Upcoming Events!

“When an author decides to write about violence, there is always the danger that the author herself or the reader or both fall under the seduction of violence, and that, instead of condemning it, they either glorify it or trivialise it. Yet, a writer cannot turn away from the reality of violence - especially in a increasingly tumultuous world. Are there limits to what can written about? Should writers question their own motivations when addressing such issues? And do they come out of it unscathed?”.

Ananda Devi is a novelist and scholar born in Trois-Boutiques, Mauritius in 1957. She has lived in Ferney-Voltaire, France since 1989, after having spent some years in Congo-Brazzaville. As an ethnologist and a translator, Devi is sensitive to the interconnection between identites and languages. Her incisive, lyrical and shrewd style offers the French language new cultural and linguistic scope linked to her native island.

Co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Europe, the African Studies Program, and the Department of Romance Studies. Refreshments will be available; a book-signing will follow the talk. [More info]

Join us for a conversation on the emerging geopolitical situation in Europe. Will new security threats in Europe save NATO?

Krzysztof Szczerski is State Secretary in the Chancellery of the President of the Republic of Poland and Associate Professor of International and Political Studies at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, where he received his PhD in 2001. Vesko Garčević is Professor of the Practice of International Relations at Boston University and Former Ambassador of Montenegro in Brussels (NATO) and Vienna (OSCE). Igor Lukes is Professor of History and International Relations at Boston University.

RSVP to eventsps@bu.edu. [More info]

Join us for a lecture by cultural agitator, media activist and a transdisciplinary philosopher Franco "Bifo" Berardi. Berardi is an Italian Marxist theorist and activist in the autonomist tradition. His work mainly focuses on the role of the media and information technology within post-industrial capitalism. One of the founders of the notorious Radio Alice, a pirate radio station that became the voice of the autonomous youth movement of Bologna in the late 1970s, Bifo is the author of multiple works of political theory, including, among others, And: Phenomenology of the End, (Semiotext(e), 2015), Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide (Verso, 2014), The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance (Semiotext(e), 2012), After the Future (AK Press, 2011), and The Soul at Work (Semiotext(e), 2010).

Moderated by Nicholas Knouf, Assistant Professor of Cinema and Media Studies, Wellesley College. A reception and booksigning will follow the lecture. [More info]

Joachim Fritz-Vannahme, director of the think tank Europe’s Future at the Bertelsmann Stiftung, discusses the future of Europe, what “Europe” means, and what its next steps ought to be. These are important matters also for Americans, given the interdependence of the global economy, the global nature of the challenges that confront us, and the different routes the world may take depending on the path Europe chooses.

Moderated by Vivien Schmidt, Professor of International Relations and Political Science at Boston University, and Founding Director of BU’s Center for the Study of Europe. Prof. Schmidt's research focuses on European political economy, institutions, democracy, and political theory. [More info]

Join us for a lunch discussion with Servaas Deroose, Deputy Director-General, Directorate-General Economics and Financial Affairs (ECFIN), European Commission. Servaas Deroose has been Deputy Director-General at the European Commission's Directorate-General for Economic and Financial Affairs since 2010. In this capacity, he co-ordinates the DG's work on EU governance, integrated macroeconomic surveillance, EU2020, competitiveness and fiscal policy. Mr. Deroose is currently the Commission's Mission Chief for Greece's economic adjustment programme. He has been a member of the Economic and Financial Committee since 2005.

Moderated by Vivien Schmidt, Jean Monnet Professor of European Integration and Director of the Center for the Study of Europe. Lunch provided. Open to BU community and others with a research interest in the topic. RSVP to edamrien@bu.edu. [More info]

Join us for a reading and conversation with Enrique Vila-Matas. Born in Barcelona in 1948, Vila-Matas is one of Spain’s most original and celebrated literary voices. He is the recipient of numerous international literary prizes, including the FIL Award in 2015, and been longlisted and shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. His works, which have been translated into thirty-seven languages, traverse the borders between fiction, essay, and biography. His most recent publications in English are Because She Never Asked and Illogic of Kassel. Vampire in Love, a collection of his short fiction, is forthcoming from New Directions this fall.

Moderated by Christopher Maurer, Professor of Spanish, Boston University. A reception and book-signing will follow the event. [More info]

Please join us for a reading and conversation with Austrian-Slovenian author Maja Haderlap and translator Tess Lewis. Haderlap will read from her recent novel, Angel of Oblivion (Archipelago Books, August, 2016), which is based on the experiences of her family and the Slovenian-speaking minority in southern Austria, many of whom fought as partisans against the Nazis during the Second World War. The story centers on the experiences of a young girl learning to navigate the terrain between two hostile communities and two extremely burdened languages: Slovenian, a language of heroic resistance and continued humiliation, and German, an escape from her stifling rural upbringing but also the language of the camps which her grandmother barely survived and many other family members didn’t.

A reception and book-signing will follow the event. [More info]

“It’s easier to imagine the end of the world," theorist Fredric Jameson once remarked, “than to imagine the end of capitalism.” Initially, this imagining took a grim and dystopian form: at the height of the financial crisis, with the global economy seemingly in full collapse, the end of capitalism looked like it might be the beginning of an anarchic and violent period of misery. However, the spread of global protests from Cairo and Hong Kong to Wall Street and Madrid has shattered this myth of capitalism’s absoluteness by demanding that an alternative is not only necessary, but better.

Join us for a presentation followed by a Q&A moderated by Nicole Aschoff (The New Prophets of Capital) on the the current state of radical politics and the emerging futures that may result. A reception and book-signing will follow the event. [More info]