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Security and Stability in Germany’s “Zeitenwende”

By William Glenn Gray

“The world afterwards is not the same as the world before,” intoned Chancellor Olaf Scholz to the Bundestag on February 27, 2022. In Berlin, the Russian assault on Ukraine reversed fundamental assumptions about the nature of international politics.

 

Europe and NATO Since Ukraine

By Carl J. Strikwerda and Ruud van Dijk

Scholars of Europe from both sides of the Atlantic assess some of the impact of the war between Ukraine and Russia on NATO, European institutions, and individual European countries. Will NATO get stronger or weaker as the war persists in a stalemate and populist and isolationist political parties assert themselves in member countries? Will the renewed unity among EU members persist in the face of the obstacles lying ahead in Europe?

C-art-ographic Dreamings

Curated by Hélène B. Ducros

In their treatment of shapes, contour lines, or colors, artists appropriate the cartographic instrument to give life to new forms and new meanings that elicit emotions.

The Ukraine by Artem Chapeye

Translated by Zenia Tompkins

You’re…moved by the welcoming calm and serenity of provincial Ukraine…suddenly you realize that from under a kiosk…the barrel of a machine gun is aimed at your chest.

To the Letter by Tomasz Różycki

Translated by Mira Rosenthal

that color once existed here. And dust gets in./ The nests of ants and mice now totally exposed./ A moving out, an exodus. This once was home./ Once light and heat and fire. Now so much wind.

The Impact of the Ukraine War on the Transatlantic Rela…

By Abraham (“Bram”) Boxhoorn

The impact of the Ukraine war on the transatlantic relationship and Euro-Atlantic institutions (EU and NATO) can be only conditionally assessed at this time. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sparked a number of consequences in European international affairs. Some European countries suffered more than others due to the self-imposed sanctions.

February 2024

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

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

An Assessment of the Impact of the War in Ukraine on th…

By Jordan T. Kuck

The political leadership in Baltic countries is an antidote to the patriarchal propaganda emanating from the Kremlin. In addition to rebuking Putin’s machismo culture with examples of steady woman leadership, the Baltic states have also advanced on support for LGBT rights.

“Are You Paying Attention to Us Now?” Recognizing the C…

By Emilian Kavalski

From providing armaments and diplomatic support to hosting refugees and pushing their counterparts in Western Europe, North America, and beyond to offer more advanced weapons systems and include Kyiv in European and Euro-Atlantic organizations, the CEE states have been at the forefront of the Ukrainian support network.

 

Holding Their Breath: How the Allies Confronted the Thr…

Reviewed by Richard Overy

The use of poison gas in war has long been part of the grimier side of World War I history, but it could have been part of World War II as well, when the use of chemical weapons was never far below the surface of Western strategy but restraint proved paramount.

The Plural Island by Gesualdo Bufalino

Translated by Julia Conrad

For a Sicilian, understanding Sicily means understanding oneself. It means choosing to be absolved or condemned. And it means resolving the fundamental tension that plagues us, the oscillation between claustrophobia and claustrophilia, between a hatred and love of seclusion.

New Energies: A History of Energy Transitions in Europe…

Reviewed by Nicholas Ostrum

This volume examines numerous historical case studies to show how energy transitions have unfolded, faltered, and succeeded in the past in order to give insight into the many possibilities that lay before our own energo-environmental predicament.

How German Higher Education Institutions Collaborate wi…

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

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

 

A Roundtable on Serbian Philosopher Radomir Konstantino…

By Suzana Vuljevic

Penned in the 1950s and published at a time of rising nationalism in Yugoslavia, Serbian philosopher and writer Radomir Konstantinović’s (1928-2011) The Philosophy of Parochialism (1969) remains a keystone of Serbian and South Slavic literary-philosophical scholarship.

The Spirit of Parochialism and Imperial Teleophilia

By Branislav Jakovljević

One of the key insights emanating from works on parochialism in Serbian culture is that the province and the empire constitute a dialectical couple. The empire is at once a negation of palanka and a full realization of the spirit of palanka.

The Israel-Hamas War: Where is Europe?

By Manuela Achilles and Peter Debaere

In the early hours of October 7, 2023, militants of the Islamist group Hamas and a few other armed Palestinian organizations struck Israel across the security border surrounding Gaza.

Kinderland: A Novel by Liliana Corobca

Translated by Monica Cure

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

 

In and Out Clouds

Curated by Hélène B. Ducros

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

The Return of the Russian Gulag

By Oksana Ermolaeva

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

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

By Benjamin Bernard and Matthew McDonald

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

Eastbound by Maylis de Kerangal

Translated by Jessica Moore

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

 

 

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

By Patricia Chiantera-Stutte

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

November 2023

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

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

Feminist Transformations and Domestic Violence Activism…

Reviewed by Lauren Stokes

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

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

By Paul O’Keeffe

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

The Drowned, the Saved, and the Sonderkommando: A Lesso…

By Nicholas Ostrum

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

Undesirables: A Holocaust Journey to North Africa by Ao…

Reviewed by Biz Nijdam

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

From the Sorbonne to the Institut d’Art et d’Archéologi…

By Alain Duplouy

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

Two Poems by Pierre Haroche

By Pierre Haroche

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

A Collection of Ancient Iranian Seal Impressions at the…

By Guido Antinori

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

The Digital Management of Archaeological Collections: T…

By Vincenzo Capozzoli

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

Interpretive Archaeology: Historiography of the Ancient…

By Alain Duplouy

The objective of the seminar was to bring a historiographical dimension to the training of students enrolled in archaeology and art history of the ancient world or Classics, by providing them with the keys to various readings of ancient Greek societies and their material culture and the way these have been constantly renewed since the nineteenth century.

Eurasian Past Presents

Curated by Hélène B. Ducros

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

Thinking Eurasia Now

By Arina Rotaru

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

Two Divided Countries in the Divided Supercontinent: Hu…

By Chris Hann

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

September 2023

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

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

The Poetic Cinema of Sergei Paradzhanov: An Opportunity…

By Adrianna Hlukhovych

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

 

Exploring the New Middle Ages: Japanese Intellectual Di…

By Noriaki Hoshino

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

Bathhouse and Other Tanka by Tatsuhiko Ishii

Translated by Hiroaki Sato

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

Tribar by Andra Rotaru

Translated by Anca Roncea

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

Homelessness and Poverty in Europe

By Hélène B. Ducros and Elizabeth B. Jones

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

Exclusion, Isolation, Loneliness

Curated by Hélène B. Ducros

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

 

Homelessness and EU Citizenship in a Borderless Europe

By Dion Kramer

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

How do We Talk about Housing Equality in an Increasingl…

By Lindsay B. Flynn

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

July 2023

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

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

Reflections on the Next Round of European Capitals of C…

Interviewed by Anastasia Paparis

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

The Dragoman Renaissance Diplomatic Interpreters and th…

Reviewed by Duygu Yıldırım

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

Syllabus: The Holocaust

By Nick Ostrum

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

Commander of the River by Ubah Cristina Ali Farah

Translated by Hope Campbell Gustafson

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

A Roundtable on the European Capitals of Culture

By Anastasia Paparis

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

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

By Jordan T. Kuck

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

 

Europe is a Castle

By Pierre Haroche

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

Mobility, Home, and Belonging

Curated by Hélène B. Ducros

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

May 2023

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

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

The Politics of Postmigration

By Markus Hallensleben and Moritz Schramm

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

The Trousseau by Samina H. Bakhsh

By Samina Hussain

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

Five Poems by Salvador Espriu

Translated by Sonia Alland and Richard Jeffrey Newman

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

 

 

Decolonizing European Memory Cultures

By Katrine Sieg and Hélène B. Ducros

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

An Anticolonial Museum

By Ana Sladojević

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

Ada’s Realm by Sharon Dodua Otoo

Translated by Jon Cho-Polizzi

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

Conference Dispatch: An Anticolonial Museum

By Emilia Epštajn

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

February 2023

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

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

The Banality of World War “Z”

By Julia Khrebtan-Hörhager and Evgeniya Pyatovskaya

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

Business in Politics and Society

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

Two Poems by Teemu Helle

Translated by Niina Pollari

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

Pina by Titaua Peu

Translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman

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

Breaking through the Latest Regulatory Plans of the Cli…

By Maria Dolores Sanchez Galera

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

May 2022

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

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

The Act of Living

By Eliza Bourner

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

Victorious by Yishai Sarid

Translated by Yardenne Greenspan

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

Building Sustainable Water Futures

By Pauline Münch and Jörg Niewöhner

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

Teaching Maus in an Age of Racial Panic and Reckoning

By Barry Trachtenberg

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

Riverine Struggles Against Plunder and Dispossession: W…

By Larisa Kurtović

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

Wolfskin by Lara Moreno

Translated by Katie Whittemore

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

Securitization of Migration and Development Cooperation…

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

Cities and Migration Governance: An Interview with Gülc…

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

Securitization of Identity

By Lesley-Ann Daniels

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

Politics of Ethnicity and Nationalism

By Şener Aktürk

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

 

April 2022

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

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

Unwelcome

By Simone Perolari

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

From De-securitization to “Flexicuritization” of Migrat…

By Georgia Dimari and Stylianos Ioannis Tzagkarakis 

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

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

By Andrea Carlà

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

Contemporary Balkan Cinema: Transnational Exchanges and…

Reviewed by Philip E. Phillis

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

The Unbearable Lightness of Translating: Szilárd Borbél…

By Judit Hajnal Ward

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

Democracy, Nazi Trials, and Transitional Justice in Ger…

Reviewed by Douglas G. Morris

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

Premodernism

By Andrew Cole and Brooke Holmes

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

Toward an Interdisciplinary Conceptual History of Catas…

By Jonathon Catlin

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

February 2022

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

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

 

Brothers and Ghosts by Khuê Phạm

Translated by Imogen Taylor

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

A Sense of Place, Imprints of Iceland

By Charlotta María Hauksdóttir 

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

A Strange Woman by Leylâ Erbil

Translated by Nermin Menemencioğlu

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

The Externalization of Border Control and the Dynamism …

By Isabel Hilpert

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

Excerpt from We Were Never Brothers by Pia Edvardsen

Translated by Mauricio Ruiz

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

Mastery and the Banksia Tree

By Prudence Gibson and Sharon Willoughby

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

On Becoming Lichen

By John Charles Ryan

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

Moving the Green: Plant Behavior in the Human World

By Vicente Raja

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

Billy Wilder on Assignment: Dispatches from Weimar Berl…

Reviewed by Nora Gortcheva

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

Diary of a Young Naturalist by Dara McAnulty

Reviewed by Elizabeth B. Jones

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

The Danube

By Matthew D. Miller

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

Education for a More-Than-Human World

By Kay Sidebottom

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

In a Europe of Waters

By Matthew D. Miller

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

Living with Bear

By Kathryn Kirkpatrick

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

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

Reviewed by Ervin Malakaj

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

Animals as Dark Tourism Attractions: A Prototype

By David A. FennellBastian Thomsen and Samuel R. Fennell

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

November 2021

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

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

Rethinking the Human in a Multispecies World

By Hélène B. Ducros

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

Displacement, Memory, and Design

By Ava McElhone Yates, Maria Höhn, and Chase Estes

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

How to Solve the Environmental Problem of Climate Migra…

By Clarence Dodge

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

October 2021

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

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

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

By Antonia Noll, Veronika Zaripova, and Ayham Dalal

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

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

By Olga Sezneva

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

The Movement by Petra Hůlová

Translated by Alex Zucker

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

The Migration and Mobilities Working Group at Sarah Law…

By Parthiban Muniandy

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

European ‘Code Unknown’ Cinema

By Peter Verstraten

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

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

By Irina Herrschner and Benjamin Nickl

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

Making and Mapping European Border Series: From Bridges…

By Michael Gott

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

Europe’s Moving Images

By Randall Halle

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

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

By Hester Baer and Jill Suzanne Smith  

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

The New European Cinema of Precarity

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

What Moves Artists? Mapping Vienna through the Moving I…

By Lora Sariaslan

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

European Culture and the Moving Image

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

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

Art in the Cinema

Curated by Nicole Shea

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

September 2021

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

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

Cremation by Rafael Chirbes

Translated by Valerie Miles

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

East German Film and the Holocaust by Elizabeth Ward

Reviewed by Mariana Ivanova

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

Exhausted Ecologies: Modernism and Environmental Recove…

Reviewed by Leanna Lostoski-Ho

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

The Memory Monster by Yishai Sarid

Translated by Yardenne Greenspan

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

Stranger to the Moon by Evelio Rosero

Translated by Victor Meadowcroft and Anne McLean

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

The Inheritance by Elizabeth Povinelli

Reviewed by Caroline DeVane

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

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

Reviewed by Alessandro Giammei

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

Husserl and the Idea of Europe by Timo Miettinen

Reviewed by Boris Pantev

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

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

Reviewed by Chloé Vettier

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

July 2021

By Emily Schuckman-Matthews

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

Europe’s Pandemic Failure

By Stuart P.M. Mackintosh

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

Among the Hedges by Sara Mesa

Translated by Megan McDowell

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

Four Minutes by Nataliya Deleva

Translated by Izidora Angel

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

July 2021

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

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

May 2021

By Hélène Ducros

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

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

By Anita Savo

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

Geothermal Heating and Cooling Networks for Green and L…

By Kai Zosseder, et al.

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

The Quest for Efficient Deliberation and Proximity Demo…

By Pekka Tuominen, Mikko Rask and Titiana Ertiö

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

Parallel Thoughts: A Conversation about Columbia Univer…

By Maria Dimitropoulos and Roberto C. Ferrari

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

Interpretive Archaeology

By Alain Duplouy

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

New Impressions and Future Directions: Columbia Univers…

By Majdolene Dajani and Erhan Tamur

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

Sustainable European Cities and Digitization

By Nicole Shea and Zsuzsanna Varga

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

Land Art Generator

By Various Artists

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

May 2021

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

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

Novel 11, Book 18 by Dag Solstad

Translated by Sverre Lyngstad

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

Anti-Roma Racism in Romania

By Marius Turda

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

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

By Cristina Blanco Sío-López

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

Guardians of Memory and the Return of the Xenophobic Ri…

Reviewed by Alexis Herr

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

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

By Alexandria Cogdill, Zach Kulstad and Jennifer Wargo

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

Politics of Memory Under Two Pandemics

By Manuela Boatcă

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

Subjects of Racialized Modernity: Romani People and Dec…

By Ioanida Costache

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

In Concrete by Anne F. Garréta

Translated by Emma Ramadan

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

 

Egun

By Àsìkò

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

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

By Ioanida Costache

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

March 2021

By Hélène Ducros

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

From Nowhere to Nowhere by Bekim Sejranović

Translated by Will Firth

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

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

By Vlada Șubernițchi

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

February 2021

By William Bowden

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

Postwar Europe

By Nicholas Ostrum

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

Gegenwartsbewältigung by Max Czollek

Reviewed by Johanna Schuster-Craig

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

Looking Out from Within

By Julia Fullerton-Batten

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

In Memory of Memory by Maria Stepanova

Translated by Sasha Dugdale

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

Self-fulfilling Prophesies: Domestic Terrorism, Islamis…

By Carol Ferrara 

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

Europe and the Myth of the Racialized Sexual Predator: …

By Saskia Bonjour and Sarah Bracke

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

Medieval Europe

By Lucy Barnhouse

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

December 2020

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

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

The Ruins Lesson: Meaning and Material in Western Cultu…

Reviewed by Tanvi Solanki

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

December 2020

By Hélène Ducros

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

Looking at Racism, Eugenics, and Biopolitics in Europe …

Interviewed by Hélène B. Ducros

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

COVID, Compassion, Connection: Pedagogy in the Long 2020

By Eugene Smelyansky

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

An Inventory of Losses

By Judith Schalansky

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

The Effects of Coronavirus at a Community College

By Carol Anderson

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

On Not Teaching the Black Death During COVID-19

By Maria Americo

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

“The Camino Provides:” Teaching Pilgrimage Online

By Christina Bruno

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

Medieval Echoes in Modern Experiences of the COVID-19 P…

By Esther Cuenca

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

Race and Racism in Europe: The Urgency of Now

By Jean Beaman and Jennifer Fredette

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

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

By Siún Carden

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

Are the Balkans Still the Other of Europe? Untangling …

Interviewed by Dragoș Ioniță

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

The Great British Kakistocracy

By Stuart P. M. Mackintosh

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

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

By Lucian A. Despa

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

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

By Tom MordueOliver Moss, and Lorraine Johnston

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

Reclaiming Rural Skills: Crafts from the European Count…

By Corinne Geering

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

Peasantry and Rural Social Movements in Twenty-First Ce…

By José Duarte Ribeiro

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

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

Interviewed by Eline Schmeets and Akudo McGee

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

From Engineering Student to Teacher in European Studies…

By Marie Labussière

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

The Agrarian Reform in Italy: Historical Analysis and I…

By Angela Cacciarru

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

Practicing Regenerative Design in Greece

By Evy Vourlides

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

European Studies at Maastricht University: Problem-Base…

By Elissaveta Radulova

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

Where Are the Women in “Empty Spain”?

By Jeremy MacClancy

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

European Integration after Maastricht: Insights, Novel …

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

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

A Roundtable on Maastricht University Student Research

By Patrick Bijsmans

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

Changing Agriculture in Rural Europe

By Hélène B. Ducros

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

November 2020

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

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

November 2020

By Hélène Ducros

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

Changing Ruralities in Germany

By Gesine Tuitjer

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

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

By Dominik Schmidt

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

Painting-Like

By Magali Chesnel

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

Rurality in Europe

By Hélène B. Ducros

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

Landmine Clearance, Displacement, and Interdisciplinarity

By Noah CoburnElbunit Kqiku, and Sitashma Parajuli

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

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

By Soumya Rachel Shailendra, Sitashma Parajuli, and Ioanna Katsara

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

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

By Valeria Bonatti

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

A Selective Bibliography of Forced Migration: Resources…

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

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

Dying in Diaspora

By Emily Mitchell-Eaton

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

October 2020

By Hélène Ducros

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

Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politic…

Reviewed by Maria Mitchell

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

Bard College Border Pedagogy: Experiential Learning, Sy…

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

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

The Wine Dark Sea

By Hew Locke

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

 

Allegria by Giuseppe Ungaretti

Translated by Geoffrey Brock

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

Networks of Solidarity in Times of Crisis

By Matthew Brill-CarlatAva McElhone Yates, and Maria Höhn

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

The Fabric of Healing

By Rachel A Cohen and Catherine Butterly

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

October 2020

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

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

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

By Lauri Tähtinen

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

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

By Răzvan-Victor Sassu and Eliza Vaș

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

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

By Angela Cacciarru and Antonio Paesano

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

Europe’s Essential Workers

By Ruxandra Paul

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

From Fake News to False Elections

By Agnes E. Venema

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

Proletarische Welten: Internationalistische Weltliterat…

Reviewed by Hunter Bivens

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

August 2020

By Hélène Ducros

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

Virtual Reality Meets Language Teaching

By Tricia Thrasher

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

The Humanitarian Ideology

By Siraj Ahmed

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

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

By Megan Dixon

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

Italian Ecocinema Beyond the Human by Elena Past

Reviewed by Emily Meneghin

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

August 2020

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

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

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

By Niloofar Sarlati

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

Studying Migration in a Study Abroad Setting

By Emanuel Rota

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

Confronting Nationalisms: Romania and the Autonomy of t…

By Cătălin-Gabriel Done

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

Manifestations of the Unseen

By Seb Janiak

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

Murderous Consent: A Translator’s Note

By Michael Loriaux

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

EuropeNow on COVID-19

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

The Autoimmunity of Murderous Consent

By Jacob Levi

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

Count Luna by Alexander Lernet-Holenia

Translated by Jane B. Greene

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

Unmasking the Rifts in the European Union: New Coalitio…

By Thomas Henökl

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

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

By Alyssa Granacki

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

The Impact of COVID-19 on Student Mobilities

By Alexandru Pieptea

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

Placing Islam in European Studies

By John R. Bowen

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

From Past Practices to Future Directions in European St…

By Hélène B. Ducros

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

A Roundtable on European Integration

By Mark I. Vail

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

Imagining Europe, Citizenship, and Scholarship in the T…

By Louie Dean Valencia-García

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

An Empty Spain Filled with Ideas?

By Jeremy MacClancy

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

The Europeanness of British Cinema: Considering “Nation…

By Neil Archer

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

Illusory Enlargement of the European Union

By Milos Rastovic

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

Studying Europe Through the Lens of European Catholicism

By Hélène B. Ducros

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

Europe in a Global Context: Geographical Perspectives

By Rafael de Miguel González

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

Catholic Missionaries in Early Modern Asia Patterns of …

Reviewed by Michel Chambon

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

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

By Richard J. Golsan

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

Medievalism, Nationalism, and European Studies: New App…

By Esther Liberman Cuenca

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

Confessional Mobility and English Catholics in Counter-…

Reviewed by Eilish Gregory

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

The Myths of Western Civilization: Decolonizing and Que…

By Louie Dean Valencia-García

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

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

Reviewed by Kristin Dickinson

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

Jean-Luc Persecuted by C.F. Ramuz

Translated by Olivia Baes

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

June 2020

By Hélène Ducros

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

June 2020

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

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

Pensées Françaises Contemporaines: An Interdisciplinary…

By Elsa Tulmets

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

Imagining, Thinking, and Teaching Europe

By Hélène B. Ducros and Louie Dean Valencia-García

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

Dutch Landscapes

By Mishka Henner

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

El Autobús

By Sol Calero

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

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

By Stefanie C. Boulila

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

Solidarity and Its Limits

By Anke S. Biendarra

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

A New Existentialism for Infectious Times

By Jennifer McWeeny

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

Culturalist Perspectives in Social Analysis on Europe

By Timm Beichelt

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

Reparations and Remembrance: Determining the Future of …

By Renata Schellenberg

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

The Afterlives of Refugee Dead: What Remains?

By Karen Remmler

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

Colonial Histories at the Humboldt Forum

By Emi Finkelstein

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

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

Reviewed by Tony Foreman

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

April 2020

By Hélène Ducros

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

April 2020

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

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

Out There Learning: Critical Reflections on Off-Campus …

Reviewed by Hélène Ducros

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

European Art, Culture, and Politics

By Randall Halle

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

Game Over

By Maria Wasilewska

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

Four by Four by Sara Mesa

Translated by Katie Whittemore

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

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

By Lillian Livermore

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

Feminist Political Theory

By Nancy Love

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

Fat Talk: A Feminist Perspective

By Denise Martz

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

March 2020

By Hélène Ducros

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

Fat Talk, Body Snarking, and Women’s Body Image: An Int…

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.

Children, Cooking, Combat: When Women Disrupt the “Orde…

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.

“Being Passed off as Wicked Witches, That’s a Bit Much!…

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.

Me Who? The Audibility of a Social Movement

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.

Limit (less)

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.

 

Girls Lost by Jessica Schiefauer

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.

What is the Scholar’s Role in Apocalyptic Times?

By Martha McCaughey and Scott Welsh

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

March 2020

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

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

Across the Waves: How the United States and France Shap…

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.

Co-determination and the 2020 Presidential Election  

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.

Opera, Exhibitions, and Empire: Czech Music and Identit…

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.

Far-Right Media Ecology in Norway

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.

The Fire Now: Anti-Racist Scholarship in Times of Expli…

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.”

Post-Imperial Permutations of the Hong Kong Protests

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.

Nation and Loyalty in a German-Polish Borderland: Upper…

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.

Economic and Legal Integration of Europe

By P.W. Zuidhof

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

January 2020

By Hélène Ducros

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

European Integration

By Claske Vos and Robin de Bruin

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

Women in Red: Femininity and Womanhood in the Soviet Un…

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.

Welfare and the Great Recession: A Comparative Study ed…

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.

Enshroud

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. 

The Teacher by Michal Ben-Naftali

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.

January 2020

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.

Remembering and Forgetting Vichy

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.

Vichy contre Vichy: Memory and Forgetting – The Public …

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.

Vichy: The Dark Legacy of an Accidental Capital

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.

The Town That Deleted Its Past

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.

Vichy versus France: A Defiant Refusal to Remember

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.

Life After War: Disturbed

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.

“Translating Socio-Cognitive Models of Agency into Migr…

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.

From the Couch to the Community: The Emergence of Peer-…

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.

Foreign, Strange, Singular, Exceptional: An Interview w…

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

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

The “I Learn America” Project: Vassar College and Migra…

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.

All My Cats by Bohumil Hrabal

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.

Displaced Students and Higher Education Access: Reflect…

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.

A Conversation about Asylum Seekers in Germany and Jenn…

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.

October 2019

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.

Conversations Unbound: Student Engagement with Migratio…

By Elise Shea, Camelia Suleiman, and Eva Woods Peiró

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

October 2019

By Hélène Ducros

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

Migrants and Refugees in the Americas

By Miles Rodríguez

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

Narration on the Move

By Brittany Murray and Matthew Brill-Carlat

Together, these contributions indicate new ways to narrate forced migration, rooted in past actions of hospitality while remaining responsive to contemporary challenges. As these contributions demonstrate, the call to build sustainable models of defying borders is at the same time a call to rethink academic categories.

The Scholems: A Story of the German-Jewish Bourgeoisie …

Reviewed by Thomas Nolden

By reframing Gershom Scholem, simply,  as a member of a German Jewish bourgeois family, Jay Howard Geller presents a welcome and innovative study of the figure who single-handedly invented an entire field of Jewish religious studies.

 

The Medieval University as Refuge

By Nancy Bisaha

As we witness one of the largest movements of people in world history, universities and colleges endeavor to provide refuge for scholars and students. They offer homes, short or long term, for people fleeing oppression, injustice, and poverty. They create a space for reflection upon the universal ideals of education and collective action toward attaining them. How and where did these notions arise?

The Fire This Time: April 15, 2019 at Notre-Dame in Paris

By Caroline Bruzelius

Fires were the scourge of Medieval and Early Modern buildings and cities (think of the Great Fire of London, 1666). But they were also the opportunity for great creativity and innovation, an incentive to introduce new updated architecture and to produce cities built largely of non-flammable materials (London, Paris). In the Middle Ages, some cathedrals burned over and over (Canterbury, Chartres, Reims), but the destruction of the old churches stimulated the construction of the glorious structures in the Gothic style that we know today.

The Catholic-ness of Secular France

By Carol Ferrara

French identity and its Catholic-ness has been reified against France’s Muslims—underlining for far-right nationalism why and how France and Islam are seemingly incompatible.

Catholic Modern: The Challenge of Totalitarianism and t…

Reviewed by Sean Brennan

The success of Christian Democratic parties in stabilizing the political orders, which emerged out of the devastation of the Second World War in countries such as Austria, Germany, Italy, and to a smaller extent, in France and other countries in Western Europe, remains one of the most important stories in the history of Europe in the twentieth century.

“Gammler,” Juvenile Delinquency, and Moral Panics in 19…

By Martin Kalb

Scholars have long understood youth as a social construct only partially connected to age. After all, youth often appears in history as a hope for the future or as a threat to contemporary society. Those studying policing and juvenile delinquency have wrestled with stereotypes surrounding young people.

Different and Related: Experiences from the Project “Mo…

By Ksenia Stanicka-Brzezicka and Emilia Kloda

The Mária Valéria bridge joins Esztergom in Hungary and Štúrovo in Slovakia, across the River Danube. Since its opening in 1895, the bridge has been destroyed twice, in 1919 and 1944. Decades of intransigence between the Communist governments of Hungary and Czechoslovakia mean that the bridge was not rebuilt until the new millennium.

European History Reloaded: The Case of Czechoslovak Com…

By Adéla Gjuričová

Even when reducing the issue to archives and other history-related footage, we miss an analytical understanding of what kind of material is actually attractive enough to circulate and how to find out. On what platforms and in what context does the re-use happen?

Likeable Pasts: Historical Urban Views on Facebook

By Piotr Kisiel

In the ever-expanding universe of Facebook, it is hard to keep track of all the features of the platform. However, it is one of its most basic functions that can be of interest to those working in “history from below” in the digital age.

The Refugee Crisis, Brexit, and the Reframing of Immigr…

By Amanda Garrett

There is no shortage of scholarly evidence to suggest that voters can be receptive to negative messaging concerning immigrants and other ethnic minorities. The idea of racially coded campaign appeals has long been discussed by academics, particularly in the case of the United States.

Obsessed with History–conflicting Digital Narratives in…

By Eszter Gantner

What does the concept of historic consciousness describe or include? According to Andrew Glencross, “Historical consciousness is defined as the understanding of the temporality of historical experience or how past, present and future are thought to be connected.”

Treasuring Medieval Manuscripts Then and Now

By Sarah Wilma Watson

The scope and framing of this collection raise a number of questions. How did these diverse “treasures” come to the UK? Why are these objects so valuable? And what does it mean that they are displayed in a “British” space?

Digitization of Memory and Politics in Eastern Europe

By Eszter Gantner and Olga Dovbysh

In the last decade, there has been increasing interest in digital technologies and their influence on the production of memory, history, and heritage, not only within academic research, but also in politics, especially in Eastern Europe and Russia. The tendency toward selective history, heritage, and memory politics in the region manifests itself more and more in the digital sphere.

Ten Poems by Marie Lundquist

Translated by Kristina Andersson Bicher

I searched for a climbing tree / to fall out of. You were stepping / right into grief. Your errand  / was to be overgrown. Become grief. / Cold grief. I fell. Soft / as an apple.

 

Thinking Heritage Digitally: Examples from Contemporary…

By Stefan Trajković-Filipović

There are a number of ways in which one can explore the historical heritage of the Serbian capital, Belgrade. Apart from visiting museums or joining tours, a visitor can also download a smartphone application (available both for Android and iOS), titled Hidden places of Belgrade, developed by the Danube Competence Center, an association of tourism actors who are promoting Danube as a touristic destination.

The Incompletes by Sergio Chejfec

Translated by Heather Cleary

The characteristic scent of Buenos Aires, a mix of aquatic plants and the local soil, which—as many have told me and I’ve also read—still filters through the streets on the breeze, was an incipient aroma slowly rising off the river to form waves of disparate and paradoxically incomplete smells that morning, probably due to the hour.

Cinéma-monde. Decentered Perspectives on Global Filmmak…

Reviewed by Lia Brozgal 

In their 2007 manifesto, “Pour une littérature-monde en français,” writers Michel Le Bris and Jean Rouaud announced to readers of Le Monde that a Copernican revolution had taken place but had yet to be acknowledged or named—the previous fall, writers hailing from beyond the hexagon had dominated France’s most prestigious literary prize competitions.

The Helsinki Centre for Digital Humanities (HELDIG): De…

By Eero Hyvönen

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

Linked Data in Use: Sampo Portals on the Semantic Web

By Eero Hyvönen

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

Religious Politics in Turkey: From the Birth of the Rep…

Reviewed by Sinem Adar 

Once regarded as the poster child of Islam’s compatibility with democracy, Turkey is now drawing attention to itself for different reasons. The country’s rapid and unexpected authoritarian turn in recent years has unsettled many observers both at home and abroad.

September 2019

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Hélène B. Ducros, Louie Dean Valencia-García, Nick Ostrum, and Daniela Irrera.

September 2019

By Hélène Ducros

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

The Apology by Tiffany Hsiung

Reviewed by Julia Khrebtan-Hörhager and Minkyung Kim

Grand master narratives of contemporary history rarely correlate war with womanhood, especially if the latter has some dark, shameful, and controversial nature, like the infamous stories of comfort women.

Fairytales, Brexit Halloween Nightmares, and the Birth …

By Stuart P. M. Mackintosh

Boris Johnson’s election as leader of the Conservative Party and Prime Minister of the United Kingdom on July 23, 2019, may result in a damaging, hard, disorganized Brexit on Halloween, October 31. But the economic reality of a hard Brexit could be obscured by fairytales about the glorious future awaiting Britannia when she is freed from the shackles of the European Union, and able once again to sail the seas and chart her own economic and trade course.

The Social Democratic Road to Socialism: An Interview w…

Interviewed by Kelly McKowen

Oscar Wilde’s utopia was socialism, a social order that he believed would overcome the misery and exploitation wrought by industrial capitalism. More than a century later, as issues like inequality and climate change swell the ranks of the left in Europe and abroad, one hears renewed calls to set sail for a society that lies beyond the capitalist horizon.

Immigration Policy is Health Policy

By Elyas Bakhtiari

As rates of immigration have risen in recent years, so have questions and concerns about the health needs and care delivery challenges for newly arrived populations.

Feeling Unsettled, but Eager to Debate: A Letter from t…

By Esther Dischereit

It’s no different in Brooklyn: of the 1,825 students accepted into an elite high school, 95 are black. Well-off parents pay for private tutoring long before the entrance exam so their children will pass the test. The result is that black and Latinx children are left waiting outside the door.

What Can Political Science Learn from Public Health? Re…

By Julia Lynch

What lesson will social scientists take from public health and epidemiology? That clean causal inference from experimental (or at least quasi-experimental) data is the holy grail for social science; or that deep contextual knowledge, generated by expenditure of shoe leather, is necessary for advancing scientific understanding of social causation?

The Diaries of Lea Goldberg

Translated by Tsipi Keller

A pointless day in Brindisi. A terrible fatigue. Pain in my gut, and I fear that I’ll be sick throughout the trip. I’m now sitting in a restaurant…

History of Medicine from the Patient’s Point of View

By Raúl Necochea López

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

History after Hitler: A Transatlantic Enterprise

Reviewed by Claudio Minca

The very question of practicing “history after Hitler” is an enormous one, and I believe that reflecting on its post-war developments is an important task that transcends the boundaries of this specific academic field.

Five Poems by Maia Evrona

By Maia Evrona

Daughter of Atlas and mother of Hermes: / Daughter of the world sustained / on the sweat of a back in pain; / mother of a word with wings on its feet.

Anthropology and Public Health

By Michele Rivkin-Fish and Mark Sorensen

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

Taxes, Bans, & Burgers: Global Food Policy and Obesity …

By Lindsey Smith Taillie

We will examine the social, political, and ethical context of how individuals make decisions about what to eat; how this context shapes the implementation of food policy; and how these policies in turn shape individual behavior and health, by employing a comparative framework over three countries/regions (China, Latin America, and the US).

Living, Healing, and Dying in Russia 

By Michele Rivkin-Fish and Jehanne Gheith

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

Health and Gender After Socialism by Michele Rivkin-Fish

By Michele Rivkin-Fish

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

Talaat Pasha: Founder of Modern Turkey, Architect of Ge…

Reviewed by Mehmet Polatel

The book explores the rise and fall of Talaat Bey, his approach to politics, his role in the planning and implementation of the Armenian Genocide, and the impact of his policies and activities on the establishment of the Turkish Republic.

 

 

Six Poems by Ágnes Gergely

Translated by Ottilie Mulzet

The crooked street darkens / the city’s diseased lungs. / Drags to its entrance gates / the one unafraid of the heavens.

Art & Healing

Curated by Rusudan Zabakhidze 

Emphasis on mental health has resulted in a de-taboo process of the associated challenges. Visual arts contributes towards healing and raising awareness about these issues.

Public Health in Europe

By Sigrún Ólafsdóttir and Jason Beckfield

Health is a major political, cultural, and societal issue across Europe. While health and illness have, of course, always been a part of the human experience, the epidemiological transition from infectious, deadly diseases to the increased burden of chronic and mental health problems, has put various pressures and constraints on policy makers.

Establishing a Global Socioeconomic Network and Data Wa…

By Terje A. Eikemo, Tim Huijts, Mirza Balaj, Johan P.Mackenbach, and Emmanuela Gakidou

In the EU alone, more than 700,000 avoidable deaths per year and 33 million preventable cases of ill health are due to health inequalities, costing the EU 141 billion euros in economic losses annually.

June 2019

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.

The Multiple Ontologies of Surplus Food

By Megan Blake

Global estimates suggest that approximately one third of all food that is produced is wasted. Alongside this, a myriad of concerns, not least a concern for people who struggle to access food that is safe and healthy, has given rise to a host of organizations operating across the world that seek to move food that otherwise would be wasted from the commercial supply chain to the not-for-profit sector.

Let the People Rule: A Letter from the US

By Esther Dischereit

The words Let the People Rule can be found on an inscription in this city. This slogan, which Andrew Jackson proclaimed a long time ago, earned him the name of “Jackass” from his enemies. Since then, the Democrats are happy to use the image of a donkey in their campaigns.

Colonial Ideologies of Waste: Implications for Land and…

By James Wilkes and Myra Hird

On a global scale, waste, we argue—as material object, as concept, as symbol, and as leitmotif—is a symptom of colonialism, and indeed, cannot be meaningfully understood detached from historical and ongoing forms of colonialism.

Second Chance, Last Chance

Curated by Hélène B. Ducros

The scavenger-artists showcased here not only modify the status of waste, but also brace a pedagogical movement vital to the subsistence of the planet.

Brokers in the Fight Against Waste

By Isabelle Hajek

Recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in the fight against waste in many industrialized countries. Discourses and documented analyses on growing masses of waste and their devastating consequences for natural and human milieus have received increased exposure.

Confronting Waste

By Hélène B. Ducros

Will we seize this moment as an opportunity to make strides in waste reduction and develop ecological solutions for surplus, unused, and rejected materials of all sorts, or will we simply seek out new trash havens elsewhere in the world?

Waste in Literature and Culture: Aesthetics, Form, and …

By Susan Signe Morrison

Waste Studies offers ethical frameworks to pay attention to, understand, and act on bodily, cultural, and societal waste—material aspects of our world. As an aspect of the environmental humanities, Waste Studies expands traditional approaches of ecocriticism, once devoted to “nature,” a loaded and complex term.

The Boy by Marcus Malte

Translated by Emma Ramadan and Tom Roberge

Four years, or nearly. The next four years of the boy’s life, which will be the most beautiful, the most marvelous. The trees were nothing. The elms and the planes and the chestnuts…

European Disintegration: A Search for Explanation by H…

Reviewed by Sartirios Zartaloudis

The EU stands proudly as the longest and most advanced process of international/transnational collaboration among different independent countries in an effort to pool sovereignty to common policies for all members, the most important accomplishments being the EU’s single market, the Euro, and cross-border co-operation of the Schengen area.

May 2019

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

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

In the Name of Humanity: A Letter from the US

By Esther Dischereit

Elizabeth has almost finished her degree in International Relations. She had an interview for the Foreign Service on Saturday that lasted all day. Is that her President? She rolled her eyes; she doesn’t believe that impeachment proceedings could succeed.

Reinventing European History to Show that Black Lives D…

By Lydia Lindsey and Carlton Wilson

The xenophobic discourse that denounces the illegitimacy of a non-white presence in Europe is frequently justified by a denial of the historical contribution of non-white populations in the development of Europe, in particular, people of African descent.

Boxed In: Minority-Authored Films of Assimilation in an…

By Daniel Shea

The critical conversation concerning the migrant experience tends to focus on those countries on the front line: first-contact issues in Italy, capacity challenges in Germany, or right-wing responses in the United States. Ireland, at the edge of the EU and with only a fraction of the migrant refugee population, is often overlooked in context of conflicts in assimilation and minority status.

Survival within Survival in Ayşe Toprak’s Mr Gay Syria …

By Ljudmila Bilkić

Sitting outside a tea house in Istanbul on a cold evening in early 2016, the Berlin-based Syrian journalist and gay rights campaigner Mahmoud Hassino discusses his intentions of sending the first Syrian gay man to Mr. Gay World, an annual international beauty pageant competition for gay men.

Shedding Waters: Cinematic Mediations of European Multi…

By Matthew D. Miller

Once celebrated as a path-breaking project of peace, hope, and greater political cooperation in the new century, the unification of Europe under the auspices of the European Union appears, from the vantage-point of 2019, to be fraught with disunity, animosity, and peril.

Regional Identity in Contemporary Sardinian Writing

By Giovanni Dettori

In recent decades, the island of Sardinia, the second-largest island in the Mediterranean after Sicily, has lived a cultural renaissance that has brought many Sardinian authors onto the national and international literary stage.

My Friends by Emmanuel Bove

Translated by Janet Louth

It seems to me that the people sitting at tables on the terraces notice me in spite of my shabby clothes. Once a woman sitting behind a tiny tea-pot eyed me from head to foot.

Colours of a Journey: An Archive of Human Mobility

By Senka Neuman Stanivukovic

How to assemble, curate and circulate an archive of human mobility? The Colours of a Journey (CoJ) is a collective that addresses these questions by envisioning an archive of human mobility that apprehends the variegated practices and experiences of movement.

Teaching Migration in a Liberal Arts Setting: Reflectio…

By Agata Lisiak

Bard College Berlin (BCB) is a liberal arts university located in Berlin’s district of Pankow. True to the principles of liberal arts education, BCB offers interdisciplinary programs in the humanities and social sciences, with a strong focus on the development of essential writing and thinking skills.

Coming to Terms with Controversial Memories in South Ty…

By Andrea Carlà and Johanna Mitterhofer

The richness of Europe’s cultural heritage and diversity is embodied in the striking monuments and historical buildings that dot the continent, but many of these artifacts also talk of difficult times and remind of the darker history of Europe—its wars, its violence, the sufferings of its people that lie behind today’s union of democratic nation-states.

Global Citizenship

By Kerry Bystrom

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

April 2019

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.

What is Europe Now?

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

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

Knit Happens

By Ariane Simard

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

Perpetual Identities

By Katya Traboulsi

1975 Lebanon is in flames and I am fifteen. For my birthday, I receive the empty sleeve of a mortar shell, which I automatically place on a shelf.

United in Diversity

By Randall Halle

“United in diversity” is the official motto of the EU. Yet this special issue appears at a moment when European unity seems distant, and diversity seems to foster disunion, conflict, and cultural clash, rather than accord. We may do well to recall that the motto reaches back to the immediate post WWII era and the attempts to overcome the cataclysm of the war.

City of Jasmine by Olga Grjasnowa

Translated by Katy Derbyshire

Once tall and slim, Bassel’s body is no longer immune to time’s passing – his hair has gone grey but at least it hasn’t fallen out like most of his contemporaries’, his belly has grown soft and visibly convex, and his back is no longer strong and straight. A slipped disc a year ago came as a rude reminder of advancing age.

The Study and Teaching of Human Rights in Refugee Camps…

By Djemila Carron

InZone has been working in refugee camps for the last eight years, and in fragile contexts for over twelve years. Starting with trainings for interpreters in the field, InZone subsequently developed into a center dedicated to higher education for refugees in refugee camps in Kenya and Jordan.

At Home in the City? The Persistence of the Ethnic Lens…

By Agata Lisiak

Our team investigated how Poles, coming from cities that are largely homogenous in terms of ethnicity and religion, make sense of and come to terms with the much greater diversity they encounter in the British and German cities in which they now live

Markazi: A Camp at Crossroads

By Nathalie Peutz

Nadia Benchallal’s photographs depict the camp’s predominantly Yemeni residents navigating a state of increasingly permanent suspension.

Confronting the “Crisis:” Refugees and Populism in Euro…

By Jeffrey Jurgens

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

Forced Migration, Student Responses, and the Liberal Arts

By Matthew Brill-Carlat 

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

Implementation and Cross-Campus Collaboration: An Inter…

Interviewed by Matthew Brill-Carlat and Margaret Edgecombe

One of the objectives behind the Consortium on Forced Migration, Displacement, and Education is bridging the gaps between liberal arts institutions. The member schools aim to do so through collaboration on a number of initiatives, one of which is the “Signature Project” at each institution.

Migrating Borders and Moving Times: Temporality and the…

Reviewed by Brad Blitz

Migrating Borders and Moving Times is an extraordinarily rich collection including many personal testimonies of migrants who experienced dislocation over extended periods of time. While much migration research still focuses on the shift between sending and receiving contexts, this book smashes that mode of thinking and in turn contributes to our understanding of the lingering effects of cross-border mobility as it is experienced, internalized, and refashioned.

Genesis and Philosophy: An Interview with Members of CF…

Interviewed by Matthew Brill-Carlat and Margaret Edgecombe

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

March 2019

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

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

Closed Doorways, Barred Windows

By Mohamad Hafez

A Syrian born artist depicts cities besieged by civil war to capture the magnitude of the devastation and to expose the fragility of human life.

Forced Migration, Displacement, and the Liberal Arts

By Maria Höhn, Brittany Murray, and Nicole Shea

As institutions of higher learning, we are uniquely positioned to draw on our robust local, national, and international educational and cultural networks to prepare our students for a deeper, more nuanced understanding of forced migration and displacement. Indeed, the coming era of human movement will, without doubt, challenge our existing national and global institutions, and our students must be able to respond to these challenges with intelligence, compassion, and ingenuity.

Imagining Planetary Refuge

By Kerry Bystrom

From the Global North, and from Berlin specifically, the so-called “refugee crisis” and those seeking refuge from acute and structural violence are imagined through two key figures: the camp and the border. I will focus on the second.

#MeToo and the Weakness of Manhood

By Frederic Baitinger

The violence that underpins the sexual conduct reported by #MeToo has its roots in one of the most typical and commonly shared male fantasies: the fantasy of domination.

“I am Odysseus:” Tracing Mobile Desires and Resistance …

By Árdís K. Ingvars

The common denominator within these stories is the elevated symbol of mobility (Salazar 2018). However, the stories around the names further reflect everyone’s fragility, thus illuminating the men’s wishes to be acknowledged as human beings with myriad experiences (Mallki, 1995), countering the defining criminalized image of men from the Middle-East in Europe. As Lila Abu-Lughod (2002) demonstrated, it is possible to trace power through shifting modes of resistance.

Nativist Nationalism and the Specter of Fascism in Italy

By Silvana Patriarca

The League wants to put the “Italians first.” But who are the Italians? Until recently, race was not mentioned explicitly when speaking of Italian identity. But these days even this post-Holocaust taboo seems to be on its way out, as the paranoid representation of immigration as an attempt at “ethnic substitution” and other language of this kind is spreading.

Italians First: The New Borders of European Humanity

By Julia Khrebtan-Hörhager

Rethinking the Italian Self and normalizing its patriarchal core implies multiple approaches. Using religion as a tool of normalization of patriarchy, and re-establishing the infamous in critical feminist studies Madonna/Whore duality is one of them.

The Italian Executioners: The Genocide of the Jews of I…

Reviewed by Sergio Parussa

A detailed, harrowing account of the active participation of ordinary Italians in the deportation of Italian Jews between 1943 and 1945, as well as of the subsequent erasure of their responsibilities and absolution of all guilt during the postwar years.

Binstead’s Safari

By Rachel Ingalls

They were already weighed down by an emotion that made for even greater lassitude — a kind of inertia, intermittently broken by irritable indecisiveness.

North Africa and the Making of Europe: Governance, Inst…

Reviewed by M. Chloe Mulderig

At a time when nationalist discourse is very much on the rise worldwide, the issue of “European identity” has become pressing and contentious. Threats to the stability of the European Union, along with increasing electoral success of right-wing politicians, are, at least in some part, the consequence of growing mistrust of immigrants and refugees.

Photographing a Story in Negative Space: An Interview w…

Interviewed by June Brawner

I started this project by working with the few remaining photographs of Paul made shortly before my grandmother and her family left Europe for America. These provided actual evidence of this man, the missing person in my family’s narrative. I combined these family snapshots into a single piece titled Every Paul, presenting an accumulation of all visual evidence we still have of this man.

February 2019

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

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

Top Incomes in France in the Twentieth Century Inequali…

Reviewed by Stephen Rose

The more astonishing feature of the French tax regime is how few people pay income taxes. It was only after the end of WWII that more than 20 percent of the population paid income taxes. This share increased steadily to reach 65 percent in 1980.

Food, Religion and Communities in Early Modern Europe b…

Reviewed by Jodi Campbell

Christopher Kissane has written an engaging and informative book that introduces readers to the significant role of food in the social and cultural history of early modern Europe. He paints a broad picture of a range of communities, from Catholic to Protestant, northern to southern, elite to poor. These patterns are illustrated and enriched by the narration of numerous individual experiences of ordinary people whose food practices came into conflict with religious or secular authorities, and therefore left a paper trail.

Living Architectures

By Carlo Cafferini

Throughout the ages, architecture has been used as a way to express a wide range of concepts, reflecting the historical, political, and religious beliefs of the period.

Sanctions on Russia: Effectiveness and Impacts

By Nataliia Slobodian and Iryna Ptasnyk

We cannot expect sanctions to lead to surrender. The relevant question is rather: are sanctions changing the context in which Russia’s decisions are being made? Would we have achieved the Minsk package, even with its weakness of implementation, without sanctions?

Last Night in Nuuk by Niviaq Korneliussen

Translated by Anna Halager

Oh, my head. I let out a deep sigh and smell alcohol. My stomach roils and I heave my body out of bed, go to the bathroom. Shit, my head is about to explode. I still feel drunk. My eyes won’t focus and my legs aren’t working right. I kick the clothes I dumped on the floor because they block my way and I walk five long metres to the bathroom, my hand over my mouth.

Facing Floods in the Middle Ages

By Ellen Arnold

In the summer of 2018, a series of “hunger stones” in the Czech Republic’s Elbe River emerged, bearing warnings of the perils of drought and the vital importance of rivers.

Reflections on the Soviet Politics of Water in the 1930s

By Cynthia A. Ruder

If we consider the construction of the three European canals as part of the larger program to build a singularly Soviet space, albeit on the backs of slave laborers, then the consequences and subsequent apprehension of the canals remains no less important.

Climate Change, Water, and the Golden Age of the Dutch …

By Dagomar Degroot

These are momentous times in the history of our planet. Industrialized and industrializing nations, as well as  world-straddling corporations, are choking our atmosphere with greenhouse gases in such quantity that the whole Earth is warming with a speed, on a scale, unprecedented in the 300,000-year history of our species. Yet natural forces have repeatedly changed Earth’s climate during that long history, even before the onset of industrialization.

Marble by Amalie Smith

Translated by Jennifer Russell

Daniel found her in the ground. He dug her free and brushed off the dirt. He joined the pieces, logged the pigment traces: how they were distributed across her clothes and her skin.

How WWF Harnesses Water as Both a Source of Risk and Re…

By Alexis Morgan

Civilization was founded on the presence of water. The two cradles of civilization—the Nile Valley and the region between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers—were established around fertile river valleys that brought both the rewards of rich soils for agriculture, and perversely, the risks associated with the nutrient-laden flood waters.

Where Will We Find Tomorrow’s Water?

By Fernando Mercé

Today, there are approximately 4 billion people living in regions where the water supply is woefully inadequate. With about 663 million people without safe drinking water, scarcity has become a very real and complex challenge. Additionally, UNESCO estimates that by 2025, 1.8 billion people will be living in countries or regions with severe water scarcity, and two-thirds of the world population could fall under “water stress” conditions from increased demand and the impacts of climate change.

Desalination: Water for an Increasingly Thirsty World

By Geoffrey M. Geise

Within the next decade, water shortages are projected to affect 40 US states and effectively all Americans. The issue of water accessibility is not one limited to the US, however, as the problem of clean water availability has become more widely recognized in recent years. For example, the US National Academy of Engineering has recognized the urgent need to provide access to clean water as one of the “Grand Challenges for Engineering

Water Stress and Pollution in Belgium: The Internationa…

By Monica Garcia Quesada and David Aubin

2018 has seen the hottest and driest summer in Western Europe since records began. This prolonged heat and dryness has touched areas in England, the Netherlands, Belgium, and France amongst others, affecting farms and forests, threating agricultural output, pasture, and feed supply.

The Birds by Vladimir Poleganov

Translated by Peter Bachev

If she just looks long and hard enough through the grimy pane of the southern window, she is sure to see one of them returning to its nest. That’s what she’s been told…

Management of European Water Bodies: Approaching a Good…

By Ralf B. SchäferMira Kattwinkel, and Elisabeth Berger

Water has always been essential for human societies providing ecosystem services, such as drinking water, crop production through irrigation water, food, climate regulation, and recreation. The German sociologist Karl Wittfogel went so far as to suggest a connection between water and the evolution of the state, the so-called “hydraulic societies.” Today, water management is a key sector of environmental policy in Europe, and arguably the environmental sector with the highest aspirations.

Sustainable Crop Production and Consumption: The Role o…

By Stefan Siebert

If water and soil resources are not well managed, water use for irrigation can negatively affect ecosystems and water availability for other water use sectors. Globally, irrigation is by far the largest water use sector and contributes to about 90 percent of the additional evapotranspiration caused by human water use

A Legal Foundation: Critical to a Realized SDG 6 and Un…

By Alexandra Campbell-Ferrari and Luke Wilson

It seems simple: water and sanitation are essential to life and livelihood, and thus everyone should have access to these basic necessities and services. But therein lays the challenge. They are services that demand resources, capacity, infrastructure, and governance to be safely and efficiently delivered. Services do not come free. And the reality is: it costs a lot to provide water and sanitation services, it is not easy to provide these services, and everyone should but not everyone can pay.

Learning from Challenges in the Arid West: Stanford’s W…

By Leon F. Szeptycki and Newsha Ajami

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

Water Quality Law in the US and EU: A Comparison of the…

By Robin Kundis Craig

“Water management” can refer to several types of governmental activities. These include allocation of surface water use and depletion rights, allocation of groundwater use and depletion rights, control of surface water pollution, control of groundwater pollution, preservation or restoration of aquatic habitat and ecosystems, and regulation of development near and in waterbodies, including the destruction of wetlands and mangrove forests.

Columbia Water Center

By Upmanu Lall

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

The Irish Scholarly Presence at St. Gall: Networks of K…

Reviewed by Salvatore Cipriano

The notion that early medieval Ireland was an island of “saints and scholars,” a bastion of civilization-saving monks and their rich corpus of well-travelled books and manuscripts, is something of a popular truism. Scholars, too, have also readily identified Irish scholarship’s significant contributions to monastic, spiritual, and intellectual life in the eight and ninth centuries.

Electing the Pope in Early Modern Italy, 1450-1700 by M…

Reviewed by Christopher P. Gillett

In his new book, Electing the Pope in Early Modern Italy, 1450-1700, Miles Pattenden argues that the unique character of the papal electoral model contributed to the papacy’s increasing economic and structural problems throughout the early modern period.

Water in Europe and the World

By Nicole Shea and Peter Debaere

Fresh water is essential for life. No plant, animal, or person can live without it. Because whatever we do requires a lot of water, cities and towns were initially built next to rivers or streams, and farmers grew crops where water was plentiful or accessible. Water abundance cannot be taken for granted any longer everywhere. A dry spell and record temperatures caught up with Europe this summer, testing farmers from Scandinavia and England as well as France, the Netherlands, Germany and southern European countries.

Seeking a Blue Urbanism: The Paradoxes of Blue Nature

By Timothy Beatley

We live on the Blue Planet, as oceanographers like Sylvia Earle remind us, but we are also increasingly the Urban Planet. How to reconcile these two realities, and how to integrate them into a unified vision of future cities is a major challenge and a topic I have been working on for many years.

The Wedding Party by Jonida Prifti

Translated by Diana Thow

The only illusion is that there’s a road to follow to an end: the hallway inhabits a closed door hourly. The mystery of a dark legend buried inside a tunnel where children grow into adult visions.

The Governance of Transboundary Rivers Across the World

By Neda Zawahri

It may be argued that there is sufficient fresh water in our planet to meet basic human needs throughout the world, however, this water is unevenly distributed. For instance, regions containing large populations, such as the Middle East, North Africa, western portions of the United States, and northern portions of China all confront extreme shortages of fresh water.

Beauty and Waste

Curated by Nicole Shea and Kayla Maiuri

This art series illustrates both the phenomenal beauty of water and the pollution that has washed upon our shores at the hands of humankind.

Against Freedom: Scene 1 by Esteve Soler

Translated by H.J. Gardner

A fence separating one country from another in Europe. On one side, MOTHER, about 45 years old; on the other side, her SON, about 20 years old. They are connected to each other by the umbilical cord that supplies nourishment to the fetus. The cord is still functioning, moving nourishment from one body to the other.

In Remembrance of Kristallnacht

By Louie Dean Valencia-García

Eighty years ago today, November 9, 1938, an order was given by Nazi German authorities to terrorize and arrest German Jewish citizens, resulting in tens of thousands of people being sent to concentration camps. Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass, marked a violent escalation against Jewish people.

“Make the Nation Look at our Demands:” The 2018 Nationa…

By Toussaint Losier

State officials did not simply build more prisons, but they commissioned increasingly secure, riot-proof facilities. These new prisons were designed to hold captive a population that might regularly exceed official capacity, while limiting the space in which imprisoned men and women might move about, congregate together, and, potentially, gain control of the institution.

Habitual Punishment: Family Detention and the Status Quo

By David Hernández

The problem with framing mass emigration of refugees and asylum seekers as one-off crises is that they demand one-off solutions—walls and fences, military deployments at the border, and deterrence that hinges on mass detention of families.

Notes on Teaching in Prison

By Julia Gardiner

I feel guilty, as usual, because I can leave and my students cannot. Razor wire glitters in the dark as I walk down the hill from the school building to the front gate. Not for the first time in my experience, I see a bus idling in the dark as women board, holding small bundles of their possessions.

Rationing Justice: Risk Assessment Instruments in the A…

By Julie Ciccolini and Cynthia Conti-Cook

Naturally, in a system already primed for triage, actuarial risk assessment instruments are spreading rapidly. At nearly every stage of decision-making—including bail, program eligibility, sentencing, probation, prison classification, parole release and supervision—actuarial tools are assisting decision-makers to ration liberty and due process.

 

America First and the End of Pax Americana

By Stuart Mackintosh

As we approach the two-year mark of the Trump Presidency, the implications and the effects of the “America First” policy are becoming clear. Supporters of the multilateral rules-based world order are alarmed. We are witnessing the end of Pax Americana; the end of a generally benign U.S. hegemony; the end of U.S. support for a global system created by America and her allies after the Second World War.

Damon’s Case and the Meaning of British Antislavery

By Padraic X. Scanlan

In practice, there was a law for the rich and a law for the poor in Britain. In the British Empire, there was a law for whites and another for everyone else. Courtrooms were officially blind to race, but racism was everywhere.

The Strange Career of the Artisanal Penitentiary

By Anne Kerth

The similarities between convict leasing and modern mass incarceration are uncomfortably clear: in both systems, convicts are cordoned off from larger society and coerced into the performance of menial labor, from which they gain neither profit nor personal advancement. In this version of history, slavery, convict leasing, and modern incarceration merge to form an unbroken legacy of American coercion of unskilled and easily replaced black labor.

Global Hybrid Threats and European Security in the Age …

By Giray Sadik

Hybrid war encompasses a set of hostile actions whereby, instead of a classical large-scale military invasion, an attacking power seeks to undermine its opponent through a variety of acts including subversive intelligence operations, sabotage, hacking, and the empowering of proxy insurgent groups.

Two Poems by Monika Herceg

Translated by Mirza Purić

Under a stolen car the world will shrink down to a single truth, and then I’ll encourage / the bullet I’d spat out into your lung.

Five Poems by Marko Tomaš

Translated by Rachael Daum

Someday it will be enough. / I’ll write a poem, / the words will spill all over your street / and you’ll slip / and fall straight into my arms my shackles / they’re learning to be gentle / by way of drunkenness,

Scottish Prisoners of War in Durham Cathedral: An Inter…

Interviewed by Christopher P. Gillett

Between June 9th and October 7th, 2018, the Palace Green Library of Durham University hosted the exhibition “Bodies of Evidence: How science unearthed Durham’s dark secret.” This display forms part of a much larger, interdisciplinary research project investigating the remains of seventeenth-century Scottish prisoners of war discovered in the grounds of the cathedral square in November 2013.

Oil and Sovereignty: Petroknowledge and Energy Policy i…

Reviewed by Stephen Gross

The surge of populist movements across Europe, which are assaulting the supranational powers of the European Union; the growth of massive financial institutions, which transcend borders with a web of monetary flows; the expansion of firms with global supply chains, which can relocate production around the world; the trade wars unleashed by President Donald Trump, which ostensibly aim to reassert American control over its own economy; can be understood as either causes of or reactions to the perceived decline of the nation state.

Four Poems by Sylvia Beato-Davis

By Sylvia Beato-Davis

sleep without touching & in the morning, you ask what is the matter., but nothing is ever the matter until the tea kettle struggles to sing. i dig to remember the ardor of dreamlife, putting the wrapped stick of butter near the flame to melt.

December 2018

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here is this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Hélène B. Ducros (Geography), Louie Dean Valencia-García (History), and Mihai Sebe (Political Science).

Crime and Punishment

By Christopher M. Florio and Nicole Shea

The study of crime and punishment is bound up with the study of a host of other subjects, ranging from social welfare to immigration to imperialism, from law to race relations to education. It is our hope that this issue helps readers to understand how crime and punishment have long been and continue to be entangled with virtually every side of human existence.

Under Pressure by Faruk Šehić

Translated by Mirza Purić

They’ve brought us to the front line. Mud and fog everywhere. I can barely see the man in front of me. We almost hold onto each other’s belts lest we get lost. We pass between burning houses. The file trudges on along rickety fences. The mud sticks to our boots, stretches like dough.

The Problem of Punishment in a Progressive Society

By Sarah Armstrong

Should mass imprisonment be applied as a general phenomenon that might arise anywhere, or should it be understood as a label for the unique experience of one country at one point in time? The distinctiveness of the US experience and the lack of a similar pattern elsewhere argue for the latter. No country in Europe has experienced post-war a scale of imprisonment (bar Russia with its gulag legacy) or a rate of growth anything like that observed in the US between the 1980s and 2000s.

Transcending

By Jesse Krimes

A Philadelphia-based artist whose work explores power, authority, systems, social hierarchies, norms, transgressions, and conventions of beauty.

November 2018

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Hélène Ducros (Geography) and Louie Dean Valencia-García (History).

Politics of Turkish European Belonging in the Era of “N…

By Özgür Özvatan

European welfare states witness both the challenges of Turks’ political inclusion and the rise of the populist radical right firmly warning against the threat of “Islamization.” Turks in Europe, perceived as Europe’s dominant Muslim group, create complex dilemmas for “native” Europeans as well as their “non-native” Turkish fellows. The latter recognize drastic changes in the way they are treated in their everyday life and are portrayed in the public sphere in the aftermath of 9/11.

Everyday Securitization: Prevention and Preemption in B…

By Tom Pettinger

The Prevent program tries to stop people becoming drawn into, supporting, or engaging in violence based on twenty-two supposed “signs of radicalization.”[4] The program has moved through several different iterations, focusing, in its early years, specifically on Muslim communities who were targeted with explicit funding, to a whole-of-society approach where specific community work has become less overt.

Preventing Extremism and Terrorism: Reporting on an Int…

By Raymond SlotFrans Van AsscheSérgio Vieira, and Joana Vieira dos Santos

One specific psychological approach to understand the terrorist is not feasible, as terrorists differ widely in motivation, conviction, and objective. Consequently, trying to identify or profile terrorists within the general population based on psychological characteristics is a difficult task.

Britain First: Banned on Facebook but not Solved

By Lella Nouri

How do groups like Britain First use social media, and how does this result in such unprecedented popularity? Does social media bring out xenophobia in British society? Is Britain First really that popular? Is this thanks to its online strategy; and if so, what is their secret?

Bees of the Invisible by Maximiliane Donicht

Reviewed by Shoshana Akabas

One hundred years later, German-born poet Maximiliane Donicht picks up where Rilke left off, weaving her own expressive, elegiac verses. I balance on the bottleneck of being.

Mapping the Radical Right in Hungary

By Katherine Kondor

In a political environment so influenced by radical right elites, the number of radical right street-level and direct-action organizations is notable. Derivatively, in a county whose political atmosphere is becoming increasingly radicalized, on what grounds do radical right activist groups stand? In what way have the attitudes and aims of radical right street movements shifted in reflecting this change?

Between the “Street” and the “Salon,” the Local and the…

By Julian Göpffarth

While Tellkamp and Grünbein are well-known figures in the German public sphere, and their debate received a lot of attention in the German mediascape, little attention is paid to less prominent, more local intellectuals. This is probably due to the tendency to associate the social concept of the “public intellectual” with a certain degree of grandeur or prestige, and a national or even global audience.

Rocking the Boat: Migration and Race in Contemporary Sp…

Reviewed by Angela Acosta

Drawing on the concept of “Fortress Europe,” first used during the Second World War to refer to defending Europe from outsiders, Bermúdez applies the term to the dangerous process of migrants attempting to enter the EU via its southern boundaries

Europe Un-Imagined: Nation and Culture at a French-Germ…

Reviewed by Ib Bondebjerg

For citizens of the European Union, navigating the relationship between the transnational and national is very complicated business. Though they are both European and national citizens, it is by far the nation which is most present in their everyday lives, their minds, and the cultures they imagine themselves to belong to.

Protecting the Natural Environment? A Look at the Radic…

By Bernhard Forchtner

When contemplating radical-right politics, whether past or present, few think about the fight against environmental degradation. Yet to consider radical-right perspectives on environmental issues and the natural environment more generally does provide an important insight into these actors’ ideas and practices.

Just Harmless Lunatics? The “Reichsbürger” Movement in …

By Barbara Manthe

They live in their own world. They proclaim their own state territories, which are sometimes only the size of a stately home. They reject the legitimacy of the Federal Republic of Germany and its legal system, arguing that the pre-1945 German “Reich” is still in force.

Networked Remembrance: Excavating Buried Memories in th…

Reviewed by Brian Ladd

The widespread fascination with the landscape of underground railways is not difficult to understand. This is a realm frequently visited by large numbers of people who realize that they only glimpse fragments of a much larger system. The fact that these structures lie under the earth, and often lack illumination, ensures that many of us will wonder what might be hidden there, concealed by a cloak of darkness.

Making Meaning in a Global Art Market: Presentations of…

By Spencer Kaplan

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

The Radical Right in the Global Context

By Cynthia Miller-Idriss

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

Producing History in Spanish Civil War Exhumations: Fro…

Reviewed by Jonah S. Rubin

In this timely volume, Zahira Aragüete-Toribio examines civil society forensic exhumations of Spanish Civil War dead in Extremadura, the region of western Spain where the author grew up. The region, which borders Portugal, saw some of the most intense fighting of the Spanish Civil War.

October 2018

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Hélène Ducros (Geography), Louie Dean Valencia-García (History), Malcolm Campbell-Verduyn (Political Science), and Thomas Nolden (Comparative Literature).

Democratic Accountability, Political Order, and Change …

Reviewed by Alexandra Bousiou

By focusing on the interrelations between democratic accountability, political order, and orderly change, Johan Olsen approaches democratic accountability as a mechanism by which citizens can influence and even control the elected representatives, non-elected officials, and other power holders.

Hearing Hate: White Power Music

By Rob May 

The radical right is currently flourishing across the globe. Positioned at the extreme end of this ideological spectrum are Hitler worshipping neo-Nazis. Back in the 1980s, these white supremacists created their own genre of music – White Power – which has since become an essential ingredient of neo-Nazi skinhead propaganda.

Mediterranean-First?: La pianificazione strategica angl…

Reviewed by Julia Khrebtan-Hörhager

World War II was the most significant European and global conflict of the twentieth century – historically, politically, ideologically – a conflict, whose cultural legacy still greatly affects international relations on the world arena today and reminds us about le passé qui ne passe pas. War pages of history are comprised of complex and controversial narratives of perpetrators and victims: those who later became celebrated, glorified, forever commemorated; or those who become feared, loathed, pitied, or forever forgotten.

Assessing the Impact of Air Pollution on Students’ Inte…

By Evelin Rizzo

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

Radicalism and Violence in Europe

By Cynthia Miller-Idriss, Nicole Shea, and Fabian Virchow

In this special issue, artists and authors take up these issues in a series of feature essays and works, short opinion pieces, and research reports, examining questions of radicalism and violence, prevention and intervention, and radicalization and de-radicalization across Europe and other parts of the world. The authors examine cases from Germany, France, Hungary, the U.K. and beyond, looking at social media, school-based interventions, the use of history by far groups, the role of public intellectuals, and more.

(G)UNSAFE

Curated by Nicole Shea

Artists Hank Willis Thomas and Yosman Botero call awareness to racism and police brutality, pulling viewers into unarmed victim cases and making them witnesses to inequality.

 

The Females by Wolfgang Hilbig

Translated by Isabel Fargo Cole

It was hot, a damp hot hell, sweat emerged from all my pores. I began excreting smells, how strange, as though something within me were starting to mold, an extraordinary fromage, as though I smelled of my eyeballs, which bulged and welled with what seemed a sort of slime, a turbidity likely rising up from my loins, a twinge from the groin that brushed my heart, stinging; it dug slowly into my brain, but I hadn’t felt its onset.

The “Brexit Moment” and British Academia  

By Mike Finn

In the Brexit debate, academic expertise itself came under visceral attack. Overwhelmingly, academics backed the Remain cause, and as the political scientist David Runciman has noted, universities and their environs often became isolated pockets of Remain resistance in otherwise Leave-dominated areas once the votes were tallied.

Terroir, Wine Culture, and Globalization: What Does Ter…

By Marion Demossier

Throughout the last decade, the global world of wine has seen a radical transformation, defined by the emergence of the concept of terroir as a space for renegotiation of past, present, and future ways of producing, selling, and consuming wine. But what is terroir? And why is it attracting so much interest from academics, producers, experts, and wine consumers?

Baltic Agriculture: The Political Economy of Extremes

By Anu Mai Kõll

Historically, the fate of the Baltic realm has been difficult. It served as a kind of Middle East of the North; inhabited by small ethnic groups with larger neighbors, which tended to play out rivalries fighting about their territory. German feudal lords, knights and barons, were a heritage from the crusades in Latvian- and Estonian-speaking areas in the thirteenth century.

“Let Them Eat Cake:” European Austerity, Food Insecurit…

By Louise Manning

This article focuses on Europe and the interaction between food price spikes, economic downturn and political austerity, and the risk of reported food fraud. It is important to firstly consider the impact of the 2007-2008 financial crash on household food security and the role of food insecurity as a driver towards political instability.

American Fictionary by Dubravka Ugresic

Translated by Celia Hawkesworth and Ellen Elias-Bursac

My mother collects other people’s deaths, rattling them mournfully like coins in a piggy bank. “Did you know Petrović died?” asks Mother over the phone.

Looking Backward, Moving Forward: Articulating a “Yes, …

By Richard White

One way to approach this question involves identifying and teasing apart two rather crude-but-important approaches of veganism. One is rooted in the “original” definition for veganism, which emerged in the UK in the 1940s. I will refer to this as “activist” veganism, one which inspires a more radical vision for veganism, encouraging greater critical reflection, awareness, and commitment to social justice issues than “the other” type of veganism, namely “lifestyle,” or “corporate” veganism

The Moral Economies of Agricultural Production and the …

By Angela Cacciarru

How do diverse property systems work in order to ensure access to land and the management of local resource? What role do moral economies play beyond property? Von Benda-Beckmann and Wiber find these questions intriguing, and argue that property regimes cannot be expressed by any one-dimensional political, economic, or legal model: they are multi-dimensional and multi-functional.

The Governesses by Anne Serre

Translated by Mark Hutchinson

And to think he’d expected them to rally round at the first puff of smoke from his cigar! That, whatever the circumstance, whatever the temptations, it was to him they would turn, him they would support with their powerful young love.

From Disturbing to Disrupting? Cultured Meat and Early …

By Erik Jönsson

As a number of scholars have noted, cultured (or “in vitro,” or “clean”) meat is, today, a confusing technology, shot through with ontological ambiguity. What cultured meat eventually could become, and what cultured meat is today, are both uncertain. Moreover, in making sense of cultured meat in relation to (particular forms of) contemporary veganism, cultural and technological processes visibly entangle.

Food Citizenship? Collective Food Procurement in Europe…

By Cristina Grasseni

Collective food procurement defines the production, distribution, and consumption of food with a participatory dimension: for example community gardens, but also new entrepreneurship based on urban agriculture, as well as broader projects governing food markets or allotments at municipal level.

The Cheese Story

By Olga Sezneva

I check myself in the mirror one last time. Black sweater, high neck, navy blue pants that you won’t see under my long apron. Dark-frame glasses. City smart, I’d say, no different from that mevrouw I saw selling gloves in E*.

Turkish Guest Workers in Germany: Hidden Lives and Cont…

Reviewed by Brittany Lehman

Historians often rely on a preponderance of evidence to stake their claims. In so doing, however, these scholars frequently get lost in the numbers and the trends, forgetting the individual. Jennifer Miller’s much-needed book shows readers that groups of people—even when they number in the millions—are made up of individuals, each of whom has unique experiences.

My Life as a Spy: Investigations in a Secret Police Fil…

Reviewed by Sabrina Papazian

Verdery highlights the vulnerability of her emotions and experiences by sharing fieldnotes where she describes feelings of hopelessness and despair during particular stressful moments in her ethnographic endeavors. She also documents her emotions as she carefully read her secret file in 2010. This introspective dive into Verdery’s psyche makes her research experience and writing relatable.

The Pyrenees in the Modern Era: Reinventions of a Lands…

Reviewed by David A. Messenger

Drawing on traveler accounts from the late eighteenth through the twentieth centuries, as well as official tourist publications, memoirs, and regional newspapers, Lyons takes a transnational approach to understand exchanges, conceptions, and ideas that flourished in the region.

Physical Hydrology

By Matt Reidenbach

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

Water Footprint Network: Using the Water Footprint Conc…

By Joep Schyns    

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

Sociology of Food

By Erica Morrell

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

A Conversation About Urban Agriculture

By Christine Aubry and Baptiste Grard

Through this conversation, we can see that urban agriculture is an open door to delve into many issues around the functioning and development of urban environment: food provisioning, habitat fragmentation, soil waterproofing, waste recycling, well-being, social linkages, etc.

September 2018

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Hélène Ducros (Geography), Daniela Irrera (International Relations), Samantha Lomb (History), Louie Dean Valencia-García (History), and Malcolm Campbell-Verduyn (Political Science).

Sociology of Knowledge and Food Systems

By Erica Morrell

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

Food, Food Systems, and Agriculture

By Hélène B. Ducros

The articles and interviews included here clearly convey that food stands as an entry point into a wide range of contemporary and historical debates that touch all humans. What is more, they also indicate that food operates as a spatial and temporal link across a complex web of interconnected social, cultural, political, economic, environmental, demographic, nutritional, and physiological topics

Superfood or Dangerous Drug? Coffee, Tea, and Chocolate…

By Ken Albala

We are all too familiar today with the wildly exaggerated health claims made for so-called super foods. Often based loosely on clinical research, the underlying motivation for these claims is, of course, selling new products. Foods are likewise demonized with the same motives, here too pushing a new line and maximizing profit underlies the latest fad diets that ban whole classes of food.

The Condition of Secrecy: Essays by Inger Christensen

Translated by Susanna Nied

When I was nine years old, the world too was nine years old. At least there was no difference between us, no opposition, no distance. We just tumbled around from sunrise to sunset, earth and body as like as two pennies. And there was never a harsh word between us, for the simple reason that there were no words at all between us; we never uttered a word to each other, the world and I.

Famine and Dearth in Medieval England

By Phillipp Schofield

While we have a general sense of famine events in this period and some inroads into exploring the extent and impact of famine and dearth, there is also a great deal we do not know about famine in the middle ages. In fact, our ignorance in regards to famine reflects a more general gap in our understanding of medieval society.

Peas in Queues

Curated by Nicole Shea

Tjalf Sparnaay’s oil paintings highlight the beauty of the contemporary commonplace while David Hicks draws his inspiration from the beauty of farm lands surrounding his home.

The Unexamined Securitization of Economic Migrants

By Lara Davis

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

A World of Regions, but Not of Europes

By Giuseppe Spatafora

The end of the Cold War significantly strengthened the forces of globalization and internationalization: the political and economic developments in Eastern Europe, the post-Soviet space, Southeast Asia and Latin America opened up previously sealed markets and fuelled exponential growth of trade and financial interchange.

Anxiety in Our Times

By Jordi Torrent

Many studies and experts are pointing that the main reason of the increase of anxiety in our society (particularly in youth, but not only) are the uses we are making of contemporary media, in particular of social media.

The Irresolvable Political Brain: Our Neuropolitical Li…

By Liya Yu

Not only are our brains ill-equipped to handle the socio-political realities that accompany liberal democratic procedures, but we might never be able to completely overcome our brains’ biases and dehumanizing abilities, nor can we prevent people from preferring cognitive closure over openness towards ambiguity, uncertainty and risk.

Digital Strangers at Our Door: Moral Panic and the Refu…

By Sandra Ponzanesi

The status of Europe, which is supposed to welcome so-called “legitimate” refugees, is itself so very precarious at the moment; instead of identification with the needy, this has led to antagonism, ambivalence and fear, often erupting into pure xenophobia, expertly manipulated by right-wing demagogues and anti-immigration parties

The Construction of Equality: Syriac Immigration and th…

Reviewed by Ada Engebrigtsen

Jennifer Mack’s The Construction of Equality, tells the fascinating story of a community of Syriac Orthodox refugees in Sweden who fled discrimination and persecution in Turkey and lived as stateless refugees in Lebanon before being admitted by Swedish authorities as part of a quota agreement in 1967.

Making Spain Great Again

By Layla Benitez-James

I wanted to unequivocally condemn police violence while simultaneously feeling a knee jerk aversion to any movement working under a shared idea of nationalism.

Toward a Strengths-Based Approach to Mitigating our Anx…

By Beatrice L. Bridglall

It appears that our ability to moderate anxiety over accelerations in climate change, may hinge on what we believe and how we perceive this issue. Cognitive scientists suggest the value of reframing our mental maps in efforts to process our fears and dilemmas more constructively and positively.

Middlemost Constantine

By Ken White

I forget nothing / think of a curse / triple it and still / you’re nowhere near / all braids evenly divided / from earth

Imaginary Explosions

By Caitlin Berrigan

Even an entirety must have an edge. Just as the continents drifted before, leaving a line against water: California.

Do Our Concepts of Bilingual Education Match the Anxiet…

By Bàrbara Roviró and Patricia Martínez-Álvarez

Anxieties related to the parenting experience for migrant families are complicated by multiple factors, some of which are perceived as being life-threatening, and thus, at times, prioritized over any others (e.g., making a living, finding a home, having someone to care for their children, paying their bills, or avoiding police prosecution, among others).

Hunting Party by Agnès Desarthe

Translated by Christiana Hills

This isn’t exactly how Tristan tells his story to Dumestre. He doesn’t tell him everything. He doesn’t use words like “stammer” or “arrogance.”

Brexit: Why Britain Voted to Leave the European Union b…

Reviewed by Owen Parker

Brexit was one of the first book-length contributions to this rapidly growing set of stories. Broadly, it is in the camp of those interested in the survey-data-driven “who-voted-what-and-why” question. But unlike many analyses in that camp, it considers the results of the referendum within the broader context of a rigorous and detailed analysis of public opinion during the decade preceding the referendum and of the rise of the UK Independence Party (UKIP), a growing political force, particularly during the latter part of that period.

Musical Theater in Europe, 1830–1945 by Michela Niccol…

Reviewed by Jennifer Walker

The lion’s share of scholarly literature that treats the subject of European musical theater during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries relegates itself to the study of “high” art, mainly in the form of opera. Musical Theater in Europe, 1830–1945, however, stands as a long-awaited corrective to this issue.

Locals

By Sverrir Norland

Just then, my old man came rushing in through the door, a violent storm of red flesh and graying hair. He sent out a deep, satisfied grumble when he spotted me, then proceeded to waddle across the room like a giant duck.

Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust: Language, Rhetoric, an…

Reviewed by Tatjana Lichtenstein

In Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust: Language, Rhetoric, and the Traditions of Hatred, Beth Griech-Polelle sets out to investigate the relationship between antisemitism, the construction of a German racial community, and the persecution and murder of Jews during the Second World War.

Styrian Witches in European Perspective: Ethnographic F…

Reviewed by Mary R. O’Neil

Until the last several decades, historians would have agreed that European witch beliefs had gradually disappeared following the decline of witch trials during the seventeenth century. However, contemporary researchers have effected an historic revision, documenting the persistence of these archaic beliefs into the twentieth century.

Migration, Europe, and Staged Affect-Scenarios

By Paul Mecheril and Monica van der Haagen-Wulff

Lacan’s ideas establish the theoretical framework in which subjectivization and identity formation can be understood, not merely in the solipsistic process of the self, but rather as a constant “mirror dynamic.”

On the Path to a European University

By Janosch Nieden

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

Dilemmas of Inclusion: Muslims in European Politics by …

Reviewed by Colin Brown

Recognition of the immigrant-origin electorate, and especially of the Muslim electorate, has grown in Europe in recent years. Academic studies have highlighted the increasing descriptive representation of migrant-background politicians at the local and national level—and have asked why this increase has been uneven.

Robotics and Emotion

By Stephan Habscheid, Christine Hrncal, Jens Lüssem, Rainer Wieching, Felix Carros, and Volker Wulf

One of the commonplaces in the debate on technological innovation is that interpretations and expectations, emotions and assessments with which people encounter new technologies, differ considerably in cultural terms. In the public debate in Germany, for example, it is often claimed that robots in Japan are generally already anchored much more widely and consensus-based in society, and that instead of the fears, anxiety, and skepticism towards robotic technology, which are characteristic for Germany, trust in and gratitude towards technology prevail in Japan.

Anxiety Culture

By Nicole Shea and Emmanuel Kattan

The challenges of climate change, pandemics, mental illness, rapid technological change and its impact on work and individual freedom, migration and its social and political consequences are not always best understood under the prism of “crisis.” Rather, they seep into our collective consciousness, building on an increased sense of insecurity and powerlessness and shaping our relationships with others and the world.

Kayla Maiuri; Hands Tied

Hands Tied

Curated by Kayla Maiuri and Nicole Shea

Through the works of Kim Noble and Jorge Tacla, “Hands Tied” tackles questions of identity and the throes of mental illness, ultimately illustrating the beauty that can be discovered.

Anxiety Culture: The New Global State of Human Affairs?

By Michael I. Schapira, Ulrich Hoinkes, and John P. Allegrante

There are many consequences of living in this state of anxiety on an individual or collective level. Invoking crisis or danger tends to speed up our thinking and lend a sense of urgency to our actions, but might this come at the expense of a deeper understanding of the changing face of our societies?

The Storm by Tomás González

Translated by Andrea Rosenberg

Javier eyed his father’s invulnerable back as the old man, sitting up in the bow, received the morning full on his face. His father was skinnier and shorter than Javier, and he was wearing a polo shirt that had started out red but had long since faded.

July 2018

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Hélène Ducros (Geography), Daniela Irrera (International Relations), Samantha Lomb (History), Louie Dean Valencia-García (History), Nick Ostrum (History), and Thomas Nolden (Literature).

Constitutionalism in Russia: A Missed Opportunity

By Stephen F. Williams

The years 1905-1917 presented Russia with an opportunity to move smartly toward the rule of law and constitutionalism. In October 1905, Tsar Nicholas II issued the October Manifesto, in which he promised a popularly elected legislature, the State Duma, and committed the regime to the principle that law could become effective only with approval of the Duma.

EU’s Balkans Test: Geopolitics of a Normative Power

By Enika Abazi

Fatigued by expansion and challenged by the refugee crisis, Brexit, Catalonian independence, and the aftershocks of the financial crash, the EU project faces major internal challenges, which perhaps should require the EU to revise its policies to make membership more attractive.

To the Center via the Periphery: An Interview with Mari…

Interviewed by Dana J. Johnson

The name Maria Todorova is familiar to all scholars of the Balkan Peninsula and Eastern Europe. Prof. Todorova’s seminal book, Imagining the Balkans (1997), prompted a broad conversation in the social sciences and humanities about the Balkans as location and imaginary.

From Being to Living: Euro-Chinese Thought Lexicon by F…

Reviewed by Anca Pop

François Jullien is a world-renowned French philosopher and sinologist, a most widely translated thinker with a prolific oeuvre on Chinese thought and culture. Having uniquely forged an intellectual reputation as an intercultural philosopher, he aptly holds the Alterity Chair at “Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme” in Paris.

Central Asia in the Age of Connectivity

By Alberto Turkstra

At a time when other regions and geopolitical hotspots are dominating the political and media headlines, Central Asia has been quietly taking advantage of the extraordinary opportunities deriving from the region’s increasingly central role in the numerous connectivity initiatives and corridors that are traversing Eurasia, of which China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is a primary example.

Geography of Rebels by Maria Gabriela Llansol

Translated by Audrey Young

in that place there was a woman who did not want to have children from her womb. She asked the men to bring her their wives’ children
so she could educate them in a large house…

16+1: The EU’s Concerns of a Chinese ‘Trojan Horse’

By Eamonn Butler 

In July 2018, Bulgaria, fresh off the back of its EU Presidency, will host the seventh annual summit for “Cooperation between China and Central and Eastern European Countries.” More commonly known 16+1 Initiative, it is a diplomatic platform coordinated by China, to support institutional coordination of relations between China and sixteen countries from the Central and East European (CEE) region.

The EU and China: Prospects of Cooperation on Climate a…

By Alexandra-Maria Bocse

The EU also cooperates with China towards the implementation of the Paris Agreement in the framework of initiatives such the Clean Energy Ministerial, a global forum promoting policies and sharing best practices in order to accelerate the transition to clean energy.

Roads, Belts, and Connectivities: Chinese Silk Road Pro…

By Madeleine Herren

Chinese news is presenting the new silk road project with a strong reference to a deep historical past, imaging the silk road as a bustling trading route established centuries ago. The narrative usually does not mention the very fact that the concept of a silk road in the sense of a coherent trading route only surfaced as recently as 1877.

The Politics of Studying Europe in China

By Ralph Weber and Silvana Tarlea

It is difficult to disregard the importance of the relationship between Europe and China. The European Union (EU) is China’s biggest trading partner and China is the EU’s second-biggest trading partner after the United States. In order to enhance and consolidate relations with China, the EU has provided considerable research funding to Chinese universities over the years.

The Geopolitics of Central Europe

By Eamonn Butler

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

Three Poems from The Exeter Book

Translated by Gnaomi Siemens

All over the earth are countless creatures we can never know. / Wherever water encircles the world’s bright breast, legions /
of land-roving beasts, huge swarms of birds, crowd against / the roaring surf, the surge of the salty waves.

The Bottom of the Sky by Rodrigo Fresán

Translated by Will Vanderhyden

My mother—known as “Fair Sarah”—died during the great influenza epidemic, when I was less than a year old. I got sick too. And against all prognoses, condemned by the doctors, I survived, and no one dared call it miracle

Comparative European Politics

By Thomas Lundberg

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

China-EU Relations in the Twenty-First Century: An Inte…

Interviewed by Daniela Irrera

Mario Telò is an eminent scholar in the International Relations and European Studies field. He has just edited Deepening the EU-China Partnership: Bridging Institutional and Ideational Differences in an Unstable World with Ding Chun and Zhang Xiaotong (Routledge, 2018) where he discusses the relations between China and Europe and launches some perspectives on the future of this partnership, facing the regional and global political and economic developments and the challenges posed by the current instability.

June 2018

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Hélène Ducros (Geography), Samantha Lomb (History), and Louie Dean Valencia-García (History).

The Political Economy of Higher Education Finance: The …

Reviewed by Scott Smith

This overview of tuition and subsidy regimes is important because of the dearth in empirical data around what drives tuition fees across the OECD, as well as what accounts for the stickiness of subsidies even when governments are led by rightist political parties that traditionally espouse greater privatization and deregulation.

Fast Fashion, Transnational Ties, and Encounter Ethnogr…

Interviewed by Kelly McKowen

Who are the makers behind the “Made in Italy” label prized by the world’s fashion-conscious consumers? In Prato, a small Tuscan city with a long history of textile production, the makers come increasingly from a growing community of transnational Chinese migrants.

The Oxford Water Network: Securing Water for Sustainabl…

By Dustin Garrick

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

The Globalization of Education – Challenges and Opportu…

Interviewed by Lara Davis

One of our most recent initiatives has been the creation of a Joint Graduate School with Nankai University in China. This is a unique development which is the first such joint graduate school between a UK and Chinese university and reflects the important strategic partnership which we have with Nankai.

IHE Delft Institute for Water Education: Integrating In…

By Emma Meurs 

IHE Delft is the largest international graduate water education facility in the world and is based in Delft, the Netherlands. Since 1957, the Institute has provided water education and training to professionals from over 190 countries, the vast majority from Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

Water-related Activities at the University of Copenhage…

By Mette Frimodt-Møller

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

Europe-China Relations

By Eamonn Butler and Nicole Shea

It has been more than 40 years since the first formal, diplomatic relations between China and the European Union (EU) were established. In the subsequent years, relations between these two global economic powerhouses have significantly developed, with both the EU and China publishing and implementing a number of communiqués intended to build and strengthen partnership.

New Life

Curated by Nicole Shea

While Xin Song’s work highlights the ancient folk art tradition of paper-cutting, her collages made from recycled magazines also cut through modern consumerism and wastefulness.

The Shutters by Ahmed Bouanani

Translated by Emma Ramadan

In an angel’s bed in a wool dress she sleeps / The house is cold the walls white like a dream / motionless death takes a seat / and for two weeks awaits the end of the temporary peace

Cap Setting and Strict Compliance Enforcement Will be C…

By Patrick Bayer

At the end of last year, the Chinese government approved plans for a national emissions trading scheme. While many of the details are still in the works, the biggest carbon emitter’s commitment to set up carbon markets nationwide has important implications for global climate mitigation.

Translating the Interior Galaxies of Anise Koltz

By Marci Vogel

As reflected in its title, Galaxies intérieures straddles the worlds of material and spirit, creating a convergence of inner and outer realms, an interior emotional galaxy intimately tied to earthly experience — personal, political, and linguistic.

The Big Impossible, an Art Series

By Jacob Dahlstrup 

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

On Urban Research in Europe: An Interview with Pekka Tu…

Interviewed by Eszter Gantner

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

Public Spaces, Urban Heritage, and Politics

By Cor Wagenaar

Only in the late eighteenth century, curing patients was identified as the primary function of hospitals, and the provision of clean air as the best tool to do so. This view was propagated by medical doctors and produced buildings in which medicine, paradoxically, only played a marginal role.

From Tactical Urban Interventions to Strategic Ones: Be…

By Lilia Voronkova and Oleg Pachekov

Disappearance of public space in cities due to their privatization and commoditization has become a truism in the twentieth century. What is less discussed is another danger — lack of publics, which leads to the deficiency of demand for public space.

Linked by Research: Berlin and St. Petersburg

By Eszter Gantner

We consider urban interventions to be practices in which the most diverse participants make their socio-political positions and genuine private interests clear and visible and exert their influence on the public space.

Commoning in Action: Walking in St. Petersburg, Urban G…

By Ayse Erek

Debates on the shrinking public space in Istanbul are not new. Since the last two decades, they have been crystalized in relation to the topics such as the regeneration of old neighborhoods, protecting heritage, the right for the waterfronts and green spaces, as well as the public but unused spaces, revived with old or new ways of usages.

Jewish Salonica: Between the Ottoman Empire and Modern …

Reviewed by Yaron Ben-Naeh and Tamir Karkason

Jewish Salonica is a cornerstone of Sephardi legacy, without which it is impossible to describe the history of Sephardi Jews after their expulsion from the Iberian Peninsula. Alongside Istanbul, Salonica stands at the center of the study on Ottoman Jewry and the Jewish Sephardi Diaspora.

May 2018

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Hélène Ducros (Geography), Samantha Lomb (History), and Louie Dean Valencia-García (History).

Contemporary Urban Research in the European City

By Nicole Shea and Eszter Gantner

By now, urban public spaces have become strongly contested resources in present European cities, where multiple agents are claiming the right to these spaces. Reacting to this development, this special issue concentrates on European cities, focusing on their public spaces, their histories and their rich heritages.

Unseen

Curated by Nicole Shea

The modern metropolis thrives on the creativity of its citizens, with the arts and culture as revitalizing forces.

She Is Angry by Maja Lee Langvad

Translated by Katrine Øgaard Jensen

She is angry about being an export. She is angry that adoption agencies in sending as well as receiving countries make money off transnational adoption.

Red by Helena Österlund

Translated by Paul Cunningham

The wolf is so small / The wolf is so very small / I see the wolf die / I don’t know what to do / I see that the wolf is on the ground / I see the wolf die / I stand beside the wolf

Cultural Feelings: Mood, Mediation, and Cultural Politi…

Reviewed by Danielle Hanley

Highmore makes a number of provocative and ultimately productive choices for his project. First, he chooses to use the terms  “feeling” and “mood” over “affect.” He does so because these terms are vague and allow the author to move between habituated and the emotional, the quotidian and the intense aspects of lived experience.

The Easiness and the Loneliness by Asta Olivia Nordenhof

Translated by Susanna Nied

my fathers mother kept smoking after her stroke / one side of her face was paralyzed / she could just barely hold her lips together, they werent airtight / it must have affected the strength of her smokes / i think now

Personal Space

Curated by Kayla Maiuri

In this photography series, we showcase the works of three emerging Finnish artists, Anni Hanén, Kimmo Metsäranta, and Jaakko Kahilaniemi.

 

Soviet Communists on the Factory Floor: 1926–1941

By Yiannis Kokosalakis

The question thus remained; what did Lenin’s vanguard actually do? One of the most influential social historians of the Stalin period described party activism as a paradox, pointing out that the many thousands of communist rank-and-filers were representatives of political authority, but their activities brought them to conflict with functionaries of the state everywhere.

Four Poems by Elías Knörr

Translated by Meg Matich

I invited the biologist into my back garden / he marveled at the lightbulbs / and took to dancing like a night moth

The Paris Syndrome by Heidi Furre

Translated by Julia Johanne Tolo

This is the globe. It’s blue, with green, orange, and yellow sections. Sometimes pink or red. It turns in the dark, and has two white spots. The North Pole and the South Pole. If you want to leave the globe you have to send an application to somewhere like NASA, and you’ll need to be good at physics, math, and chemistry.

27: or, Death Makes the Artist by Alexandra Salmela

Translated by Niina Pollari

She believes she’s very happy. She tells herself that a loving husband, three beautiful children, a red granny cottage in an idyllic countryside setting, and a newish Opel station wagon in the yard is exactly what she’s always wanted.

Starlings by Solrún Michelsen

Translated by Kerri Pierce

Truth to tell, I’ve always thought that, when it comes to the animal kingdom, starlings are the creatures that most resemble humans. Could be that’s just wishful thinking.

Excerpt from Oneiron by Laura Lindstedt

Translated by Owen Witesman

Imagine you are partially blind. Minus eleven diopters. Imagine a dark exam room at an optometrist’s office. You’re sitting in a comfortable leather chair, afraid you’ll lose your sight entirely. You’ve carefully placed your old glasses on the table. The plastic rims, electric-blue ten years ago, are scuffed now.

The Nationsoul of My Dear Jon by Birkir Blær

Translated by Meg Matich

The most preposterous figure in Icelandic folklore is the indomitable wife of My Dear Jon who travels to the kingdom of heaven with the soul of her husband in a sack, to smuggle him into Paradise; she’s a woman who slings insults at the saints and slut shames the Virgin Mary before Jesus Christ himself arrives at the gates of heaven to bid her, with ceremonious tact, to get lost.

April 2018

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Hélène Ducros (Geography), Samantha Lomb (History), Malcolm Campbell-Verduyn (Political Science), Louie Dean Valencia-García (History), and Daniela Irrera (International Relations).

Queenship in Medieval France, 1300-1500 by Murielle Gau…

Reviewed by Zita Eva Rohr

While the stories of medieval kings, and indeed their kingships, have received considerable scholarly attention for decades, if not for a hundred years or more, studies of medieval queens, and queenship in general, as legitimate fields of cross-disciplinary research really only received their “shot in the arm” following John Carmi Parson’s ground-breaking and durable collection of essays, Medieval Queenship, first published in 1993.

Iceland’s Financial Crisis: The Politics of Blame, Prot…

Reviewed by Alyssa Maraj Grahame

Despite owning the distinction of being the first national economy to experience the full brunt of the financial crisis in 2008, and the first to “recover” from it, Iceland is no exception to widespread patterns of ongoing consequences.

Engines of Empire: Steamships and the Victorian Imagina…

Reviewed by Crosbie Smith

This is an ambitious, provocative, and at times idiosyncratic book. The dust-jacket fly-leaf declares its broad aims as the telling of “the story of the complex relationship between the Victorians and their wondrous steamships … it is a fascinating glimpse into a world where an empire felt powerful and anything seemed possible – if there was an engine behind it.”

Katrine Ogaard Jensen; Kayla Maiuri; Nordic Voices

New Nordic Voices

By Katrine Øgaard Jensen and Kayla Maiuri

A selection of emerging writers from Nordic countries—Iceland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, and the Faroe Islands.

“Ode to Sadness” by Ghayath Almadhoun

Translated by Catherine Cobham

We love you, Europe. We love your art and hate your colonialist history, love your theatre and hate your concentration camps, love your music and hate the sound of your bombs

Three Poems by Friða Ísberg

Translated by Meg Matich

wet paper / tangled in birch branches / inside the window, smoking, / a woman with red hair / says to herself: / they can’t hear me anymore

Wingbeats by Shadi Angelina Bazeghi

Translated by Katrine Øgaard Jensen

Rain clouds and fox traces / newly-fledged birds / a pair of rotten cherries hitting the ground / an inevitable detachment, a dry release

T. U. V. by Zeshan Shakar

Translated by David M. Smith

I kept my mouth shut and realized that Stovner was a very small place, and Tante Ulrikkes vei even smaller. I realized that in Stovner, people lived in houses on one side and housing on the other, and that the two were nothing alike, something that held true for Oslo just as much as the rest of the world.

The Death of the Perpetrator: Interdisciplinary Reflect…

Reviewed by Lee Douglas

Broad in scope and interdisciplinary in tone, the book examines the political, social, and symbolic lives of the bodies of Europe’s most singular tyrants, including Hitler, Franco, and Mussolini, who are placed side by side with analyses of other dictators and despots from Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia.

Archaeological Heritage and Museums

By Dacia Viejo-Rose 

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

Elín, Misc. by Kristín Eiríksdóttir

Translated by Larissa Kyzer

My hands get no cleaner than an old bathtub. My fingernails are all clipped as short as possible, but the chemicals have managed to claw their way through the dead skin, into the bone. As if there’s no enamel.

Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene

Reviewed by Alison Sperling

Haraway engages the feminist techno-scientific thinkers and ideas that have always marked her work, as she stays with different sticky, murky, complicated practices and companions, laying out the ethical dilemmas presented on a damaged planet and making suggestions about how we are to navigate them.

Understanding the EU Aid Policy in Unpredictable Times

By Daniela Irrera

Among the EU policies, humanitarian aid has been one of the most expressive, expected to represent and apply the European principles and values in the world. It has changed a lot over the decades in its strategy, actors, and tools, trying to adapt to the transformations in the global environment and to fulfill international duties.

The Return of Politics, the End of Merkel? Germany’s Ne…

By Julian Jürgenmeyer

Martin Schulz went head-on against Angela Merkel: the German chancellor was a “vacuum cleaner of ideas,” sucking up the programmatic core of other parties and selling it as her own whenever public opinion polling promises a profit; her “systematic refusal of politics” was responsible for the rise of right-wing Alternative für Deutschland (AfD); her election campaign nothing short of “scandalous.” The problem with Schulz’s fierce attack: it came too late.

Reconciling Neo-liberalism and Community Based Tourism …

By Chris Boonzaaier and Harry Wels

The commodification of culture in tourism is often critiqued and lamented in academic texts. What this process often seems to entail is that so called “cultures” of local communities are showcased to tourists from around the world. Often, it is especially what is considered “exotic” and “indigenous” that is showcased to tourists.

Nine Poems by Tanella Boni

Translated by Todd Fredson

I dream the poem of a borderless sea / I dance a welcoming music in my skin / first ground for any home / while the hands of plenty the portly souls / weave their barbed wire

Belgrade, 1941 by Biljana Jovanović

Translated by John K. Cox

Ivan urged his mother impatiently on, watching her root around in the ruins on Uskočka Street. He screamed at her, flapping his arms, cursed, threatened her, looked around in nervousness and fright: It’s already getting dark! But Milica, not paying him any heed, sat down on a smashed ceiling joist, and, now with her cane and now with her bare hand, she picked through the indistinguishable mass of rags, furniture, burnt scraps…

Primavera, an Art Series

By Sokari Douglas Camp

In this art series, Nigerian artist Sokari Douglas Camp finds herself inspired by European painters William Blake, Botticelli, and Michelangelo. These pieces aim to signify beauty and hope.

“Eurafrica” is Dead: In Fact, It Never Existed

By Veit Bachmann

The term “Eurafrica” invokes a global panregion that has long and pervasively been a fantasy of imperialistic geopolitics, yet that has never existed. First, the spatial construction of panregions is in itself problematic as it describes a “large functional area linking core states to resource peripheries and cutting across latitudinal distributed environmental zones” and is thus inherently exploitative and imperial. Second, it is superficial, incomplete, and possibly essentializing as it suggests a homogeneity that has never existed.

Saving Agu’s Wife

By Chika Unigwe

But suffering is not without its lessons. Here, she has learned thrift. Not the thriftiness of her mother back home in Nigeria who bargains for palm oil until she gets a good price, and boasts.

Boys Quarter by Chukwuma Ndulue

Reviewed by Naomi Falk

Ndulue directs the mind away from imagining stereotypes of times and places and coaxes it towards a sustained patience with language, one that melts the text into the reader.

Four poems by Léopold Sedar Senghor

Translated by Baba Badji

Here is the Sun/ Which tightens the breasts of the virgins/ Who makes the old men smile on the green benches/ Who would awaken the dead under a maternal earth.

A Forgotten Colony: Equatorial Guinea and Spain

By Adriana Chira

In our geographic imaginaries, Spanish colonialism tends to be mapped onto South America. But the last Spanish colony to claim independence from Spain in 1968 was a territory in West Africa—Equatorial Guinea

Three Plastic Rooms by Petra Hůlová, translated from th…

Reviewed by Andrei Rogatchevski

Hůlová’s first-person narrative on behalf of a thirty-something female prostitute attempts to establish the image of prostitutes as women of integrity, who provide a service to society by furnishing their clients with “a bit of humanity.”

 

Decolonization: A Short History by Jan C. Jansen and Jü…

Reviewed by Michael Collins

The ambitious aim of Jansen and Osterhammel’s Decolonization is to provide a comparative evaluation of an immensely complex global historical process in a relatively concise volume. The authors revised and expanded their original 2013 German language version for the current text, whose purpose is to explain how the de-legitimation of European colonial rule over Africa and Asia during the course of the twentieth century involved a broad array of structural and normative factors.

Lalana by Michèle Rakotoson

Translated by Allison M. Charette

You cannot walk fast in Antananarivo. There’s a weight in the air, a heat that makes everything slow and viscous. There’s a constant small of noxious gas, an acid odor that gets into your lungs, infests your muscles. There’s the red dust, blackened by exhaust fumes, and the perpetual suffocation of the city, so precariously perched, so dry.

Between Hammer, Machete, and Kalashnikov: Contract Labo…

By Marcia C. Schenck

It is 2014. The faded flag the German Democratic Republic used from 1959 to 1990 blows in the wind on a makeshift flagpole in the heart of Maputo. It consists of the tricolor: black, red, and yellow, and features the symbols of the worker and peasant state: a compass and hammer encircled with rye.

Layering Over the Wounds of Algeria in Contemporary Pie…

By Amy L. Hubbell 

France’s former French citizens of Algeria, the Pieds-Noirs, include one of Europe’s largest diaspora communities in the twentieth century. This diverse group of people settled in Algeria during the colonial years, and after one-hundred and thirty years of French colonial rule, Algeria fought for and won its independence in 1962. The seven-year war was traumatic for both the Algerians and the French living in the colony, and nearly one million people crossed the Mediterranean during and after the war to make a new home in France.

Behind the Humanitarian Crisis in the Mediterranean: Fi…

By Anna Arnone and David O’Kane

Certain historical incidents can crystallize and condense the reality of an entire era. The mass drowning of at least 500 migrants, mostly Eritrean, near the island of Lampedusa on the third of October 2013, was one such incident. It was part of a wider set of political logics that characterize this era, logics that include those described by Barbara Pinelli in her ethnography of the conditions endured by asylum seekers in the reception centers of the Italian state.

International Collaboration and Rivalry in the Early Fi…

By Thaddeus Sunseri

Although rinderpest was long known in Eurasia, emanating from the central Asian steppes with trade, warfare, and herd migration, its arrival in sub-Saharan Africa in 1888, and subsequent spread throughout the continent over the next decade, is surprising.

Scrambling for Africa, Again: Germans in Kenya

By Nina Berman

Across the world, the effects of neoliberal capitalism and anthropocentric excesses act as stressors on people and their natural habitat. On the sub-Saharan African continent, neoliberal economic development, in conjunction with economic and political programs of authoritarian postcolonial rulers, have increased the economic and social precarity of the urban and rural poor.

A Brief History of Dutch in Africa

By Michael Meeuwis

Dutch has been present in South Africa since the establishment in 1652 of the first permanent Dutch settlement around what is now Cape Town. In the decades and centuries that followed, the Dutch spoken there, detached from its ancestor in Europe, underwent internal developments as well as influences from other languages.

Jujube by Ubah Cristina Ali Farah

Translated by Hope Campbell Gustafson

Mama built our house with flamboyant tree branches and braids of palms, mixing a paste of resin, dung and red sand to protect us from water and from the monsoons.

Flip The Script: European Hip Hop and the Politics of P…

Reviewed by Séverin Guillard

This music genre sheds light on postcolonial issues that, despite having been crucial in European politics, have often been put aside in most debates. As immigrants from former colonized countries settle in the heart of the ex-colonial capitals, hip hop helps them to “flip the script” on the dominant discourse on Europe, forcing the nation to see them as an inherent part of its identity.

Germans on the Kenyan Coast: Land, Charity, and Romance

Reviewed by Mark Lawrence

Nina Berman’s Germans on the Kenyan Coast: Land, Charity, and Romance is a thoughtful effort to draw connections between the ever-vexed land question in the postcolonial world, the frequently oversimplified complexity of the history behind this, and the often-marginalized ways in which the personal has played as important a role as the political in externally-driven material development in Africa.

The Borders of “Europe” edited by Nicholas De Genova

Reviewed by Özden Ocak

The last few years have left their mark on the history of humankind with the deadliest shipwrecks known to the Mediterranean, unnumbered capsized “migrant boats” trying to reach the European shores, and dead bodies washed ashore after failed attempts to cross European maritime borders—such as Aylan Kurdi, a Syrian boy trying to reach the Greek Island of Kos from Turkey.

Language, Affect, and Everyday Experience in Post-colon…

Interviewed by Hélène B. Ducros

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

Thinking Freedom in Africa: Toward a Theory of Emancipa…

Reviewed by Yousuf Al-Bulushi

When Nelson Mandela became South Africa’s first democratically elected president in 1994, much of the Western world rejoiced at the prospect of a “reasonable” transition from apartheid to liberal democracy on the African continent. Mandela was seen by many as the best equipped to realize the goals of freedom, justice, and equality in the African country that had remained under white settler domination for longer than any other on the continent.

A Prose-Poem Series by Vincent Broqua

Translated by Cole Swensen

They have the extreme, soft, palpable, tangible sensation of glimmering each with his neck plunged in a basin of water, made artificial, they look at each other, clearly apt to scurry off, they know nothing of each other, to scrutinize, they possess the fragile, fluttering, heightened, exclamatory sensation of being able to leave at any moment, whenever they want

Race, Sex, and Colonialism

By Carina Ray

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

March 2018

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Hélène Ducros (Geography), Louie Dean Valencia-García (History), Mihai Sebe (Political Science), and Malcolm Campbell-Verduyn (Political Science).

 

Beyond Eurafrica: Encounters in a Globalized World

By Hélène B. Ducros

With this special feature, EuropeNow confirms the web of connectivity that exists between nations of Europe and nations of Africa, as not only rooted in geopolitics and global economic flows, but also increasingly in global cultural flows, which support the enduring linkages and reciprocal influences between the two continents and shape the ways in which both Africans and Europeans apprehend the local and the global.

Gabon and the Enduring Legacies of France’s Françafriqu…

By Daniel Mengara

History owes the term “Françafrique” to François-Xavier Verschave, the late French human-rights activist who enshrined the notion in a number of groundbreaking books that provide an extensive background to France’s neocolonialist policies towards Africa.

Kayla Maiuri; It Dwells Within; EuropeNow; EuropeNow Journal

It Dwells Within

Curated by Kayla Maiuri

Through the works of three African-European artists, “It Dwells Within” depicts the contemporary and historical relationship between Europe and Africa.

Generation Identity: A Millennial Fascism for the Future?

By Louie Dean Valencia-García

While many elements of the extreme far-right were suppressed after the Second World War, today, neo-fascists, white nationalists, far-right traditionalists, and new groups have emerged, such as Génération Identitaire (Generation Identity)—a trans-European, networked group of primarily young people who advocate for a “Europe of Nations.”

Writing into A Cultural Divide: An Interview with Sana …

Interviewed by Masha Udensiva-Brenner 

Krasikov immigrated to the United States in 1987 from the Soviet Republic of Georgia. Her critically-acclaimed debut short story collection, One More Year, was published in 2008. She was named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists of 2017. I spent an afternoon with Krasikov in the Hudson Valley discussing her novel in the context of the recent global paradigm shift, and Russian-American political attitudes.

How Fascist is Arktos? A Traditionalist Confronting Fas…

By Louie Dean Valencia-García

From its beginning, ITP/Arktos heavily promoted the work of far-right philosopher Julius Evola, whose ideas were popular amongst fascist thinkers and in the press under Mussolini. Politically, Evola located himself to the right of fascism. Like many of his fascist contemporaries, Evola wanted to eschew modernity to restore an imagined, glorious past, delving into a sort of occultism that obscured the rhetoric of his fascistic ideologies.

History Repeating Itself: The Rebirth of Far-Right Ideo…

By Louie Dean Valencia-García

Established by many of the original ITP collaborators, most of whom no longer are with the company, Arktos dominates the field of far-right publishing, and has published and translated authors with the purpose of radically transforming the conservative and neoliberal right—calling forth a return of the “real right,” as Arktos C.E.O., Daniel Friberg, articulates in his less-than-eloquent manifesto work published in 2015.

ABCs of Arktos: People, Ideas, and Movements

By Louie Dean Valencia-García

Over the last decade, ITP/Arktos has created a trans-European and global Nationalist-Traditionalist network, translating and editing texts that have appealed to supporters of both nationalist and neo-traditionalist ideologies.

Globalization Under Fire

By Peter Debaere

Under the banner of “Make America Great Again,” Trump took every opportunity to call for more protectionism and to blame “bad trade deals” for the predicament of the United States.

Populism Is a Problem. Elitist Technocrats Aren’t the S…

By Sheri Berman

Democracy today seems to be in constant crisis. Democratic backsliding has occurred in countries from Venezuela to Poland, and autocratic leaders, including Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, proudly proclaim that the era of liberal democracy is over.

Dark: Energy Politics in an Age of Latency

By Samantha Fox

Dark, with its drama centered on the consequences of nuclear energy production—social and economic consequences, in addition to those more speculative and supernatural—illustrates the degree to which changing energy politics serve as the backdrop to everyday life in Germany. One hopes that the show can export Germany’s attention to energy politics to an international audience.

The Rise of Nativism in Europe

By Jan Willem Duyvendak and Josip Kesic 

Wilders has not only dominated the public sphere in the Netherlands for more than fifteen years, but has also become a prominent voice in transnational anti-Islam circles.

The European Union, Spain, and the Catalan Question: An…

By Juan Andrés García Martín

Since the economic crisis began, Catalan nationalism has abandoned its traditional cooperation with the central government. This radicalization happened under the argument of lack of economic assistance, the impossibility of recognizing of its particularities, and political repression, leading towards a unilateral policy. Moreover, Catalan nationalism identified not only a foreign enemy — Spain — but domestic enemies — those who support unity with Spain.

Poland, a “Normal” European Country

By Agnieszka Pasieka

Among numerous questions that have been posed after recent electoral successes of conservative, right-wing, populist parties at least one seems to be repeated ad nauseam: “Who voted for them?” Whether this question is asked on the occasion of a dinner among friends, an academic conference, or a business meeting, it tends to provoke a somewhat comforting reaction: those who committed “such terrible electoral mistakes” were misled, driven by emotions (usually “anger” and “fear”), and deluded by hopes of economic gains.

Between Nativism and Indigeneity in the Kabyle Diaspora…

By Jonathan Harris

Nativism and nationalist populism, despite Macron’s 2017 victory over the Front National, are a significant part of contemporary French politics. Popular concerns about the weakening power of the nation-state to control the economic and demographic effects of globalization contribute to xenophobic, and particularly Islamophobic, attitudes in broader contemporary French state and society, predominantly directed at France’s large Maghrebi postcolonial diaspora.

Reflections on the Czech Election

By Jan Čulík

Zeman’s victory is a sign of the emergence of politics of parasitism as a mainstream political strategy within Central Europe in general, and the Czech Republic in particular. Both Miloš Zeman and most Czech politicians have realized that in order to gain substantial political support amongst voters, they no longer need to develop strategies for the solution of many of the existing, often intractable, social problems. The only thing they need to do in order to gain influence and money is to peddle fear.

The Essence of our Era: Yukio Mishima, Steve Bannon, an…

By Christopher Impiglia 

What the alt-right still lacks is a leader that can not only champion many of its ideals and bring them to the forefront of the political debate, but outright embraces it in return; despite flattering calls of “Heil Trump,” at Charlottesville, the president has increasingly distanced himself from the alt-right, most recently by ousting their mouthpiece—Bannon—from the White House, although his policies and consistent, racist comments continue to reveal clear alt-right sympathies.

The Power of Narrative: An Interview with Mikkel Roseng…

Interviewed by Morten Høi Jensen

In democratic nations there is usually a multitude of narratives about people in power, but in these one-man dictatorships there’s just one, and its usually very warped and far-fetched. So I was very interested in the idea of Ceaușescu’s narrative in Romania, and of how one’s own narrative about one’s life clashes with that larger, overpowering official narrative. And then, of course, there’s the fact that, from a storytelling perspective, in a world in which these very rigid rules are imposed on you there’s much more at stake.

Fox by Dubravka Ugrešić

Translated by Ellen Elias-Bursać and David Williams

Marlene was Polish (in age she could have been my daughter) and she occasionally cleaned my apartment for ten Euros an hour. Who knows how she’d found her way to Amsterdam and from where, but in the flood of words she showered on me in her poor, strongly Polish accented English, I remembered mention of a collective somewhere in Belgium with its leader whom she referred to, reverently, as “Baba.”

The Body and the Screen: Female Subjectivities in Conte…

Reviewed by Michelle Royer

Since the 1980s, Western countries have seen an increasing number of films by female directors who challenge the mainstream representation of women, and attempt to present women’s lives and identities in a new light. Kate Ince’s volume offer new readings of several key French and British female filmmakers of the last twenty-five years, and shows that feminist philosophers can provide the tools for rethinking female subjectivities in cinema.

Irish Drug Policy: At the Crossroads of Inclusion and A…

By Kieran Kelley

The specters of anti-social criminality and death by overdose, amplified by crisis-inflected media coverage, loom large in public discourse. In the face of the uncertainties and crises that proliferate around drugs, the language of social inclusion and human rights raises new perplexities.

Histories of Nationalism in Ireland and Germany: A Comp…

Reviewed by Fearghal McGarry

The comparative approach has long been recognized as an effective means of analyzing nationalism, even if studies of nationalist movements remain mostly confined within nation-state frameworks. While the appeal of nationalist rhetoric is rooted in its claim to represent the unique values, aspirations, and destiny of a specific national community, comparative studies emphasize the political and cultural commonalities shared by various brands of nationalism.

Our City, Our Streets!

By Esther Dischereit

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

Par Amouricana

By Joshua Kleinberg

It’s not the threat of violence. It’s the questions I’m expected to answer before the violence that bother me. All stemming from premises I don’t agree with, but what are you going to get into a debate with a man who just caught you making out with his “domestic partner?”

Four Poems by Antonio Machado

Translated by Daniel Evans Pritchard 

It was a time of infamy and lies. / The nation itself was dressed up / like a squalid clown to draw / attention away from our wound.

The Rise of the European Far-Right in the Internet Age

By Louie Dean Valencia-García

Over the course of this series, readers will be introduced to a hybrid print/digital publisher that has brought esoteric, fascist ideologies back from the grave. Each installment will delve into another aspect of the media company, outlining Arktos’ history, while describing more broadly the ways its collaborators are using both the internet and analogue media to promote fascistic ideologies.

Global Focus: An Interview with Janet Horne

Interviewed by Maria Lechtarova

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

The Past in the Present: Transatlantic Teaching and Res…

By Manuela Achilles and Hannah Winnick

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

Collective Response: Moving Forward Initiative of the U…

By Manuela Achilles and Matthew Burtner

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

Nationalizing France’s Army: Foreign, Black and Jewish …

Reviewed by Graeme Callister

The French Revolution has long been acknowledged as a watershed in the history of France. Over the past two-and-a-quarter centuries it has spawned a plethora of studies from scholars, statesmen, political scientists, and polemical ideologues, while the wars that engulfed Europe from 1792-1815 are amongst the most written about in history.

The Crisis of Multiculturalism in Europe: A History by …

Reviewed by Michelle Lynn Kahn

As rightwing nativist parties gain traction across the Continent, Europeans’ fraught relationship to ethnically and religiously diverse minority populations, and particularly Muslim migrants, is at the forefront of national and international debates. These debates cannot, however, be understood solely in the vacuum of the ongoing “refugee crisis,” nor in light of the rising Islamophobia since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy by Dani…

Reviewed by Henri-Pierre Mottironi

While many fear a possible retreat of democracy following these reactionary surges, Daniel Ziblatt’s Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy demonstrates that strong and well-organized conservative parties paradoxically played a crucial role in the democratization and constitutional stability of European countries from the nineteenth century to the Second World War.

February 2018

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Malcolm Campbell-Verduyn (Political Science), Samantha Lomb (History), Louie Dean Valencia-García (History), and Hélène Ducros (Geography).

First Response: A Reading List

By Kyrill Kunakhovich, Manuela Achilles, and Janet Horne

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

The Making of Grand Paris: Metropolitan Urbanism in the…

Reviewed by Caroline Ford

Enright argues that it was in the context of the 2005 riots, which first erupted in Clichy-sur-Bois, that Nicolas Sarkozy, who was elected right-wing president of France in 2007, proposed a regional development plan that would become Grand Paris.

Nationalism, Nativism, and the Revolt Against Globaliza…

By Manuela AchillesKyrill Kunakhovich, and Nicole Shea

This special issue examines the resurgence of far-right groups, considering how recent events in Charlottesville can illuminate radical movements in Europe. It focuses on three key elements: nationalism, nativism, and the revolt against globalization. Nationalism was the word most associated with the Charlottesville rally, whose participants often called themselves “white nationalists.” By this, they meant that a racialized national identity should be the condition for political belonging.

Jefferson’s Two Bodies: Interpretations of a Statue at …

By Isaac Ariail Reed 

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

Home and (Be)Longing

Curated by Nicole Shea

The perception of a safe home is closely linked with the populist view that women’s “intended role” is at home, as dutiful wife and mother.

The Legacy of the Georgian Revolution

By Eric Lee

While the Russian Bolsheviks were clamping down on trade unions, which were dismissed by Trotsky as being under the control of “chatterboxes,” in Menshevik-led Georgia they thrived – retaining their independence from the state and winning a constitutional right to strike. They also played a key role in a remarkable institution known as the Wages Board, which consisted of ten representatives each from the employers and trade unions.

A Revelatory Biography: The Genial Genius

By Anne Price-Owen

For over three decades, devotees of the painter-poet David Jones have waited eagerly for the definitive biography and attendant revelations concerning this extraordinary artist and poet, and they have not been disappointed. Thomas Dilworth’s book is a compelling read, and his claim that Jones was the greatest native British Modernist working in twentieth century Britain is convincingly articulated.

Sustainability Policy Design and Evaluations

By Molly Lipscomb

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

Minorities and Securities: Past Experiences, Current Ch…

Moderated by Peter Haslinger

Since the beginning of the so-called refugee crisis in 2015/16, the discursive shift away from multiculturalism and the agendas of ethnic, cultural, religious, and other minorities to a perspective of assessing risks and challenges that evolve from societal diversity has intensified.

Depictions of Russian Culture in Cold War British Ficti…

By Olga Chuprakova

Despite the prevailing trend to demonize Russia, we can find sincere sympathy for and understanding of Russia and the Russian people in the fiction of the bestselling British novelist Iris Murdoch (1919-1999). Russia, Russian culture, and Russian identity are prevalent themes in twenty of her twenty-six novels.

A Difficult Death: The Life and Work of Jens Peter Jaco…

Reviewed by Marianne Stecher

It is Jensen’s crisp and concise writing and wit, which distinguish his marvelous contextualization of the intellectual, cultural, and social worlds in which Jens Peter Jacobsen moved and breathed. Jensen draws vivid portraits of the nineteenth-century literary contemporaries of Jacobsen – so that they spring from the pages.

O, Henry! by Georgi Gospodinov

Translated by Angela Rodel

I can see her clearly now, wandering through the New York dusk on Christmas Eve. She grabs a cab, and in less than an hour she is standing in front of an entryway in Brooklyn.

Das Charisma der Weltrevolution. Revolutionärer Interna…

Reviewed by Theodore Weeks

This year, the centenary of what used to be called the “Great October Socialist Revolution,” has seen the publication of numerous new works on the epoch-making event, its causes, and its consequences. Among these is Gleb Albert’s impressive study of the role of “world revolution” in the Soviet state’s first decade.

American Girls in Red Russia: Chasing the Dream by Juli…

Reviewed by Samantha Lomb

Julia Mickenberg’s American Girls in Red Russia, touches on such diverse topics as American women’s participation in pre-1917 revolutionary movements, famine relief in during the Civil War period, the creation of an American colony in Siberia, the establishment of an American-run English language newspaper in Moscow, modern dance, African-American theater and film performances, and creating pro-Russian World War II propaganda.

Two Poems by Elitza Kotzeva

By Elitza Kotzeva

Memories of moments from my childhood days / carefully sealed in the sarcophagus of / forlorn history / forgotten history / forbidden history

TV Socialism by Anikó Imre

Reviewed by Stefan Zimmermann

This volume offers a mesmerizing gaze into the television industry behind the iron curtain, providing television scholars, who have ignored Soviet and Soviet bloc television, an opportunity to learn about the industry and culture.

“Gollum and I” by Elena Alexieva

By Elena Alexieva

I still can’t get used to living on ground level. The fact that from my kitchen window I see the people walking between the apartment blocks almost in their actual size keeps astonishing me. Living on the ground floor means we have no terrace. But we do have bars on the windows which we didn’t put there.

Russian History through the Senses: From 1700 to the Pr…

Reviewed by Steven G. Marks

What do we gain from looking at Russian history through the senses? On one level, it places front and center certain realities that are taken for granted or ignored in the scholarly literature. For instance, the cold climate that shocked the systems of early modern visitors from the West, as chronicled in Matthew P. Romaniello’s entry. Paying attention to the senses can also open our eyes to a new dimension of warfare, which is vividly illustrated in articles by Laurie S. Stoff on nurses in World War One and Steven G. Jug on soldiers in World War Two.

Roller Skates by Dimitar “Shosho” Kotzev

Translated by Ekaterina Petrova

Zhoro “the Bird” was a Bulgarian immigrant in Melbourne. He was born in a village near the town of Plovdiv, where, going off in pursuit of his entire family’s happiness, he had left behind a wife and a daughter.

The Green Hand and Other Stories by Nicole Claveloux

Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith

She lives alone in a smoke-filled apartment. Now and again a glass of wine may be seen–hers, or that of a casual visitor. A bird lives there too, looking out of the window for hours, indifferent, distant. One day she decides to bring some plant life into her home to freshen things up…

Three Plastic Rooms by Petra Hůlová

Translated by Alex Zucker

Don’t stink and watch your weight. Those are the most important resolutions I know of. Every morning I plop myself down in front of the mirror and stare into my face, just in case it might finally tell me something I don’t know. It stares right back, as if expecting the same from me.

Launching the Roma People’s Project at Columbia Univers…

By Cristiana Grigore

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

Disrupted Landscapes: State, Peasants, and the Politics…

Reviewed by Georgeta Stoian Connor

Disrupted Landscapes is a valuable contribution to the study of environmental politics of Romania generally, and to an understanding of the transformations of land relations since the fall of the Golden Age era specifically. As the title suggests, we learn significant information about the workings of power in rural areas and the social and political mechanisms behind them. The volume brings together in one resource Dorondel’s impressive quantity of work on the topic of the transformation of the agrarian landscape of postsocialist Romania during the transition from collectivization to privatization.

December 2017

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Samantha Lomb (History), Louie Dean Valencia-García (History), Daniela Irrera (International Relations), and Hélène Ducros (Geography).

Forging Cultural Centers: An Interview with Lora Tcheko…

Interviewed by Lillian Klein

At that time—right after the fall of the Berlin Wall—many Bulgarians started traveling freely, and a lot of us young musicians chose to study abroad. But many of us still felt deeply connected to Bulgaria, so we started a Bulgarian concert series in New York.

Friendship, Family, Revolution: Nikolai Charushin and a…

Reviewed by Aleksandr Iakovlevich Gudov

Nikolai Charushin does not rank among the pantheon of famous historical figures, but this has its positive side. Charushin’s story demonstrates that the revolutionary movement in the last decades of the nineteenth century recruited new members not only from the educated strata of St. Petersburg or Moscow, but from the Russian periphery as well. This allows the reader to be able to learn a lot about the life of a provincial Russian town, of prison and exile, and about the relationship between the authorities and the revolutionaries in the periphery.

A Digital Space to Imagine What is Possible: An Intervi…

Interviewed by Cristiana Grigore

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

The Eurasian Wheat Belt and Food Security: Global and R…

Reviewed by Judith Pallot

The problem of global food security was brought into sharp relief in 2008-2011 in food riots in the global south and the Arab Spring. These crises witnessed a sharpening of debate about how to feed the world. Advocates of the traditional food security approach maintain that the answer lies in “aid and trade” based on the world-price-governed staple food circuits that emerged in the twentieth century, and large-scale, high external-input corporate farms.

Diversity, Security, Mobility: Challenges for Eastern E…

By Nicole Shea and Peter Haslinger

In this special anniversary edition of EuropeNow, curators Peter Haslinger and Nicole Shea highlight the importance in research and culture of smaller central and eastern European regions. The research presented here assesses the concepts, paradigms, and methods for the re-evaluation of multi-ethnicity, diversity, and mobility in a globalized and “post-factual” era, and seeks to identify factors and agencies that help to explain the current trends towards the obsession with security agendas.

The Borders Project: Sarajevo Writers’ Workshop + Atlan…

By Stacy Mattingly

In the fall of 2015, as people fleeing Syria and elsewhere for Europe were being stopped en masse at borders, two writers’ collectives to which I belong – one based primarily in Sarajevo, one in Atlanta – decided to engage in a collaborative artistic response. We called it The Borders Project.

You’ll Be Me by Neđla Ćemanović

By Neđla Ćemanović

My cousin promised me a job in Austria. At the moment he told me he had managed to sort something out, I was glaring at a wall plastered with posters of nature, some of them faded and some coffeestained. The entire apartment was begrimed with the previous tenants’ addictions—from caffeine to domestic violence.

Russia’s ‘Myth’ of Equality in a Securitized Context…

By Federica Prina

Russia is an exceptionally vast and heterogeneous country with high levels of ethnic, linguistic, and religious diversity, and a complex federal structure. The Russian empire already saw an intermingling of peoples, encompassing Slavic, Scandinavian, and Asiatic groups, with various forms of hybridization, multilingualism, and cultural cross-fertilization.

Securitizing the Unknown Borderlands: Czechoslovak Subc…

By Sebastian Paul

The Subcarpathian Rus is still a region for specialists. For hundreds of years, together with Slovakia, the territory of later Subcarpathian Rus embodied the northeastern part of the Kingdom of Hungary. Until 1918, it was the neighboring region to Habsburg Galicia, and in the Interwar Period, it formed Czechoslovakia’s eastern borderland to the reestablished Polish state.

Yankee Messiah by Suzanne Mozes

By Suzanne Mozes

Ignorance and apathy have no boundaries,” David said. I raised the half-empty bottle of Evan Williams. He nodded at it but refused my boyfriend’s invitation to stay for dinner, saying he would “leave with this one last thing so y’all can eat.”

In Motion

Curated by Nicole Shea

This series features three Bulgarian-born artists who experienced the Iron Curtain and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Motion and movement connect the works.

On Populism, Liberalism, and the Future of the Left: An…

Interviewed by Frédéric Baitinger

The question of populism is essential, even though the term is a bit confusing. To be a populist does not mean to be close to the people. To be a populist, according to me, is to speak in the name of people, to speak for them, which is to say, on their behalf.

“Trotskyists on Trial:” Defining Spanish Republican Ant…

By Jonathan Sherry

All too often, the Spanish Civil War is discussed by way of subsequent events. The trend is just as marked in public discourse as it is in academic study. Whether intellectuals conceptualize the terms of World War II as the “first chapter” in the battle between the Axis and Allied powers, or in the Cold War lexicon as a struggle against Communist or Soviet domination, the ideological and historical complexity of the conflict is often swept under the carpet.

Why Europe Needs Political Economy

By Gregory W. Fuller

Fuller considers how European policymakers have relied too much on “mainstream” economic analysis in the design and re-design of eurozone governance structures.

The City is in Ruins

By Salvatore Settis

“The city is in ruins.” In European cultural memory, these simple words have, sometimes, a literal sense (either narrative or descriptive)—when we talk about wars, insurrections, and natural disasters, for instance. More often, they have a strong metaphorical relevance according two complementary directions.

Voices in the Dark by Ulli Lust

Based on the novel by Marcel Beyer

Surely Mama must realize that the little ones are scared and that we older ones know she’s lying. We can’t tell her so because the little ones would be even more scared.

The Accidental Keynesian: How Refugee Spending in Swede…

By Peo Hansen

“Despite Sweden’s sizeable refugee reception, its economy is doing exceptionally well.” This line has been repeated on countless occasions over the past year or so. By the government, experts, and pundits — from right to left. As the president of the Swedish Trade Union Confederation put it a little while ago: “Despite an unstable world and a refugee emergency, Sweden’s economy is performing very well.” Despite?

Charlemagne by Johannes Fried

Reviewed by Carey Fleiner

The author emphasizes how the creation of the emperor’s distinct image of warrior king and saintly ruler was consciously fashioned in the historical record from the start.

The European Union’s Fight Against Terrorism: Discourse…

Reviewed by Alessandra Russo

2016 was marked by EU’s inter-institutional negotiations on a new Directive on combatting terrorism, aiming to reinforce the EU’s legal framework in preventing terrorist attacks. The Directive also complements the current legislation on the rights for the victims of terrorism and envisages enhanced rules for information exchange between the member states related to terrorist offences gathered in criminal proceedings

Of Card Games and Kisses by Daniela Valenta

By Daniela Valenta

It’s not that my father was a gambling man; after all, he never entered a casino in his life. He just had a way with cards and thought it would be a pity not to make the most of it, I guess. In the Yugoslavia of the 1970s, groups would gather in homes over a game of cards, playing as day turned slowly into night and night gave way to the next day, until one person finally left with a nice profit.

Teaching Europe: An Interview with Cathie Jo Martin and…

Interviewed by Briitta van Staalduinen

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

Registration by Naida Avdović

Translated by Mirza Purić

He was walking in his neighbourhood, looking around. The streets were incredibly empty. He didn’t think it was possible not to see anyone that day. Unusually, not even his neighbour Mara had left her flat to do her morning shopping. She never missed her morning walk. Menso knew this because he preferred spying on his neighbours to watching breakfast television.

From Convergence to Crisis: Labor Markets and the Insta…

Reviewed by Ari Ray

As Alison Johnston points out in her debut book, rising labor unit costs were indeed a defining characteristic of these member states in the early years of the Euro; most importantly in sectors such as public services or construction that are sheltered from trade.

Berlin Rules: Europe and the German Way by Paul Lever

Reviewed by Kurt Huebner

Since the global financial crisis, Germany experienced a massive turnaround of its fate and today is widely seen as the dominant power in Europe–in Lever’s words: Berlin rules. Over the last couple of years, the idea that Germany is again dominating Europe has become a mainstream view, not only in media, but also in scholarly literature.

November 2017

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Katrine Øgaard Jensen (Literature), Samantha Lomb (History), Louie Dean Valencia-García (History), Daniela Irrera (International Relations), and Hélène Ducros (Geography).

Political Economy on TARGET

By Waltraud Schelkle

Albeit an arcane institution, TARGET, the cross-border payments system of the euro area, is a good example for how economics and political economy can be combined to advance our understanding of European integration.

The Crises of European Integration

By Erik Jones, Regine Paul, and Nicole Shea

The inescapable politics of knowledge production about and for a Europe in crisis demands scholarly transparency. In this issue, we consider the value and limits of their disciplinary perspectives in explaining the recent crises of European Integration. We nail our colors to the mast by arguing that a political economy approach is valuable – and ought to be cherished – for seeing more than just economics vs. politics at play in explaining crisis and navigating Europe’s future.

Managed Futures

Curated by Nicole Shea

Depicting illusion, greed, and over-consumption, both artists wrestle with the impact that financial delusions have on the human psyche.

The Kites by Romain Gary

Translated by Miranda Richmond Mouillot

I’m not going to hide at all, my friend. The ones who hide are always the ones they find. I’ve had smallpox twice; the Nazis just make it a third time.

Dignified Kiss of Paris Streets by Bae Suah

Translated by Deborah Smith

It began in Mao’s room. Hazy, formless, faint things, things that were neither light nor shade, yet at the same time the illegitimate children of both, a moment of glittering black and dark…

What Prospects for Change to Achieve a Sustainable EU M…

By Elif Çetin

Europe is facing the largest humanitarian disaster since the end of World War II. Even though the European governments, in an attempt to address public feelings of insecurity about immigration, seek to project themselves as able to manage international migration effectively, the objectives and outcomes of their immigration and border control policies do not always overlap.

At the Mercy of Global Interests: Reflections on Nativi…

By Antonio Sorge

Neo-nationalist parties throughout Europe are deriving considerable mileage from the current refugee “crisis,” seeing within it an opportunity to shore up support from a disaffected electorate reeling from a slow economic recovery and high unemployment.

Belladonna by Daša Drndic

Translated by Celia Hawkesworth

On Saturday, November 19, 2002, sixty people incarcerated in a camp for illegal immigrants sew their lips together. Sixty people with their lips sewn reel around the camp, gazing at the sky. Small muddy stray dogs scamper after them, yapping shrilly. The authorities keep assiduously postponing consideration of their applications for leave to remain.

New York to Manchuria

By Christopher Impiglia

For my great-grandparents, as it was for most immigrants of their generation, the past was a hindrance. It was all about the future. A new life with new appliances and new cars and new names. Nothing old, as the old carried with it the weight of oppressive regimes, poverty, and social immobility.

Broken

By Mark Römisch

Among the many challenges that Europe faces in the wake of the recent refugee crisis is the integration of millions of immigrants and the rise of xenophobia and nationalism at the same time. The photographic work Broken highlights an aspect of the crisis that is not necessarily obvious to those who are in support of the refugees or for those who want to refuse them entry to their country.

Narratives of Belonging: Polish Immigrants in the UK Af…

By Agnieszka Kulesa

Despite fears related to the increase in hate crime numbers following the EU referendum, and the uncertainty around their future residency status, immigrants from Poland will not abandon their established lives in the UK as willingly as the Brexit supporters would wish to see.

What is a Refugee? by William Maley

Reviewed by Alex Sager

The conditions in detention are appalling, commonly leading to suicide and self-harm. Many detainees have lived in limbo for years while they wait to see if they will be resettled.

Exiles: Interviews by Kader Attia

Interviewed by Kader Attia

Many Syrian refugees are suffering from depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, as well as delirium. These people were already ill in Syria before they arrived here. The delirium is mostly political; they feel persecuted by ISIS, the Syrian army. It has to do with politics rather than religion. We see more patients suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder than patients who are truly depressed.

Paper Cuts by Matea Šimić

Translated by Mirza Purić

The smell of apple cider vinegar pervades the room, starting from the clean, warm window panes, making its way into the perfectly tightened coverlet on the bed, the freshly brushed carpet, and one suitcase.

Migration, Memory, and Diversity: Germany from 1945 to …

Reviewed by Lauren Stokes

Reading the headlines in the summer of 2015, one might think that migration was a wholly new challenge for Europeans and specifically for Germans. Many of the contributors to this volume are explicit about their desire to intervene in this political culture of historical amnesia and in doing so contribute to what editor Cornelia Wilhelm identifies as “a new, more inclusive understanding of Germanness and of Germany’s role as a destination for immigrants.

Familiar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands by Stuart…

Reviewed by Graeme Turner

The primary task undertaken in Familiar Stranger is one of intensely thoughtful theoretical introspection, an introspection that is directed at understanding the processes of cultural and intellectual self-fashioning that had gone into the formation of one of the most influential intellectuals of his generation.

 

Invisible Bumps by Rachael Maddux

By Rachael Maddux

At the Pawleys Island General Store, I bought a postcard of a ghost. He stood atop a dune in a wide-brimmed hat and overcoat, one arm raised towards the ocean, his body half-disappeared into the overcast sky. Some stories held that the Gray Man was the ghost of a colonial man who had been thrown from his horse and drowned in the marsh.

The Young Victims of the Nazi Regime: Migration, the Ho…

Reviewed by Paula Fass

As the history of children has taken its place among the important fields of inquiry over the past two decades, and as children’s lives provide valuable insights into human experience, it is inevitable that the children brutalized by Nazi Germany should become historical subjects.

EurAfrican Borders and Migration Management: Political …

Reviewed by Stephanie Maher

Borders are political and economic, material and subjective, hard and soft. By their very nature, borders are gendered, classed, and raced in important ways. Yet, they are also emergent and relational, rather than being fixed and hegemonic.

October 2017

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Hélène Ducros (Geography), Malcolm Campbell-Verduyn (Political Science), and Lillian Klein (Literature).

In Between and Far Above

Curated by Nicole Shea

These artists tackle stereotypes and prejudices, focusing on the cultural capital of immigration and the ambition for a better life.

Governing the Migration Crisis

By Jennifer Elrick, Oliver Schmidtke, and Nicole Shea

We have seen two opposing trends across Europe: On the one hand, civil society has demonstrated a great degree of compassion with the plight of refugees, organizing local welcome committees and, in the Canadian case, even putting pressure on the government to accept more refugees from Syria as a fundamental humanitarian commitment of the country. On the other hand, the populist Right has exploited the influx of so many refugees for their political mobilization.

Go, Went, Gone by Jenny Erpenbeck

Translated by Susan Bernofsky

One Thursday in late August, ten men gather in front of Berlin’s Town Hall. According to news reports, they’ve decided to stop eating. Three days later they decide to stop drinking too. Their skin is black. They speak English, French, Italian, as well as other languages that no one here understands. What do these men want? They are asking for work. They want to support themselves by working.

Notions of Solidarity in Europe’s Migration Crisis: The…

By Stefan Wallaschek

At the beginning of October 2013, a boat shipwrecked at the coast of Lampedusa and caused the death of approximately 350 asylum seekers. During his visit to Lampedusa shortly after it, the President of the European Commission José Manuel Barroso, demanded solidarity from the EU member states.

The Endless Summer by Madame Nielsen

Translated by Gaye Kynoch

The days and weeks in Lisbon, the clear, higher, harder light out here by the coast, the slightly forsaken haziness of the city, a forgotten region of outermost Europe, the sound of the street-cleaning trucks advancing slowly through the streets behind Praça do Rossio in the last hour before daybreak, like big beetles snorting hoarsely in the dust of the strangely quiet city…

Paradise Inn

By Marinos Tsagkarakis

This photo series aims to highlight the consequences of a massive and uncontrolled tourist development.

A Fact of Survival

By Mina Hamedi

I saw him walking, black hair in knots and a bottle with the cap open held by his side. Leaning over the top, he brought his bottle, took a sip and stared at us.

Lviv in Wartime

By John Lindner

I see only the two small feet of a child, who had just been previously feigning sleep, walk across the stage below a hovering curtain. They are met at the wings by a pair of adult shoes when the lights turn on for intermission.

A Transnational Place-based Label for the “Glocal Villa…

By Hélène B. Ducros

By the early 1980s, some rural mayors in France came to the realization that their villages were dying. In spite of a strong attachment to the rural in the French collective imaginary, many factors had contributed to rural decline and exodus since the early twentieth century.

Europe and Island Tourism

By Godfrey Baldacchino

In the wake of the Greek “financial crisis,” some observers were surprised to note that the Greek islands, with their less-developed economic fabric, weathered the storm much better than their urban counterparts.

Cinéma Militant: Political Filmmaking & May 1968 by Pau…

Reviewed by Joseph Palis

Paul Grant’s fine contribution to film studies sheds light on the subversive filmmaking practices of French collectives during and in the aftermath of May 1968 events. It exemplifies a “deep mapping” of the specific historical moment that greatly influenced and provided filmic vocabularies to filmmakers in succeeding generations.

Shanty Town Deluxe

By Roger Eberhard

It is quite common for wealthy tourists to visit impoverished countries without ever exposing themselves to the extreme penury its citizens suffer.

Centre Pompidou: Renzo Piano, Richard Rogers, and the M…

Reviewed by Leslie Sklair

This handsome book is a notable first contribution to the new Yale University series “Great Architects/Great Buildings.” In his illuminating preface, Dal Co begins with Virginia Woolf’s essay, “How One Should Read a Book,” published in the Yale Review in October 1926, where Woolf observes that a book is always “an attempt to make something as formed and controlled as a building.”

Four Poems

By Chris Blackman

Hope is but a greeting card, it occurs to me,
while in a cab barreling across the Triborough Bridge
and it might be important enough to get this maxim
tattooed on my neck in case I forget this simple truth
and lest ideas otherwise become more obtrusive,
more incessant, but these are just the ugly thoughts
to which I am chemically prone, when I’m feeling morbid—

Prague-Berlin Train by Stacy Mattingly

By Stacy Mattingly

We’d already shown our passports at the border—it was still Czechoslovakia-Germany then. We’d kept the lights on in our compartment, waiting for the guard. Drab uniform. Angular face. Documents, he’d said. The Cold War was basically dead. Still, I could imagine.

Five Poems

By Michael Juliani

As the fishermen strangle cod
out on the wet docks our refrigerator arrives
and today is a warm sleeved gust
passing through the afternoon
a somnolent incident of pleasure

Ten Years After Romania’s Entry into the EU

By Aura Socol

When Romania joined the EU it implicitly assumed responsibility for adopting the euro. After ten years, contrary to what was expected, East European states including Romania meet the nominal criteria for being accepted in the Eurozone while states from the Eurozone itself do not.

September 2017

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Hélène Ducros (Geography) and Julian Garritzmann (Political Science).

Tonic to the Nation: Making English Music in the Festiv…

Reviewed by Nicholas Clark

From the deprivation that occurred in the aftermath of the Second World War, which ranged from ill-health, rationing, food and housing shortage, to the crushing impact on artistic life, there emerged in Britain an intention to rebuild and improve all aspects of social and cultural existence. It was from this context, of commemorating resilience and celebrating ingenuity, that the 1951 Festival of Britain was planned.

U.S.-E.U. Relations in the Face of Brexit and Trump: An…

Interviewed by Daniela Irrera

Realism is certainly helpful in making sense of the recent return of great-power tensions. However, many important aspects of world politics today require close attention to domestic institutions and political processes—I’m thinking of the revolt against globalization and the rise of populism in Britain, the USA, France, Italy, and the Netherlands.

Moroccan Roads that Start in Europe: ‘insha’allah’ Time…

By Lauren Wagner

This set of research notes illustrates how the annual vacation of diasporic European-Moroccan communities towards Morocco carves a “Moroccan” road in their trajectory through Europe. By embracing this practice as a materialization of affect, we can appreciate the infrastructure of the road as more than a space of transit.

My Father’s Eye

By Theophilus Kwek

Now that we live in the same house, it sits on a glass shelf in the hallway, a dark lens winking when the lights come on. A cataract of dust, invisible except at certain angles…

Tourism: People, Places & Mobilities

By Hélène B. Ducros and Katrine Øgaard Jensen

In Europe, from the time of religious pilgrimages or journeys to spa towns for thermal treatments, all sorts of people have undertaken recreational travel since at least the Middle-Ages, even if motivations differed. But, it is with the industrial revolution that tourism took on a new face with the practice of the tour. Later, the emergence of paid leave in many places gave the impetus for the first mass tourists.

Collision by Merle Kröger

Translated by Rachel Hildebrandt and Alexandra Roesch

White swathes of steam float across the deck. It wreaks. Someone has puked into the swimming pool, and fibrous chunks float on the surface. Leg of duck in a truffle reduction—the Chef’s daily special. As though in slow motion, the girl straightens up, staggers away, reeling between stacks of deck chairs and disappears into the haze.

Adua by Igiaba Scego

Reviewed by Yasmin Roshanian

Adua dreams of a place where the taboos surrounding sex, romantic idealism, and uninhibited aesthetic pleasures are not censored or damned.

Sustainability and the Transformation of Transnational …

By Thomas Henökl

The EU is about to digest the separation from Great Britain, a major member state, and one of Europe’s two military powers. Setting a precedent of sorts, Brexit, so far, may appear to be a negative example of how to prepare for common challenges and multilateral cooperation in times of turbulence.

Confessions of the Shtetl. Converts from Judaism in Imp…

Reviewed by Theodore R. Weeks

The field of Jewish studies has developed considerably over the past few decades. In particular, the field, which has never closed off from other disciplines and area studies, has progressively opened up to insights and topics that are of interest to broader scholarly and social groups, from anthropologists, to historians, to social scientists of all stripes.

African Pentecostals in Catholic Europe: The Politics o…

Reviewed by Donald Carter

The author’s extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Italy, Ghana, and Nigeria informs her exploration of the complementarity of African Pentecostalism and Catholicism at the level of shared sacramental and incarnational principles evident in both traditions.

Looking for The Stranger: Albert Camus and the Life of …

Reviewed by David Stegall

Kaplan chooses a linear approach to her task, giving the reader a chronological narrative, from Camus as clerk, writing The Stranger, to the current life of Camus’ first novel as it inspires Kamel Daoud’s lauded 2013 The Meursault Investigation.

Forget Workers Going Out on Strike – In Future It Shoul…

By Aude Cefaliello

I belong to a generation that has been told there is no other choice other than to be flexible in the labour market. It means being flexible about where you go to work, when you go to work, and about what work you are going to do. For many of us, the idea of a long-term employment contract in a company where there is the possibility to progress belongs to another time.

Paprika, Foie Gras, and Red Mud: The Politics of Materi…

Reviewed by Klaus-Jürgen Hermanik

The monograph, with its particular case studies, bring abstract categories of power relations between Hungary and the EU to the forefront. The chapters on the paprika ban, the foie gras scandal, and the red mud environmental catastrophe should help to make these power relations visible and understandable.

Big Business Prioritizes Climate Change Over Labour Rig…

By Kelly Kollman and Alvise Favotto

When the Trump administration was still deciding whether America should remain in the Paris climate agreement, the president’s closest officials lined up on different sides of the debate. Those in favour of the agreement included Trump’s son-in-law and close adviser, Jared Kushner, a career property developer, and the secretary of state and former chief executive of ExxonMobil, Rex Tillerson.

Austerity Has Wounded Public Health in EU Bailout Count…

By Susan Giaimo

The economic crisis of the past decade has been a wrenching experience, particularly for Greece, Spain, Portugal and Ireland. They all required bailouts from the Troika of the European Commission, European Central Bank, and the IMF. The bailouts came with tough conditions to slash public spending and employment and raise taxes to achieve a balanced budget.

So Much for Dutch Tolerance: Life as an LGBT Asylum See…

By Sarah French Brennan

Aziz is from Kabul in Afghanistan. His boyfriend was murdered by his own family in early 2014. They threatened to kill Aziz too, so he fled. After he arrived at an asylum camp in the Netherlands, the family beat his mother and siblings. He sought asylum claiming he was in fear of his life, but the Dutch authorities rejected the application.

Morten Høi Jensen

Saul Bellow and the Moronic Inferno

By Morten Høi Jensen

One of the central conflicts of Bellow’s novels is the apparent incommensurability of Old World thinking with the demonic pace of American society. The country’s big cities become a sort of battleground of Big Ideas. Bellow once wrote movingly of his discovery of the classics of European literature and philosophy as a young man darting about the streets of Depression-era Chicago.

Homonegativity in Eastern Europe

By Catherine Bolzendahl and Ksenia Gracheva

Stagnating and declining of tolerance toward homosexuality in Eastern Europe should be alarming to anyone taking note of changes in Europe. It represents not only disparate perspectives on sexuality and freedom of personal identity, but also signifies a cultural and political rift between Western and Eastern Europe that may be deepening. Growing intolerance could be a symptom of a dangerous divide between East and West, rooted in political disenchantment and subsequent mutual rejection.

The European Refugee Crisis and the Myth of the Immigra…

By Caitlin Carroll

In the “myth of the immigrant rapist,” white women’s bodies are seen as in need of protection by a paternalist state from the sexual violence of brown men. In the case of Europe’s refugee crisis, this protection took the form of closing borders and harshening immigration policies, including curtailing family reunification for refugees.

“A Beautiful Night with Marine:” Marine Le Pen and Gend…

By Dorit Geva

Why would FN members link such narratives of Marine Le Pen’s feminine and masculine virtues alongside their virulent criticism of the European Union, Muslim immigrants, and political elites? How is a woman who is viewed as the beloved political daughter, the quintessential femme moderne, and at the same time as the new Charles de Gaulle, treated as the most potent cure to France’s political and economic woes? Why, in sum, do populist supporters emphasize such gendered virtues in their everyday discourses around their beloved leader?

Reframing Gendered Violence at Columbia University

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

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

The Illustrious House of Ramires by José Maria de Eça d…

Reviewed by Mor Sheinbein

Costa’s re-translation highlights her translating powers to both preserve and portray a world that has been left behind by the end of the nineteenth century, whilst highlighting a kind of humor and irony that some might claim to be the definite marker of the cynical twenty-first century.

The Alt-Right

Produced by Daniel Goulden

In this episode of the EuropeNow podcast we explore the murky world of the alt-right, the online movement dedicated to opposing multiculturalism and globalization. We’ll take a look at how the alt-right formed, the factors that led to their rapid rise, and how they advance their motives. Welcome to the EuropeNow Podcast.

Critique of Black Reason by Achille Mbembe, Translated …

Reviewed by Dominic Thomas

Achille Mbembe’s writings are groundbreaking, truly interdisciplinary in nature, bridging institutional divides between the humanities and social sciences, and affording him recognition as one of the most challenging and stimulating thinkers at work today.

Recognizing the Revolution: Thoughts on Genetic Distrac…

By Shelley Grant

It is entirely possible that Europe, although in the midst of many grand debates on the acceptability of social sexual performances, is also unwittingly leading a sexual revolution on the microscopic level. The profundity of integrating the benefits of technology advances into pregnancy care may seem compelling. Yet, the incrementalization of pre-birth care may cause socially disorienting, disagreeable, and demanding effects.

 

The Lighthouse by Alison Moore

By Alison Moore

He is not in the bedroom. She can hear the shower running in the bathroom, can hear him singing in there. She would prefer not to have to talk to this man who keeps calling her Ester as if he knows her. She is still annoyed with him for being so late and not even apologizing. She is obliged to feed the man – she wants to feed him, she always wants to feed men – but she would be pleased to get away without having to engage with him.

Moonbath by Yanick Lahens

Translated by Emily Gogolak

The elusive gazes of the men, the slightly aghast looks from the women, upon the arrival of this rider, all to suggest that he was a dreadful and dreaded being.

The Gender of Power

By Michael Stambolis-Ruhstorfer, Kayla Maiuri, and Gill Allwood

Given the severity of challenges facing Europe, from Brexit and the Trump administration’s thinly veiled hostility to the EU and NATO, to the on-going influx of refugees and the rise of populism, writing about gender and sexuality might seem quaint, even indulgent to some people. They would be mistaken. Any thorough examination of the political, social, and economic situation of Europe in the early twenty-first century takes gender and sexuality seriously.

July 2017

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Hélène Ducros (Geography), Malcolm Campbell-Verduyn (Political Science), and Muireann O’Dwyer (Political Science).

Hladno by Marina Alagić-Bowder

By Marina Alagić-Bowder

The March sunshine is clear as a bell, but there’s a bitter edge to the glassy Adriatic waters. Matt and I follow the children down to the shore to watch them dip their toes and scream, “Hladno-o-o!” The initial H adds to the shivering.

Child Insanity in England, 1845-1907 by Steven J. Taylor

Reviewed by Pamela Dale

In the twenty-first century, the mental health of children is under constant scrutiny and is a topic that is regularly discussed by the print and broadcast media, drawing on reports from researchers, practitioners, policy-makers, service-providers, charities, and user-led organizations.

The New Repartition of Forces Between Employers and Uni…

By Aude Cefaliello

If we want to deal with the challenges Europe faces and develop sustainable mechanisms to overcome them, it is necessary to understand the forces exercised at the decision-making level, for example in the relations between employers, unions, and European Union institutions.

The Role of Values in EU Governance

By Shumail Javed

“Human dignity,” Drowet makes the comparison, is “what the precautionary principle was in the 90s, and dignity is becoming the symbol of Europe in the European Framework of values.”

Windows, Gates, and Bridges, or the Architecture of the…

By Hunter Doyle and Sofia Pia Belenky

Zooming to the scale of the individual bill, it is clear that the note itself reflects both of these trends, the cultural narrative or mythology, as well as the private desire for territorial accumulation. Each euro note has an architectural theme ranging from classical to  “modern” twentieth century. As the bill increasses in value, the architectural period becomes more contemporary.

Citizen of the English Language: An Interview with Bahi…

Interviewed by James Crossley

I hoped this story would go beyond the Persian diaspora. It is about all migrant communities, all refugees, all people exiled either by choice or because of necessity. We do need labels, to flag the limits of our knowledge, the extent of our ignorance, but as Aminatta Forna says, labels can also limit who we are.

Euro-Visions: Europe in Contemporary Cinema by Mariana …

Reviewed by Roger Hillman

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the ongoing emergence of a new, multi-faceted European identity has been a gradual process. In a valuable contribution, this book takes stock of a work-in-process after its first quarter century, the melting pot fusion that is Europe, as reflected (but not in a vulgar Marxist sense) in European cinema

How the Spectre of Yugoslavia Looms Over EU’s Handling …

By Irial Glynn

With peak season approaching for refugees making treacherous journeys to and through Europe, don’t be surprised if we are told again that this is unprecedented. That would certainly be in keeping with what news organisations, politicians and research bodies have asserted in the past several years.

Three Poems by Zhu Zhu

Translated by Dong Li 

days are placid, like an olive grove
spread upon the slopes, not
too many high rises, not too much dust
or too many nouveau-riche neighbors;

From Interinstitutional Competition to Interinstitution…

By Stéphane Charitos, Christopher Kaiser, and Nelleke Van Deusen-Scholl

In response to rapidly changing conditions in higher education, an increasing number of institutions of colleges and universities are exploring the potential for collaborative models of course and program sharing to help them meet their academic goals.

Collaboration in Refugee Education: Field Notes from Ba…

By Kerry Bystrom with Marion Detjen

The following “field notes” give a glimpse into the College’s engagement in education and forced migration since 2015, when our PIE-SC plans crystallized, by profiling one pilot project created with the current and future cohorts of students with a forced migration background in mind.

Performative Polyphonies

Curated by Felix Meyer-Christian

The Berlin and Hamburg based COSTA COMPAGNIE was founded in 2009 as an collaboration of interdisciplinary working emerging artists.

City of Ulysses by Teolinda Gersão

Translated by Jethro Soutar and Annie McDermott

You would’ve come home and told me all about it, filled with enthusiasm and doubtless in fits of laughter. If the conversation had ever taken place.

The Vassar Refugee Solidarity Initiative

By Anish Kanoria

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

 

A Different Doctor: Reimagining the Humanities PhD for …

By Kevin Boettcher

In August 2017, Binghamton University was one of twenty-eight schools selected for the Next Generation PhD program, a new initiative from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) which provided more than $1.6 million in total grants to PhD-granting universities across the country.

From Collaboration to Strategic Coordination: Creating …

By Christopher P. Long, Susan Gass, and Koen Van Gorp

Academic isolation has long been impractical; in today’s world, it is impossible. At a time when yesterday’s bright new fact becomes today’s doubt and tomorrow’s myth, no single institution has the resources in faculty or facilities to go it alone.

Sustainability & Innovation

By Maria Höhn and Nicole Shea

In this challenging time of governmental retrenchment—with its accompanying cuts to the Arts and Humanities—many foundations have been stepping up and pivoting their missions to a defense of democratic values and shared cultural heritages. At the same time, institutions of higher learning, think tanks, artists, policy makers, and NGOs have been reimagining their mission and innovating new models of collaboration not only among like-minded institutions, but across disciplines and national boundaries.

Tangle by Kulović Selma

Translated by Mirza Purić

All the pain we inflicted on our mother began with our birth. We hurt her when we were being born, and we hurt her by being born. Why people come uninvited, she never understood. She invited her first husband into her life. Me she didn’t invite.

Announcing the EuropeNow Film Festival

By Jake Purcell

EuropeNow is collaborating with the World of Film International Festival Glasgow to make the EuropeNow Festival, featuring films from across the globe that address sustainability and transformation in Europe.

June 2017

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Louie Dean Valencia-García (History), Malcolm Campbell-Verduyn (Political Science), Hélène Ducros (Geography), Daniela Irrera (International Relations), and Özden Ocak (Sociology).

Encircling the Now by Felix Meyer-Christian

By Felix Meyer-Christian

Within the context of the world-wide refuge crisis, as well as the rising populism in the U.S. and Europe, one can clearly observe a distinct re-politicization of artists and their works, and the question of how to deal with the current state of uncertainty and urgency has been strongly reinforced in artistic discourse.

Locating Myself in the Anthropocene

By Julie Reiss

Like many people, I had been concerned about the frightening implications of the Anthropocene long before I even heard the word. As I worried about the widespread destructive impact of human activity on the earth, I became aware that geologists were debating whether that impact was so far reaching that it had caused a distinct geological epoch: the Anthropocene.

Miss Burma by Charmaine Craig

By Charmaine Craig

Khin had seen him before, the young officer. She had noticed his hands, strong and clenched by his sides, and the restless way he charged from one end of the seaport to the other.

The Outlaw by Jón Gnarr, translated from the Icelandic …

Reviewed by K.T. Billey

Translated by Lytton Smith, the third and final volume in Gnarr’s autobiographical trilogy is a glimpse into a sensitive, often miserable teenage mind. Devastating candor pulls the reader into the emotional whirlpool of a young thinker as he grapples with normalcy, loneliness, his own limitations, and life’s unexpected possibilities.

The World’s First Meteorological Network (1654-1670) an…

By Chiara Bertolin and Dario Camuffo

The Medici Network, which emerged in 1654, can be considered the first European weather service. It can also be linked to the scientific motivations and activities which led to the creation of another important scholarly institution, the Academy of Experiments.

Salki by Wojciech Nowicki

Translated by Jan Pytalski

The city was rebuilt to restore its previous look, sometimes down to exact details, following a naive belief that that would turn it back into what it used to be before the war. It was an exercise in fidelity without purpose, an empty gesture of men in love with history.

Four Poems by Anita Pajević

Translated by Mirza Purić

for breakfast I’ve had
a small coniferous forest
and in it a squirrel
I pressed him on a serviette
stored him between two leaves of newspaper

Three Poems by Mária Ferenčuhová

Translated by James Sutherland-Smith

Crystals grown too quickly to champ with teeth
scratch throat. with narrow fingers across
canvas voiceless retrace twists and turns.

Lessons From the Darkness by Helena Janeczek

Translated by Frederika Randall

They caught her because she made a mistake. For months she had sailed right through their nets with her false passport, her bleached hair, her little heart-shaped medal reworked as a cross, her Polish spoken like a Pole and even her school-taught German spoken badly as only the Poles in Slesia did.

Eurasia 2.0: Russian Geopolitics in the Age of New Medi…

Reviewed by Lada V. Kochtcheeva

The rise of global information age impacts power relations in the world, boosts the spread of global norms and principles, and affects political structures and cultures of states. In addition to the spread of global information networks, globalization fosters economic interdependence, technological innovation, multilateral institutions, and the proliferation of non-state actors, which are deemed to weigh profoundly in global affairs.

Facing the Anthropocene

By Hélène B. Ducros

Our global dependence on fossil fuels, nuclear power, intense resource extraction economies, genetic manipulations, air, soil, and water contamination, and byproducts of modernity such as waste material like plastics and other synthetic polymers have caused great disturbances in the Earth ecosystems on which many species depend, including the human species.

May 2017

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Hélène Ducros (Geography), Kelly McKowen (Anthropology), and Mihai Sebe (Political Science).

“We Are Poor,” the Czechs Have Realized with Horror

By Jan Čulík

While the Czechs as members of a ten million nation know very well their international influence would be greatly diminished if the EU ceased to exist, their dissatisfaction of what they increasingly see as a position of second rate citizens within the EU could in future become a deeply destabilizing factor.

Artist Spotlight: The Thousand Colors Of Nik Spatari

Curated by Antonio Laruffa 

When you talk about Nik Spatari, it is a very complex figure you are dealing with. Like the pagan god Janus, this artist might be seen as a man with two faces; like the god that can look to the past and the future, Spatari has been and still is a protagonist of artistic movements that span two centuries, both representing 20th-century Avant-garde and being an independent pioneer in 21st-century art.

Thomas Mann in America

By Morten Høi Jensen

Wary of the youthful temptations of novelty, Mann argued eloquently for a political-spiritual renaissance, a rekindling of faith in the long project of democracy. He reminded his audience that it was “your American statesmen and poets such as Lincoln and Whitman who proclaimed to the world democratic thought and feeling, and the democratic way of life, in imperishable words.”

The European Union at 60: The Future Will be Brighter T…

By Roland Benedikter and Ireneusz Pawel Karolewski

The European Union is marking the 60th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome, which was signed on 25 March 1957. But is there a bleak future for the integration process? Roland Benedikter and Ireneusz Pawel Karolewski argue that the EU is in a significantly healthier position than it appears, and that far from grinding to a halt, European integration will continue to be relevant in the coming decades.

The Communist by Guido Morselli

Translated by Frederika Randall

He didn’t want to drop dead in that room. In the dark. Alone, without a helping hand: it was pure misery. The sound of his breathing did not seem to be him, but a machine.

Six Poems by Daniela Danz

Translated by Monika Cassel

The linden tree has lost all its leaves
and nothing is left of the summer but
the wish to stroke old Germany’s
head one more time

Seeing People Off by Jana Beňová

Translated by Janet Livingstone

The river draws closer and closer to the stream of gawking people. They jump onto the sandbags so they can see themselves in it. And at night they dream dreams on the shore. Dreams in which clouds of dust whirl behind herds of galloping animals.

Insanity and Sanctity in Byzantium: The Ambiguity of Re…

Reviewed by Alexander Angelov

As the cultural pendulum moves from one direction to the other, we experience a radicalization of values because the amplification of convictions on one end triggers reactions on the other. Construed as polar opposites in popular imaginaries since the Enlightenment, religion and secularism have generated different anthropologies and modes of being.

Geopolitical Constructs: The Mulberry Harbours, World W…

Reviewed by Garret J Martin

Geopolitical Constructs challenges our conception of war by emphasizing a number of key and interrelated themes. This includes underlining the ways by which war transforms individuals and places, reshapes interactions between government and businesses, or leads to the creation of new bureaucracies.

Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar Germany and Fran…

Reviewed by Amy Hubbell

As Europe continues to face the largest wave of refugees pouring into its borders since World War II, past influxes of migrants across the continent offer important lessons about national identity and integration. With Germany receiving the vast majority of refugees, and France ranked in the top three destinations, Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar Germany and France is particularly timely.

Europeans Globalizing: Mapping, Exploiting, Exchanging …

Reviewed by Marten Boon

This book is as inspiring as it is bewildering, mainly because of the sheer scope of the book and its transnational ambitions. The authors, Portuguese historian of technology Maria Paula Diogo, and German historian Dirk van Laak, aim for a transnational history of technology of Europe’s global relations since 1850.

West Germany, Cold War Europe and the Algerian War by M…

Reviewed by Brittany Lehman

Working with French, German, and English language sources, she demonstrates the complex and often lethal relationship between the West German, French, and Algerian states. Part of a recent branch of scholarship exploring West Germany beyond the East-West divide, von Bülow deftly demonstrates that the Cold War was a global conflict, which influenced independence movement and decolonial projects.

The Contemporary Presence of the Past: Memory Studies i…

By Aline Sierp and Jenny Wüstenberg

As Michael Rothberg recently pointed out, we currently appear to be living in a “moment of danger” in which memory has become particularly salient–both in terms of being abused by authoritarian and populist forces, and in terms of its importance in resisting them.

Can We Talk? Neuroscientists and Humanists on Memory

By Angelika Bammer

The strength and potential of memory research arguably lies in its interdisciplinary scope: the fact that it brings people from across the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences together to identify problems and explore solutions. But this cross-disciplinary collaboration is often easier said than done.

The Pedagogy of Memory: A Workshop on Teaching in an Em…

By Jonathan Bach and Sara Jones

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

Cultural Heritage and Politics of the Past: An Intervie…

Interviewed by Sherman Teichman

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

Memory and the Politics of the Past: New Research and I…

By Nicole Shea, Aline Sierp, and Jenny Wüstenberg

In this issue, we have invited research, artistic explorations, and campus initiatives to look at how different entities are dealing with the problem that eyewitnesses are dying and that memory starts to move from social memory into cultural memory.

Monumenting in the Present

Curated by Manca Bajec

The question of voyeurism and victimization of narrative often comes into question when artists are working with topics of war.

History of a Disappearance: The Forgotten Story of a Po…

Translated by Sean Bye

It was right before the war, and we’d put all the poverty and deprivation of the Great Depression behind us. The whole economy was doing better, hardly anyone was unemployed, they’d get jobs building the Autobahn or could get permits to work abroad. The craftspeople in town got plenty of commissions.

Remembering the Netherlands during World War II: War Di…

By Sacha van Leeuwen

On May 8, 1945, three days after the liberation from Nazi Germany, the State Institute for War Documentation (Rijksinstituut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie; RIOD) was founded in the Netherlands. Led by historian, Loe de Jong, RIOD was tasked by the government to write the official history of the Dutch kingdom during World War II.

World War I American Immigrant Poetry: A Digital Humani…

By Lorie A. Vanchena

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

World War I and Historical Memory

By Carl Strikwerda

World War I created a watershed in world history. It punctured belief in progress and radically shifted art, theology, psychology, and literature.

April 2017

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Hélène Ducros (Geography) and Louie Dean Valencia-García (History).

compass, europenow journal

Compass by Mathias Énard, translated from the French by…

Reviewed by Yasmin Roshanian

With language, Mandell encompasses this urgent tie to the past. The history is fed to us in visceral images of women required to veil, drug rings flowing with opium, rotting buildings crippled with rickety bedframes, and cigarette burns dented in wood. As Franz recollects his most poignant memories from Tehran, he revisits a city still reeling from a revolution.

Perí-pherein, the European Necessity to Think a Differe…

By Agostino Petrillo

There is nothing more vague and ambiguous than the concept of the suburb; it cannot exist on its own, it can only do so in connection with the center, in a never-ending and repetitive connection of meanings, a spiral of reciprocal definitions that Saint Thomas Aquinas called infinitum ad quem.

 

A Life Between Music and the Gulag: The Enigma of Carol…

By Margaret Tejerizo

As we have noted above, there are very many features of Codina’s life which remain both unexplained and poorly researched. She was reluctant, as noted, to speak about her experiences in the Gulag, so most of the information that exists about her time there comes from reports family members, especially her grandsons.

Berlin Bhf

By Anna Tihanyi

The scenes take place in different interiors of a fictive Berlin, showing feelings and relations through moments of transition, and emphasizing that the image is frozen in time.

Two poems by Julia Fiedorczuk

Translated by Bill Johnston

I’d like to say—to her, to both of them—
let’s lie down beneath the grass, lie in the shade
of dried-out ships, let matters of fate be left
to those plane trees, I’d like to say, look over there!

The Teeth of the Comb & Other Stories by Osama Alomar

Translated by C.J. Collins

I took the big bag that I had inherited from my grandfather down from the attic. It was brightly colored like a storm of rainbows. I hoisted it onto my back and went out into the street. I closed my eyes and began to choose samples at random from everything that was inside: humans and stones and dust and flowers and wind and the past and the present and the future.

Measures of Expatriation by Vahni Capildeo

Reviewed by Theophilus Kwek

Throughout the nineteenth century, as the British Empire and its official tongue extended across the world, the word “expatriate,” which, as late as 1818 referred to “one who has been banished,” acquired a new definition: “one who chooses to live abroad.”

Two Poems by Miodrag Stanisavljević

Translated by Mirza Purić

My beautiful triune people, you’re fairest
in the morning when you gush forth
from your colon-colonies
and your public transport vans
– thank you.

Celestine by Olga Ravn

Translated by Sherilyn Hellberg

The face, the voice, the hands press against the wall. Celestine up in the south-facing attic, in front of the stained mirror—and there is also a dried wreath there. In the darkness inside the wall, a glimpse of Celestine’s eyes. In one eye a nettle grows. The forest around the castle sparkled like silver, carrying Celestine’s name within it. She is furious; she hunts down the guests at the hotel when they sleep. She slides down the corridors. She licks their faces. She licks the sleep out of their eyes. She cries no no when the wall closes in on her.

Wolf Hunt by Ivailo Petrov

Translated by Angela Rodel

I’ll try to introduce to you the six hunters individually and I’ll start with him, since he was the reason they set off in that miserable weather to track wolves.

Three Poems by Anja Marković

Translated by Mirza Purić

You’re always on the edge between two chasms, cradle-ladles,
as your limping legs laze on the wall.
There are wider spaces in you, their evening chill
callously presses your palms
as if to pierce your insides, spill into the night,
into the rivers above the roofs, into the rotten orchards of the sky.

Three Poems by Wioletta Greg

Translated by Eliza Marciniak

Cold surfaces of mirrors stubbornly hold their form.
Beyond the looking-glass, atoms have combined
into impenetrable worlds.
I found warm newborns in the rabbit-hole.

Two Poems by Selma Asotić

Translated by Mirza Purić

When we wet the bed
for three nights in a row
they put a shroud
over our heads
and brought the lead
to our eyes

Two Poems by Lidija Deduš

Translated by Mirza Purić

I’ve got all the necessary qualifications to become stateless I’ve got
an expired passport of a state which no longer exists and a birth certificate
from a city in a country no one will recognise

20th Century Central European Literature

By Meghan Forbes

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

European Avant-­Garde in Print

By Meghan Forbes

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

Two Poems by Darko Cvijetić

Translated by Mirza Purić

Says
All things
When you lay them
One across the other
Make a cross
Only a man
Dropped as a perpendicular
Onto another man

March 2017

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Hélène Ducros (Geography), Louie Dean Valencia-García (History), Samantha Lomb (History), Mihai Sebe (Political Science), and Daniela Irrera (International Relations).

Why is the Czech Republic So Hostile to Muslims and Ref…

By Jan Čulík

The significant upsurge of refugees, which came into Europe in 2015, was met with unprecedented anger and hostility from an overwhelming majority of citizens of most of the post-communist Central European countries. It would appear that a synergy of several historical, cultural, political, and economic factors has created this fiercely hostile reaction.

Divided Subjects, Invisible Borders by Ben Gook

Reviewed by Samantha Fox

The Berlin Wall may have fallen twenty-five years ago, but Germans still talk about “Die Mauer im Kopf”—the wall in the head—the cultural and psychological divisions between East and West that continue to endure. Ben Gook’s Divided Subjects, Invisible Borderlands: Re-Unified Germany After 1989, examines the unfinished business of reunification.

Analysis: Europe’s Center-Left Risks Irrelevance

By Sheri Berman

Economically, much of the continent suffers from low growth, high unemployment and rising inequality, while politically, disillusionment with the European community as well as domestic institutions and elites is widespread. Partially as a result, right-wing populism is growing, increasing political instability and uncertainty even further.

The Mid-Hudson Refugee Solidarity Alliance

By Maria Höhn

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

Forced Migration, Cultural Identity, and Trauma

By Nicole Shea and Turhan Canli

In political analysis, scientific inquiry, literature, poetry, language, and the arts, we examine the loss of culture and identity and the effects of trauma on the human mind, as well as the healing power of artistic expression.

President Donald Trump EuropeNow

Trump Against Europe

By Morten Høi Jensen

It would take many rigorous and carefully administered lessons in world history to cover the vast and chilling tundra of President Trump’s ignorance. European history might not be a bad place to start, however, especially if you believe, as President Trump does, that the European Union was created in order to “beat the United States when it comes to trade,” or that it is merely “a vehicle for Germany.”

Frontier by Can Xue

Translated by Karen Gernant & Chen Zeping

Nights on the riverbank were terrifying: it was as if the violent wind would blow the boxes into the river at any moment. Mixed with this strong wind were many howling wolves.

The 21st Century Worldwide Refugee Crisis

By Maria Höhn

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

President Donald Trump EuropeNow

Confronting the Terrorist/Refugee Narrative

By James Fitzgerald

This article critically interrogates the “terrorist/refugee” narrative that has become a mainstay of increasingly right-wing political and (social) media discourse. It contextualizes the conflation of “refugees” with “terrorists” by reference to logics of contemporary counterterrorism practices, which tend to securitize entire populations based on the threat that they might produce.

The Magician of Vienna by Sergio Pitol

Translated by George Henson

I was in Vienna this year, after a twelve-year absence. My arrival coincided with a mass rally of three hundred thousand people who protested against the return of Nazism to the country, precisely in Heroes’ Square, the same one where one million Austrians frenziedly cheered Hitler.

Untranslated Fire: Francophone Responses to the Charlie…

By Arturo Desimone

The November 13, 2015 attack summoned unlikely mourners from the political elite. A towering human mausoleum rose above the French ground-zero, propped with flags of causes that were alien and alienating to the leftist ideology of the Hebdo family, whose hard-earned infamy had preceded them for decades, only to be trivialized into consensus and tricolor shrouds.

The White City by Karolina Ramqvist

Translated by Saskia Vogel

Her fatigue was bright and jagged. It rained down on her, dispersing her thoughts until they were but white noise. She had no idea how long she’d slept last night.

Prosopopoeia by Farid Tali

Reviewed by Poupeh Missaghi

Farid Tali’s Prosopopoeia is a gorgeous memorial for a lost loved one, from one brother to another, from one man who finds beauty and love in the arms of another man.

Language Cafes as a site of Wider Cultural Integration

By Claire Needler

This project aims to influence policy and practice, and to make tangible improvements to the lives of migrants who have settled in Scotland. Our focus is participatory action research, working with migrants and stakeholders to find local, grassroots solutions to issues they have identified.

Our Brains on Conflict: Trauma, Healing, and the Politi…

Interviewed by Sherman Teichman

Mike Niconchuk reflects on some of the intimate lessons he has learned on healing and coping from refugees he has developed friendships with over the last five years working in post-conflict and displaced communities in Latin America, Europe, and the Middle East.

The Night So Long by Marjorie Agosín

By Marjorie Agosín

Suddenly,
That night became longer still.
Around us the silence turned dark as well,
An opaque hue of gray without blue.
Bewildered girls asked what had happened.
All their mothers knew to do was play with their disheveled hair.

The History of Migration in Europe

Produced by Daniel Goulden

In this episode of the Europe Now Podcast, we take a look at the refugee crisis in Europe from a historical perspective. We’ll travel to the last ice age, the Roman Empire, and America during WWI to discuss other refugee crises and look at their effects.

February 2017

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Hélène Ducros (Geography), Ozden Ocak (Sociology), Mihai Sebe (Political Science), and Malcolm Campbell-Verduyn (Political Science).

Who Did Europe March For?

By Mary Wang

In European countries with growing right-wing movements, the upcoming elections should serve as a reminder that merging bodies into one space isn’t always enough. Instead, those in countries like France and the Netherlands, who will elect new governments in March, will need to understand that even in countries where the female body isn’t immediately under threat, female solidarity means voting against the politicians who will hurt immigrant and colored bodies more.

President Donald Trump EuropeNow

Trump, Brexit, Populism, and the Dawn of the Liberal Wo…

By Thomas Henökl

Never before has the change of administration in the United States caused this much concern globally, and never before has a US President incited so much tension ahead of taking office. As the hopes for a Damascene conversion for the new POTUS are waning, one thing has become evident by now: the path of naive unilateralism that the forthcoming American government is set to follow will prove to be of little help for international development or a burgeoning global policy of common good.

The Politics of Hair

By Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough

While city attitudes toward women cutting their tresses had by then become more liberal, in small towns and villages the daring ones were branded morally delinquent and sentenced a priori to eternal damnation. A popular saying: “Short hair, short on brains” expressed prevalent attitudes.

Praise the Mutilated World

By Morten Høi Jensen

The experience of the people of Lvov is an important rejoinder to the resurgent ethnic nationalism now tightening its grip on Europe—with its nostalgia for some illusory cultural and ethnic homogeneity, for a lost golden age that never existed and to which it would not be desirable to return if it did.

Yet Another Greco-German Imbalance

Reviewed by Angelos-Stylianos Chryssogelo

The first half is a Keynesian analysis of the flaws of the Eurozone architecture; the second half is a condensed political program of how a country could negotiate and implement an exit from the euro.

Missing Chances for Change

Reviewed by Shawn Donnelly

Instead of focusing on stable prices as the benchmark of a working monetary union, Flassbeck and Lapavitsas argue for coordination of unit labour costs instead, following observations of how economic growth in Europe closely follows wage growth.

Calling to Arms But Leaving Ammunition Behind

Reviewed by Michele Chang

Written in an accessible style, this hybrid treatment risks not engaging extensively enough with economic theory (there are not a lot of references for the various economic arguments they mention, for example) to convince those who are not already sympathetic to their cause.

Borgen and the Double Bind: The Haunted Princesses of t…

By Julia Khrebtan-Hörhager

The series became a hit in many European countries and later in the USA. John Powers, a reporter from the US National Public Radio claims that Borgen is Denmark’s West Wing (but even better). Borgen harvested an impressive amount of international awards in various categories—ranging from Best Drama Series and specifically Best European Drama TV Series to the Outstanding Actress in the Drama Series by Sidse Babett Knudsen (better known to the audience as Birgitte Nyborg).

Leonora Carrington EuropeNow

Down Below by Leonora Carrington

By Leonora Carrington

Various events were taking place in the outside world: the collapse of Belgium, the entry of the Germans in France. All of this interested me very little and I had no fear whatsoever.

Lands of No-Return

By Viktoria Sorochinski

This series portrays the last remains of the authentic Ukrainian villages and their elderly inhabitants.

Radiant Terminus by Antoine Volodine

Translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman

Mudugan was a typical village of thieves, built in the middle of the forest in a gap that barely deserved to be called a clearing, so tightly did the trees encircle the log houses. There weren’t any paths that had been marked to get there and it was inaccessible to anyone who didn’t know exactly where the ravines and undergrowth were. That was where Umrug Batyushin learned to live his life as a self-sufficient child, there where he learned to shoot rifles, to carve up elk, and endure cold and hardship, as well as bear the howling of the wolves…

Brexit EuropeNow

Past Imperfect: The Brexit Gamble

By Jacob Høi Jensen

In their desperate attempt to promote a vision of a United Kingdom, which is based on a glorified and nostalgic interpretation of the past, Brexiteers have unleashed a process that risks upending the legal, economic, and political foundations of the modern UK. Furthermore, they have yet to offer a coherent and realistic vision of what will replace it.

Merman by Tea Tulić

Translated by Mirza Purić

My husband is burly, and when he walks, it’s as if his steps are yawning. He stumbles over me as if over a pet. I sometimes hide behind a tree and wait for him to turn around. Or leave. If we’re going to a birthday party, I’m the one who wraps and carries the present. If he’s had a lot of wine, the room takes on a smell which makes me put on my shoes and walk up and down the street.

Three poems by Maximilian Voloshin

Translated by Masha Udensiva-Brenner

I want to scream something
Into its dark, open jaws,
To bring my ear to it,
Press up against it with my tremulous heart.

January 2017

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Julian Garritzmann (Political Science), Louie Dean Valencia-García (History), and Hélène Ducros (Geography).

The Nature of German Imperialism: Conservation and the …

Reviewed by Thaddeus Sunseri

Bernhard Gissibl’s work is the first comprehensive treatment of the origins of big game hunting, national parks, wildlife reserves, megafauna protection, and even “safari tourism” under German colonial rule in the former German East Africa.

End the Potemkin Villages

By Robert van Voren

The tragedy of Leonidas’ death is the fact that he did not have to die. The fact is that Vilnius airport has three defibrillators and none of them was touched. As I said, none of the airport staff tried to resuscitate him, and instead waited until the ambulance arrived–too late to save his life.

Cockroaches by Scholastique Mukasonga

Translated by Jordan Stump

But just then a crowd appeared, bellowing, with machetes in their hands, and spears, bows, clubs, torches. We hurried to hide in the banana grove. Still roaring, the men burst into our house. They set fire to the straw-roofed hut, the stables full of calves. They slashed the stores of beans and sorghum. They launched a frenzied attack on the brick house we would never live in. They didn’t take anything, they only wanted to destroy, to wipe out all sign of us, annihilate us.

Sustainable Water and Food Security

By Paolo D’Odorico

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

Global Economics of Water

By Peter Debaere

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

Forest Hydrology

By Paolo D’Odorico

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

Water for the World

By Jim Smith

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

Water Sustainability

By Brian Richter

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

Dispatch: Brexit and Higher Education

By Jake Purcell

On December 1 and 2, Columbia University hosted Brexit: Before & Beyond, a set of panels and events that brought together journalists and scholars from both European and American universities to discuss the events that precipitated the UK’s vote to leave the EU, as well as the continuing fallout from that referendum.

Dispatch: Post-Brexit International Relations

By Mary Wang

John Lancester’s “Brexit Blues,” published in the London Review of Books starts with an explanation of the “Overton window,” a concept in political science that describes the range of ideas that are deemed acceptable by the public at one time. The crucial insight of Joseph Overton, the inventor who lent his name to the concept, was that this window of acceptability could be shifted.

Sunlight and Arrows: Five Invocations for the Silent Muse

By Dan Beachy-Quick

In the summer of 2012, James Eagan Holmes walked from the midnight alley through the propped open door of the movie theater into which he would throw gas canisters and, wearing a black assault vest, his hair dyed an acid orange, he opened fire.

A Geographical Perspective on the European Research Are…

By Nicola Francesco Dotti and André Spithoven

While knowledge is intangible, research and development (R&D) activities are known for being unevenly distributed across space. Since the 1980s, cross-national knowledge flows have dramatically increased, and the EU has played a major role in this field with policies such as the Framework Programmes (FP).

Taxing the Rich: A History of Fiscal Fairness in the Un…

Reviewed by Lukas Haffert

In the post-Piketty world, economic inequality has returned to the top of the agenda of political economists with a vengeance. A flurry of research projects has started to investigate the sources and the consequences of growing disparities between the rich and the poor.

The Past Makes Its Appearance Once Again

By Christopher Impiglia

Mussolini’s skewed image of the past and his romanticizing of Imperial Rome, without considering its flaws and understanding the reasons for its downfall, ultimately helped lead to his downfall.

Europe’s Center of Science: Science Productivity in Bel…

By Justin J.W. Powell and Jennifer Dusdal

European countries have increasingly invested in higher education and science systems, leading to rising numbers of scholars and scientists, considerable infrastructure development, and dense cross-cultural networks and collaboration.

Recycling and Extended Producer Responsibility: The Eur…

Reviewed by Lucy J. Wishart

Waste has traditionally been managed in two ways: buried or burnt. These forms of waste management have caused a myriad of environmental problems including polluting water, air, and soil; endangering wildlife and waterways; and contributing to climate change.

Higher Education Reloaded: Studying the Politics of Ins…

By Tobias Schulze-Cleven

Having outgrown the ivory tower, higher education has moved to the center of societies’ efforts to sustain economic growth and provide social security. This rise to prominence has also turned the sector into a key battleground for social conflict.

Volatile Texts: Us Two by Zsuzsanna Gahse

Translated by Chenxin Jiang

Europe is disintegrating, the old lady is falling apart. She recently appeared at the Museum Festival with a terrible heap of jewelry around her neck; she’d just dyed her hair blond; above her fake gold necklace hung her wretched, worn face, and then she laughed, walked up to the bar, embraced a tall young man and kiss him artfully.

The Life-Writer by David Constantine

By David Constantine

During the funeral, and after it when the mourners came back to her house, Katrin continued in the almost rapturous state she had been lifted into by the last hours of Eric’s life. It was over, accomplished, her strength had sufficed. And now meticulously she would attend in every detail to every thing that needed to be done. She allowed advice, but followed it her way; help, but she directed it. She accepted condolences, and herself extended them to whoever had been saddened by Eric’s death.

Cast No Evil

By Alia Ali

The multi-media artist invites the viewer to analyze their subjective perception in regards to inclusion and exclusion, and the threshold in which the transition between the two occurs.

What Are the Blind Men Dreaming? by Noemi Jaffe

Translated by Julia Sanches

She continues to divine the future—more so than the past, which she has almost completely forgotten. She has herself turned into Linka, the gypsy from Debrecen. Her Jewishness is a mixture of faith and superstition; a religion she has partly invented herself.

Berlin-Hamlet by Szilárd Borbély

Translated by Ottilie Mulzet

At the time I had no answering machine, so
I couldn’t call myself. Ludicrous, perhaps,
even morbid, how secure it made me feel to know
at any time I could hear my own voice. There is a voice, however
mechanical, which is mine.

December 2016

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Malcolm Campbell-Verduyn (Political Science), Hélène Ducros (Geography), and Daniela Irrera (International Relations).

Remembered Reading: Memory, Comics and Post-War Constru…

Reviewed by Margaret Galvan

In focusing on the readership patterns of comics among British girls in the second half of the twentieth century, Mel Gibson recuperates a richly textured subject that has, by her account, “been largely neglected as a research subject within the academy and in popular accounts of youth culture.”

Analysis: Europe’s Traditional Left Is in a Death Spira…

By Sheri Berman

Europe today is a mess. The strongest countries face lackluster economic growth, while the weakest, like Greece, are struggling to recover from depression-like downturns. Politically, things are even worse, as disillusionment with European and domestic institutions and elites is at record levels, and support for far-left and far-right parties is growing, creating political instability.

Pianist’s Fingers by Berta García Faet

Translated by Kelsi Vanada

love’s cry lingers incomplete like a half-articulated sneeze love is a half-sneeze cut off by another sneeze creaking a reflex scandalously i rest my skull on your sweet skull a phonograph before the sonata in C major accentuates and duplicates the cravings and increases wellbeing and exists

Field Nodes

By Sarita Zaleha

Zaleha’s creative research explores environmental agency and our emotional engagement with the environment.

Out of Sight, Out of Mind: Neglecting Health Inequaliti…

By Nadine Reibling

Unlike other rich countries in Europe, such as the United Kingdom, Denmark, or the Netherlands, Germany has no comprehensive political strategy or program that specifically aims to reduce such inequalities. Political attempts to address health inequalities are limited to small health promotion initiatives targeted at socially disadvantaged groups.

Memoirs of a Polar Bear by Yoko Tawada

Translated by Susan Bernofsky

As soon as he entered the sleepers’ realm, the air around him grew sharply colder, with glittering silvery particles of light falling all around him. He watched the miniature flakes floating, they danced, liberated from gravity, yet still went on falling: falling ever farther until at last they alighted on the frozen earth and disappeared.

Secularism and Religion: The Attempted Coup in Turkey

By Tayfun Kasapoglu

The power struggle between secularists and “Islamists” has marked the history of Turkish politics. In this struggle, the Turkish military has acted as the guardian of the state, staging coups and banning certain political parties and figures in order to protect the secular system of the country (Jung 2008).

Of Darkness by Josefine Klougart

Translated by Martin Aitken

We come no closer, only the opposite—we are moving away. Moving backwards, losing the pores of the woman’s skin, we lose the pores, the fair down of her upper lip that you discovered, the lines of her skin reminding you of some other age—youth, funnily enough, that couldn’t quite be placed.

Political Landscape in Turkey: Suspicion Against the Hi…

By Mette Fallesen

It is almost impossible to speak of Turkish politics without to some degree addressing the conspiracy theories regarding the inner workings of the state. By calling them conspiracy theories, I intend to draw attention to how they are formed and in what way they reflect on how the state is imagined.

The Politics of Health Equity in Europe

By Courtney McNamara and Jennifer J. Carroll

The essays presented in this special feature address the growing public and political concern over increasing levels of social stratification and reveal the political relevance of health inequalities across Europe. Specifically, we asked health inequality experts to reflect on some of the biggest challenges surrounding health inequalities in different European countries.

November 2016

By the EuropeNow Editorial Committee

Here are this month’s editor’s picks from Research Editorial Committee members Malcolm Campbell-Verduyn (Political Science), Louie Dean Valencia-García (History), and Hélène Ducros (Geography).

What is Europe?

Produced by Daniel Goulden

Welcome to the EuropeNow Podcast. In this inaugural episode we try to answer the seemingly simple question: What is Europe? We’ll take a look at the geographic, historical, and political definitions of Europe and see if any of them are satisfactory. We’ll also take a look at the potential for the dream of a unified Europe and the threats to that dream.

Storm Water Management

By Teresa Culver 

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

Sin + Illy Still Alive

Directed by Maria Hengge

Sin and Illy have a plan: on a Greek island they want to get ‘clean’ on their own. But the intention of the two girls fails already on the way to the airport. Finally Sin realizes she has to go the way out of heroin addiction all alone.

The Islands and the Whales

Directed by Mike Day

The Faroese are among the first to feel the affects of our ever more polluted oceans. They have discovered that their beloved whales are toxic, contaminated by the outside world. What once secured their survival now endangers their children and the Faroe Islanders must make a choice between health and tradition.

Brexitannia

Directed by Timothy George Kelly

A portrait of a democracy in all its impossible and ugly glory. With subtle force, yet without judgement, it presents the people of a once powerful empire as they negotiate their identities in a world that is changing faster than, ever and in which power appears to lie further and further from people’s own hands.

Short Films: Western Promises

By EuropeNow Film Festival

Untold stories of men, women, and families; their mission to embrace the change and fight for the unknown while nostalgically reminiscing all those unkept promises from the past.

Four Passports

Directed by Mihajlo Jevtic

This film is a story of immigration and identity after the dissolution of former Yugoslavia, as seen through the eyes of filmmaker Mihajlo Jevtic. It follows the period of transition of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia into today’s Serbia and Mihajlo’s transition from a child into a middle aged man. It is a film made by a man who is about to leave his country for good and about the contents of his immigrant’s suitcase.

Short Films: Antiphysis

By EuropeNow Film Festival

A selection of short films from to be screened at the inaugural EuropeNow Film Festival.

Fluid Mechanics

By Teresa Culver 

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

The Dynamics of Oceans

By Matt Reidenbach

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