The most heated historical debates in post-Communist Poland have been provoked by two books, Neighbors from 2000 and Fear from 2008. The author of these books, Jan T. Gross, challenged the Poles’ view of themselves as solely innocent victims of German Nazism, showing that anti-Semitism could and did lead Poles to kill Jews, both during and after the war. In her presentation, Barbara Törnquist-Plewa scrutinizes the Polish reactions to these books, analyses the rhetoric in Gross’ writings and discusses his role as “mnemonic actor” in Poland. She points out that the case of Gross raises the general question of the role of historical scholarship in society.

Barbara Törnquist-Plewa is professor of Central and Eastern European Studies and director of the Centre for European Studies at Lund University, Sweden. She leads the international research network “In Search for Transcultural Memory in Europe” financed by the EU. Her research focus is nationalism, collective memory, myth and symbols in Central and Eastern Europe as well cultural integration in Europe. She publishes extensively on these subjects.  She recently contributed to and edited two collections of essays entitled Cultural Transformations after Communism. Central and Eastern Europe in Focus (2011) and Painful Pasts and Useful Memories. Remembering and Forgetting in Europe (2012).

Co-sponsored by the Department of History, the Taube Center for Jewish Studies and the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies

During the past few years, the European Union has experienced one of the most difficult periods in its now sixty-year long process of unification. To fight the current eurocrisis, the EU has taken further steps toward integration that seemed unthinkable just a few years ago. In this seminar, we will discuss the challenges and opportunities the crisis offers for more European unification.

Ambassador Veestraeten has been the Belgian Consul General in Los Angeles since September 2012. Prior to his arrival in California he was Belgian Ambassador to Thailand. He has also held positions at the Belgian Embassies in Nigeria, Bulgaria, Kenya and Washington DC. Amb. Veestraeten holds a degree in Romance Literature from KU Leuven.

This event is part of The Europe Center's series on the "European and Global Economic Crisis."

Is the Eurozone crisis undermining European democratic socialism? Why the current economic and fiscal crisis is cause for concern and opportunity, not alarm nor decline, for the future of the European Left.

This is part of the Europe Center's series on the "European and Global Economic Crisis". 

Pia Olsen Dyhr was appointed Minister for Trade and Investment in  October 2011. Pia Olsen Dyhr became member of the Danish Parliament (Folketing) for The Socialist People’s Party in 2007. Before joining Parliament, she worked with policy, international relations, trade, and environmental issues at the non-governmental organizations CARE Denmark and the Danish Society for the Conservation of Nature. She carries a MA in Political Science from University of Copenhagen.

Professor Marci Shore will discuss her project that focuses on Husserl's phenomenology, and later Heidegger's (and Sartre's) existentialism as these philosophical currents took shape in Eastern Europe, primarily but not only Czechoslovakia and Poland.  The project is structured around philosophical personalities, exploring their encounters and their dialogues and relationships with one another.  It's also a project about how the stakes of the questions they pose change, how epistemological questions become ontological questions and later explicitly ethical questions.

Marci Shore is associate professor of history at Yale University.  She is the translator of Michał Głowiński's The Black Seasons and the author of Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation's Life and Death in Marxism, 1918-1968.  Currently she is at work on a book project titled “Phenomenological Encounters: Scenes from Central Europe,” an examination of the history of phenomenology and existentialism in East-Central Europe.

Co-sponsored by the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies, Department of History, and the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages

* NOTE:  The venue has been changed to the Barnes/McDowell Rooms at the Fisher Conference Center in the Arrillaga Alumni Center.

Professor Marci Shore will be speaking on the topic of her recent book, The Taste of Ashes: The Afterlife of Totalitarianism in Easten Europe.  The collapse of communism opened the archives, illuminating the tragedy of twentieth-century Eastern Europe: there were moments in which no decisions were innocent, in which all possible choices caused suffering.  The Taste of Ashes is an account of the darker side of the revolutions of 1989, when the ghost of communism--no longer Marx’s “specter to come"--became a haunting presence of the past.

Marci Shore is associate professor of history at Yale University.  She is the translator of Michał Głowiński's The Black Seasons and the author of Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation's Life and Death in Marxism, 1918-1968.  Currently she is at work on a book project titled “Phenomenological Encounters: Scenes from Central Europe,” an examination of the history of phenomenology and existentialism in East-Central Europe.

Co-sponsored by the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies, Taube Center for Jewish Studies and the Department of History.