Upcoming Events!

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.

Deroose will discuss the Maastricht criteria and the key features and design flaws of EMU. Then he will discuss the economic impact and institutional consequences of the financial crisis/recession. Finally, he will explore how to complete EMU and what the various reform proposals and future paths available are. 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]

Kyriell Palaeologue is a 27-year-old musician, composer and music theorist. He was born in Russia and graduated from Tchaikovsky Institute of Arts in Chelyabinsk. He came to the US in 2014 and presently resides in Boston/ Kyriell will talk about Urbanism in the arts and in music in particular. He will concentrate on Pacific 231 by Arthur Honegger, an outstanding example of music of the turn of the 20th century and a piece of music marked by Urbanist tendencies. edamrien@bu.edu. [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]

Polina Barskova, Associate Professor of Russian Literature at Hampshire College and one of Russia's most famous poets, presents The Living Pictures, a collection of short stories, essays, and a play that explore life during the World War II–era siege of Leningrad. The Living Pictures brought Barskova the Andrei Bely Prize, Russia’s oldest independent literary award, in November 2015, and has drawn praise from numerous critics. Moderated by Alexis Peri, Assistant Professor of History at Boston University.

Polina Barskova received her B.A. from St. Petersburg State University and her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. Her scholarly publications include articles on Nabokov, the Bakhtin brothers, early Soviet film, and the aestheticization of historical trauma, primarily, culture of the Siege of Leningrad (1941-1944). She is the author of eight books of poetry and one book of prose in Russian. Three books of her poetry in English translation have been published recently: This Lamentable City (Tupelo Press), Zoo in Winter (Melville House Press), and Relocations (Zephyr Press). [More info]

The Center for the Study of Europe at Boston University, in collaboration with Chaliapin Center, presents Slavic Voices, a night of Russian language poetry and music. Renowned poet Polina Barskova will read from her own poems and from an anthology of poems composed during the winter of 1942, the most severe winter of the Nazi Siege of Leningrad (1941-1944). Polina Barskova’s reading will be accompanied by Slavic music performances by Olga Lisovskaya, Alex Polyakov, and Fred Van Ness. A reception and booksigning follow the event.

Please visit our website for full program and ticket information. Ticket includes reception with traditional Russian appetizers, wine, and grautity.

Lola Lafon, with a French, Russian and Polish background, was raised in the equally diverse cities of Bucharest, Sofia and Paris. Her first love was dance, but then she turned to writing. Her novels tackle several ideological themes such as capitalism, antifascism, utopia or feminism. Lafon is politically engaged in several collectives, addressing feminist questions and concerns; while she runs writing workshops aimed towards underserved or disadvantaged youth populations. Lola will be discussing her latest novel in English translation, The Little Communist Who Never Smiled (Seven Stories Press, 2016, translated by Nick Caistor). This fictionalized account of the life of Nadia Comaneci, a child of communist Romania and an Olympic gymnast who inspired young girls around the globe, shows how a single athletic event mesmerizes the world and reverberates across nations.

Refreshments will be available, and a book-signing will follow the talk. Co-sponsored by the Association Francophone de Boston University - AFBU. [More info]

Join us for a lunch discussion on Germany's role in the EU and beyond with Thorsten Benner, Director of the Global Public Policy Institute (GPPi) in Berlin, an independent non-profit think tank he co-founded in 2003 inspired by his experience in the US, and Amb. Kurt Volker, former United States Permanent Representative to NATO.

“Too big for a balance of power in Europe and too small for hegemony.” That is how historian Ludwig Dehio described the German dilemma after unification in 1871. The European Union was supposed to do away with this by embedding Germany in a system of institutions. Still, many fear that 25 years after reunification Germany finds itself again in the trap of “not being powerful enough to impose its will on the continent, but at the same time powerful enough to be perceived as a threat by other powers.” What answers does the German role in the three defining crises of the past years (Eurozone debt, Ukraine/Russia and refugees) provide?

Free and open to the public. Lunch provided. RSVP to edamrien@bu.edu. [More info]