debaere
If we continue to scapegoat globalization instead of being willing to share more equitably the benefits of technological progress and of globalization, we will fail to bring about the international cooperation we need.
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.
Translated by Stephen Twilley
They move slowly, lazily; move their arms or turn their back by swiveling their chest, their head immobile, with the lazy litheness of reptiles.
By Anke S. Biendarra
The regimented and multilingual intake and asylum interview features prominently in many narratives of flight and refuge across.
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.
By Estela Schindel
The persistence of migrants’ death on their way to Europe through the last two decades poses a challenge to the political and administrative forces of the continent, but their implications go far beyond those spheres.
By Kristin Dickinson
In October of 1932, just months before Hitler’s rise to power, the Turkish modernist poet Ahmet Haşim stepped off a train in Frankfurt am Main.
By Christopher Impiglia
As any student of history can attest, there are times when the voices of the past prove eerily relevant to the present.
By Christine Ivanovic
The task of “reshaping Europe” asks for experiments, for agency, for translating the experience of the migrational condition into a new cultural practice.
By Randall Halle
Integration seems to offer orientation and unity. And, yet, integration also seems difficult to achieve, apparently coupled with its antithesis―disintegration.
By Susann Worschech
There are not too many societies in Europe that have experienced such a close sequence and severe intensity of protests, crises, and social change as Ukraine did since its independence in 1991.
By Zsuzsánna Magdó
Balázs’s utopian desire and practice records his lived experience of a set of social realities and discursive positions that scholars have come to associate with the problematic concept of (global) modernity.
Reviewed by Caroline Bruzelius
A provocative and stimulating book, one that is best-suited to historians of art and architecture.
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.
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.
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.
Reviewed by Martin Fotta
Materializing Difference portrays relatively well-integrated Gabor Roma from the region of Transylvania in Romania, who enjoy a standard of living comparable to—if not higher than—that of their neighbors.
Reviewed by Giovanni Dettori
Carole Counihan explores food activism in southern Sardinia. She investigates the work of food activists living in Cagliari, Sardinia’s regional and provincial capital, and its surrounding areas.
Reviewed by David Harrisville
Over the last several decades, scholarship on the Wehrmacht—the German military during the Third Reich—has overturned the longstanding myth that its officers and men avoided involvement in the crimes of the Nazi regime.
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.
Reviewed by Peter Cowley
After a decade of using Nouveau Rond Point 1 as the textbook for our first-year beginner French courses, the time for renewal had come.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The European Studies Book Award shortlist has been announced. The award honors the work of talented scholars who have written their first book on any subject in European Studies published within a two-year period.
In this issue of EuropeNow Campus, we feature a spotlight on Appalachian State University
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.
By Kathryn Kirkpatrick
This dual vocation of academic and poet has felt both necessary and arduous: in the 1980s, reclaiming women’s writing through scholarship felt like putting literal ground under my feet.
Reviewed by Maya Solovej
She was only eleven, but the experience exposed her to the fragile border between the civility of the everyday and the violence of war.
By Nancy Love
This course examines the various types of feminist political theories that inform contemporary feminist politics.
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.
By Júlia Garraio, Sofia José Santos, Inês Amaral, and Alexandre de Sousa Carvalho
This embodiment of national pride is gendered, based upon class and race assumptions.
By Sumayya Ebrahim and Lisa Liu
Celebrities not only have the potential to discursively influence contemporary issues, they have the potential to be activists and resist silence for any given cause.
By Alison Gulley
Despite having taught the “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” many times and to hundreds of students, from sophomores to graduate students, I left class feeling inadequately prepared to teach the work in our specific modern context.
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.
Interviewed by Hélène B. Ducros
In 1949, Simone de Beauvoir’s seminal Le Deuxième Sexe (The Second Sex) broke away with the then dominant naturalist understanding of women’s bodies when she asserted that society is the key determinant of women’s roles and status through the restriction it imposes on their bodies.
By Elisabeth Pauline Gniosdorsch
The very notion of women in combat throws the boundaries between masculinity and femininity into question. The military is an important state institution and its gender assumptions and narratives are constantly referenced and reproduced in society as a whole.
By Bronwyn Winter
Both Macron’s words and the media debate over #Metoo/balancetonporc brought into sharp relief the particularly “French” dimension of public debate over sexual harassment that had been in evidence both at the time of the DSK Affair and in French reactions to the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas sexual harassment case in the US.
Interviewed by Alice R. Bertram
When dealing with gender-based violence, there is baggage. Looking at it from a corruption perspective doesn’t have the same baggage.
By Sarah Cooper and Koen Slootmaeckers
The disparagingly fickle and fleeting attention of citizens often times serves to dilute the extent of actual change following public scandals, but it arguable that the mounting critical mass of cases of sexual assault and harassment now punctuating the media’s gaze opens a prominent window of opportunity for the social movement on the political agenda.
By Caitlin Carroll
The Swedish #MeToo movement has revealed a fundamental hypocrisy when it comes to sexual violence and the law.
By Mikael Owunna
After enduring years of alienation from his Nigerian heritage, Owunna began Limit(less) to reclaim his African-ness and queerness on his own terms.
Translated by Saskia Vogel
My body clung to me like something foreign—a sticky, itchy rubber suit; but no matter how much I scratched and scraped at it, it was where it was.
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.
By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee
Here is this month’s editor’s pick from Research Editorial Committee member Hélène B. Ducros.
Reviewed by Jennifer Miller
Thomsen Vierra poses important questions: Where does the conflicted sense of belonging come from for Turkish-Germans? How do they manage their hybridity?
Reviewed by Siobhán McIlvanney
What was it about certain types of writing that prioritized gender and overrode—or at least minimized—affiliation based on class or social rank?
Reviewed by Nicholas Ostrum
The Holocaust and North Africa sets out “to flesh out our understanding of the ways the Holocaust unfolded in North Africa, a region considered marginal… to the racial and genocidal policies of the Nazis and their allies.”
Reviewed by Aleksandra Pomiecko
Oil and the Great Powers makes a convincing case for the importance of using oil as a tool to unpack critical diplomatic, geopolitical, and economic moments in the global twentieth century.
Reviewed by Stephanie Yep
Faces of Muhammad is a magisterial work that offers a complex portrait of European identity.
Reviewed by Kimberley Peters
As expressed in Vaillant’s own words, the book aims to explore the “users and developers of US-French broadcasting to illuminate the complexity of international broadcasting and reveal its consequences for cultural affairs and geopolitics,” and does so through careful, detailed research, drawing on a variety of textual and sound archives, making for a rich and expressive account.
By Kyle Shybunko
Presidential candidates in the current Democratic primary campaign are proposing major structural changes to America’s political economy in a way not seen since perhaps Ronald Reagan’s 1980 run for President, when he called for the liberalization of America’s labor market, deregulation of industries across the board, and welfare reform.
By Olga A. Vorkunova and Samvel Kochoi
A social integration perspective in Europe provides an organizing framework for understanding the changing processes of complex identities. For Yezidi people, it is about new methods and forms of post-genocide survival.
By Benjamin Tainturier
It is because of its radical opposition to the past that the movement of the Gilets Jaunes is so little intelligible to most people.
By Christopher Campo-Bowen
First premiered in 1866, The Bartered Bride became the single most beloved of all Czech operas in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Critics and scholars praised the work as a symbol of Czech national character, emphasizing that its music flawlessly represented the essence of the Czech people, regardless of their education or class.
By William Allchorn
For several years now, scholars have identified a rich seam in far-right discourse that has strategically used liberal rights to further what is ostensibly an illiberal, anti-immigration agenda.
By Sindre Bangstand
The Norwegian case illustrates how crucially important it remains to take local and national context into account when studying the rise of far-right and populist right-wing political formations, and how mistaken the view that right-wing populism is inherently ‘anti-elitist’ and anti-thetical rather than instrumental to neoliberalism actually is.
Reviewed by Christoph Dieckmann
The question that Hanebrink tackles in this study is of crucial importance for analyzing antisemitic mass violence in the 20th century.
Reviewed by Maboula Soumahoro
The mention of “love and friendship” is a rare feature in a scholarly publication. Yet, these two noble and lofty feelings make their appearance in the foreword to The Fire Now. Love and friendship, to which “tenderness” is added later on, are used by the three editors of this collective project, as the core for their “continuous dialoguing.”
By Robert Kramm
In light of current phenomena such as the gilets jaunes in France, rising right-wing populism and nationalism all over Europe and social media undermining democratic discourse and the electoral system, the Hong Kong protests raise important questions also for a European audience.
By Marc Tuters
In the aftermath of the insurgency of US president Donald Trump there was a great deal of concern regarding the problem of “fake news,” often imagined or assumed to be the work of exotic “Russian trolls.”
By Christina Isabel Zuber
In the late 1980s, when ideational explanations were on the rise, political scientists suggesting such explanations often had to defend their work against harsh critique.
By Jenny Barnett
“Visual culture,” Jane Lydon writes “can define boundaries between people, supporting perceived hierarchies of race, gender and culture, and justifying arguments for conquest and oppression.”
By Diogo Magalhaes
In recent years and with all four areas of European integration—economic, social, legal and political—facing a series of unprecedented and interconnected crises, the normative foundations of the integration process have been shattered.
In this issue of EuropeNow Campus, we feature a spotlight on the University of Amsterdam.
Reviewed by Brian Gebhart
For over a decade, historians of Central and Eastern Europe have begun to highlight how the subjects and citizens of states in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries did not always neatly subscribe to the identities projected onto them.
By Christopher Paul, Tirupapuliyar Damodaran, Noelle Wyman Roth, Laurell Malone, and Charlotte Clark
Inspired by the three-leaved plant, the Trillium conference uses a tripartite approach to sustainability that includes social, economic, and environmental elements.
By Boyd van Dijk
The course demonstrates how Europe’s images of justice and rights were far from constant, but actually shifted overtime to reflect changing moral and political transformations.
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.
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.
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.
By R. Grant Kleiser
When first formalizing my research plans in early 2018, I conceived of my project concerning the British Free Port Act of 1766 to be about emulation and idea-sharing between various European empires in the Caribbean.
Interviewed by Louie Dean Valencia-García
This interview helps to show the ways in which the field of European Studies is evolving, but also demonstrates the importance of thinking outside of one’s discipline and one’s own perspective.
Interviewed by Kathryn Crim
At the center of Berlin-based Australian artist and writer Alex Martinis Roe’s work is the concept of feminist genealogies.
Translated by Angela Rodel
We danced through the Videnov financial Crisis as well, the protests, the harsh hyperinflation that bled our parents dry.
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.
By Carlos Reijnen
European Studies at the UvA has existed for well over thirty years now, and has gradually shifted from a very cultural and historical paradigm to an ambitious interdisciplinary collaboration between humanities, law, economics, and the social sciences.
Reviewed by Anton Hemerijck
Ten years after the first economic crisis of twenty-first century capitalism, Europe seems to have passed the nadir of the Great Recession. Time to count our blessings: a rerun of the Great Depression has been avoided, and recovery, however timid, is under way while poverty is coming come down.
Reviewed by José Luis Fernández Castillo
From a general perspective, the authors illustrate how the act of translating was, on many occasions, at the center of political resistance both during the Spanish Civil War and in the long dictatorship that ensued.
By Madison Jackson
Jewish exhibitions first emerged as a post emancipation concept, founded in Western Europe in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Prior to World War II, Jewish museums and exhibitions of any sort were limited; however, in 1945 the Jewish museums presence expanded in the West.
By Medina Dugger
Dugger’s images feature the veil primarily in an abstract sense, observing its forms, patterns, colors, and its contribution to identity, self-expression, and style.
Translated by Daniella Zamir
The sidewalk was cleansed of the blood. Rivers of rain, water hoses, and street sweepers joined forces to scrub the surface after the last remnant was removed.
By Rüdiger Müller
At some point in the days that followed, I remember my mother telling me that the wall was gone, and that my father had been promoted to managing director of his company.
By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee
Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Hélène B. Ducros, Mark Vail, Carol Ferrara, Nick Ostrum, Juliane K. Mendelsohn, and Louie Dean Valencia-García.
By Hélène B. Ducros
In the fall issue of EuropeNow, we feature an Author-Meets-Critics on Vichy contre Vichy, Une capitale sans mémoire by Audrey Mallet
By Richard J. Golsan
To today’s casual visitor, Vichy seems an attractive, prosperous provincial French town. One of Europe’s most celebrated spas, it has enjoyed a long and largely prosperous past.
By Bertram M. Gordon
Mallet addresses the prewar history of Vichy as a spa center, reaching a turning point with the construction of a railway station under Napoleon III, which brought an extended clientele and made it internationally famous, evidenced in an article in the New York Times in 1876.
By David Lees
For historians of modern France, it can sometimes appear that all roads lead to the small spa town of Vichy. Such is the legacy of World War II in France that the four “dark years” of German Occupation and Vichy rule still cast long shadows over French society today.
By Richard Carswell
The visitor to Vichy today will look in vain for the Hôtel du Parc, seat of Marshal Pétain’s government from 1940 to 1944. The building still exists. But there are no signs to indicate its former incarnation. It is now a block of offices, apartments, shops and the local tourist office, where an official will tell you—on request—that, yes, this was the site of the Hôtel du Parc. The only sign of the building’s association with the defunct regime is closed to the casual tourist.
By Kirrily Freeman
In this engaging book, Mallet examines the factors that shaped the wartime experiences of the town of Vichy (which was the provisional capital of France and seat of Marshal Philippe Pétain’s collaborationist government from 1940 to 1944), the responses of the local population, and the ways in which these experiences and responses have been remembered locally (or not remembered) since the end of World War II.
By Amy Kaslow
This series transports you to a dozen countries, decades into their post-war years, providing historical context, spotlighting here and now conditions, and pointing to horizon issues.
In this issue of EuropeNow Campus, we feature a spotlight on Vassar College.
By Giovanna Faleschini Lerner
With the rise of western modernity and the invention of childhood, the job description of parenthood has expanded to include the establishment and maintenance of childhood archives.
By Evan Henritze and Adam Brown
The potential negative mental health consequences of forced migration is becoming increasingly recognized as an urgent issue in the context of international public health. Recent estimates show forcibly displaced people to be approximately 71 million worldwide. This crisis not only impacts those directly affected by forced migration, but also subsequent generations as well as non-immigrant populations of host countries whose health is closely associated with immigration policy.
By Adam Brown
Since 2016, millions of individuals have fled the Middle East and Northern Africa and have entered the European Union (EU) through Italy, Greece, and Spain. Although the majority of refugees seek asylum in Germany, a considerable minority of individuals seek protection in Switzerland.
Interviewed by Matthew Brill-Carlat
In today’s world, repressive and authoritarian governments across the globe are an increasing threat to intellectuals and civil society.
By Jan Müller
Documentary filmmaker Jan Müller chronicled life during the “New Americans” Summer Program, interviewing the high school students with refugee and forced migrant backgrounds who came to Vassar College for two weeks in July 2019.
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.
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.
Translated by Paul Wilson
And sure enough, Blackie stopped paying attention to me, and then she began clawing at me and I had to take a rag, and then a blanket, and hold her down.
By Ava McElhone Yates
Nearly every news report and explanation of resignation syndrome (alternatively known as uppgivenhetssyndrom, RS, or traumatic withdrawal syndrome) begins the same way. Each explains the life of a child.
Reviewed by Nergis Canefe
An engaging analysis of the Greek-Turkish population exchange that moves far beyond conventional attention to nationalism.
By Matthew Brill-Carlat
“Access” implies that the problem of unequal opportunity in the US is a spatial one. Institutions erect barriers — test scores and sticker prices being two of the most prominent — and once aspiring students find a path through these barriers and enter the collegiate sphere, they gain access to the knowledge, connections, and opportunities they seek.
By Julie K. Allen, Chunjie Zhang, and Sabine Zimmermann
Inspired by an actual hunger strike conducted by African asylum seekers in Berlin in 2012, and published just as the Syrian refugee wave peaked in 2015, Erpenbeck’s novel centers on Richard, a recently retired Classics professor in Berlin, who befriends a group of African men trying to get the Berlin Senate to consider their applications for asylum and becomes gradually aware of the many challenges they face in trying to start their lives over in Europe.
By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee
Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Hélène B. Ducros and Louie Dean Valencia-García.
By Miles Rodríguez
Today, over 11 of 44 million immigrants in the US were born in Mexico, by far the largest country of origin, and Latin American immigrants as a whole makes up approximately half of the entire US immigrant population.
By Lauranne Wolfe
There is a long history of restricting the entry of immigrants with medical conditions and disabilities into the United States. Disabled immigrants have historically been considered undesirable and a burden on society.
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.
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.
Reviewed by Felicity Chaplin
A committed and engaging enquiry into the contradiction between feminism and neoliberalism.
By Eva Woods Peiró
For quite some time, colleagues in Education at Vassar have been trying to reimagine the classroom in an increasingly neoliberal, commercialized landscape through contemplative practices or Human Rights Education and restorative justice models.
By Stefanie Woodard
Although people have been relocating for millennia, migration and related phenomena seem to have dominated our headlines in the last few years. Is migration happening on a larger scale today, or is this just a matter of perception?
By Stefanie Woodard
“Although people have been relocating for millennia, migration and related phenomena seem to have dominated our h