In societies with continuous in-and-out migration in relatively short periods the formation of dominant culture comes into shape as "popular". Continental theories for defining people's culture mostly assume some permanent structures (cultural preferences of elites or classes) in modern societies, yet not so successful for explaining the rise of popular cultures in societies like the USA. Turkey, as a country of migratory waves from its birth, is a pristine example of such a process and unique for its elites' interventions into the cultural sphere. The talk is broadly concerns with three dynamics on the formation of Turkish popular culture - demographic transition, elitist cultural policies, and partly oppositional character of people's taste.

Orhan Tekelioğlu is Chair of Department of New Media at Bahçeşehir University (Istanbul, Turkey) and Visiting Scholar at the University of Pennyslvania’s Annenberg School of Communication.  He is a scholar of cultural sociology including such research fields as media consumption, the history of Turkish popular music, the sociological features of Turkish literature, and the cultural politics of the Republican period. He received his Ph.D. in Sociology from the Middle Eastern Technical University (Ankara, Turkey) and his Magisterartium degree in Sociology from the University of Oslo. He taughted in Departments of Political Science and Turkish Literature at the Bilkent University in Ankara, in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at Ohio State University, and acted as Acting Dean of the Faculty of Communication at the Izmir University of Economics. Dr. Tekelioğlu conducts field studies on popular television dramas and reality shows, and history of jazz and popular music in Istanbul. He has published articles in Turkish and in English and submitted papers to numerous national and international congresses. Among his publications are Pop Ekran [Pop Screen, 2013], Pop Yazılar, [Pop Essays, 2006], Foucault Sosyolojisi [Sociology of Foucault, 2003], Şerif Mardin’e Armağan, [A Festschrift for Şerif Mardin, 2005), "Modernizing reforms and Turkish music in the 1930s"  (Turkish Studies, 2001), and “Two Incompatible Positions in the Challenge Against the Individual Subject of Modernity” (Theory& Psychology, 1997).

Co-sponsored by the Mediterranean Studies Forum, Program on Urban Studies, the Europe Center, and Turkish Students Association

When Galileo’s telescope arrived in Madrid in 1610, it not only changed the course of local science, but also became a pivotal image in the critique of contemporary society once it was incorporated into the lexicon of satires, emblems, sonnets, and allegorical dreams as anteojo de larga vista.  The passages analyzed in this talk help us see its rich presence in Spain, forcing us to rethink the artificial gap between scientific discourse and literary creation.

This seminar is part of The Europe Center's Iberian Studies Program seminar series.

“In the fields with which we are concerned, knowledge [Erkenntnis] comes only in lightning flashes. The text is the long roll of thunder that follows,” This sentence from his Arcades-project belongs to the most fluently cited passages of Benjamin’s work. However, in contrast to many reading the lecture argues that this has not to be understood as a metaphor. Instead lightening flash and image function as words mutually replacing each other in order to describe a mode of sudden, simultaneous recognition / knowledge that is at the centre of his image-based epistemology.

This lecture argues that this epistemology is informed by (1) an intense study of paintings and other pieces of visual arts and (2) the engagement with the development of media technology in modernity. Whereas the younger Benjamin studied the perceptive mode of visual art as a site of afterlife of an epiphanic mode of insight he later, in the context of his project on modernity, turned this mode of knowledge, due to the invention of electricity and technical media, into a modern epistemology. Through a kind of breaking in of technique into iconography many of its conventional figures were turned into epistemological constellations. In this way Benjamin developed a theory of knowledge and history based in simultaneity.

Co-sponsored by the Department of German Studies, Department of Comparative Literature,  Stanford Humanities Center, Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, Department of English, Program in Modern Thought and Literature, and the Interdisciplinary Working Group in Critical Theory.

The Europe Center invites you to attend this special event with opening remarks by co-hosts Amir Eshel, Abbas Milani, and Tobias Wolff

All interested faculty and students from all fields are invited to to join us for this open discussion. Thoughts and comments are welcome from all angles of analysis and about the myriad contexts and consequences of the years of the Rushdie affair: historical and present-day religion and its intersection with politics, the poetics of Rushdie’s new book, principles of free speech, authorial ethics and responsibility, international law, extra-juridical and political protections and persecutions, and the way the conflict was brought to a close with models and challenges for post-conflict reconciliation.

Co-sponsored by the Stanford Initiative for Religious and Ethnic Understanding and Coexistence, supported by the President’s Fund, The Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity, the Religious Studies Department, and the Taube Center for Jewish Studies