Rajko Grlic was born 1947 in Zagreb, Croatia. He graduated a feature film directing from the FAMU Film Academy in Prague, Czech Republic. He has directed and cowritten ten theatrical feature films, including Border Post in 2006 and Josephine in 2002.

His films have been distributed all around the world and shown in competition at many major film festivals. They have received more than fifty international awards, including the Tokyo International Film Festival Grand Prix and Best Director.

He has written nine produced feature screenplays and two television serials. He has received numerous awards for writing, including a UNESCO award, FIPRESCI award, and Peter Kastner award. He has produced four theatrical feature films and five short films. He has also directed three television documentary serials and a dozen short films.

Grlic is Ohio Eminent Scholar in Film at Ohio University, Athens, OH and Artistic Director of Motovun Film Festival, Croatia.

Sponsored by the Mediterranean Forum, the Film and Media Studies Program, the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies, CREES, and the Forum on Contemporary Europe.

Rajko Grlic was born 1947 in Zagreb, Croatia. He graduated a feature film directing from the FAMU Film Academy in Prague, Czech Republic. He has directed and cowritten ten theatrical feature films, including Border Post in 2006 and Josephine in 2002.

His films have been distributed all around the world and shown in competition at many major film festivals. They have received more than fifty international awards, including the Tokyo International Film Festival Grand Prix and Best Director.

He has written nine produced feature screenplays and two television serials. He has received numerous awards for writing, including a UNESCO award, FIPRESCI award, and Peter Kastner award. He has produced four theatrical feature films and five short films. He has also directed three television documentary serials and a dozen short films.

Grlic is Ohio Eminent Scholar in Film at Ohio University, Athens, OH and Artistic Director of Motovun Film Festival, Croatia.

Sponsored by the Mediterranean Forum, the Film and Media Studies Program, the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies, CREES, and the Forum on Contemporary Europe.

Cosponsored with the German Studies Department.

Karl Heinz Bohrer is a journalist, literary editor, professor and magazine editor. He received his doctorate from the University of Heidelberg in 1962 and studied

history, philosophy, German literature, and sociology. His dissertation was on the Geschichtsphilosophie of the German Romantics.

He was appointed Professor for Modern German Literary History at the University of Bielefeld in 1982, where he currently leads a group working on aesthetic theory. In 1983, he became editor (since 1991 co-editor with Kurt Scheel) of the influential Merkur, the "German journal of European thought."

As editor and co-editor of Merkur, Bohrer has attempted to steer aesthetics into the center of public discourse in Germany; Merkur's contents have shifted accordingly in emphasis from the political to the aesthetic realm, but without abandoning commentary on current affairs. The politics of Merkur are at the same time controversial and disengaged, strident and independent.

"Ethnicity in Today's Europe" will commence with a Related Presidential Lecture featuring Partha Chatterjee.

Conference Statement

Headlines today blaze with stories about the fate of Europe. There is a sense, both in Europe and around the world, that a sort of "tipping point" has been reached. A recurrent theme is the question of demographics. For instance, how are European social welfare systems going to cope with an aging population? What role will immigrants from outside Europe's borders, both recent and less recent, play in European society? What will be the impact of immigration between the member states of the European Union? What place will Europe's growing population of Muslims have in twenty-first century Europe?

As the ongoing process of unification redraws Europe's borders, as the populations of major European cities become more and more diverse, the question of ethnicity is at the forefront of many of the most important debates on the continent. On the one hand the long history of European national and ethnic identities is at play, as is the legacy of colonialism. On the other, a significant recent upswing in the movement of peoples around the globe has changed the face of Europe, often literally. Movement, of course, from outside Europe's borders into European states. But also, and crucially, movement within the space between Portugal and the Urals. Such movement certainly responds to a number of economic and social needs. At the same time, European conceptions of citizenship, equity, and nationhood often exist in tension with the realities of changing ethnic populations.

The conference "Ethnicity in Today's Europe" at Stanford will address this topic in an interdisciplinary manner. Participants will focus on the question: "What's new about the situation in Europe today?" Bringing together scholars from different disciplines, the conference will provide a historical perspective together with contributions addressing economic, social, cultural, and political issues. Some themes that may be discussed include: how the current situation mirrors or departs from the past; the role of the media in portraying the interaction between different groups; the different perspectives of specific populations within Europe; whether Europe's diversity is best described under the rubric of ethnicity, nationality, race, or some other term; similarities and differences between European nation-states with regard to diversity within their borders. Above all, participants will use their own disciplinary perspective to assess what is at stake in the interaction between peoples in Europe as the twenty-first century gets underway.

"Ethnicity in Today's Europe" is jointly presented by the Forum on Contemporary Europe and the Stanford Humanities Center.