General Public

Complexities of Resistance: Partisan Films from Eastern Europe and the Balkans Film Series presents a film screening of DON’T LOOK BACK, MY SON (Ne Okreći Se, Sine)
SR Croatia, 1956. 111 minutes. 35mm print. Croatian Cinematheque, Zagreb.
Directed by Branko Bauer

on Saturday, February 03, 2024, 7:00 p.m.
Humanities Quadrangle, Screening Room L01
320 York Street, New Haven, CT 06511
Free and open to the public | All films will be shown with English subtitles

A partisan (played by Yugoslav acting giant Bert Sotlar) is faced with the dual tasks of rescuing his son from a boarding school run by Croatian fascists, and of liberating the boy from the ideology with which he has been inculcated. Bauer’s masterpiece is at once a superb family melodrama and a probing investigation into the nature of political conviction.

Sponsors:
Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund; Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies Program; European Studies Council; Whitney Humanities Center; Yale Film Archive; Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures; and Film and Media Studies Program

About the Film Series: In the aftermath of World War II, several European states started reconstructing and reimagining their identities and recent histories by producing a vast number of films that celebrated and commemorated their guerrilla struggles against fascism. These films ranged in scope and ambition from intimate psychological dramas to overblown military spectacles, from elegiac recollections to pure pulp fiction. Similar to Hollywood westerns, partisan films were the defining genre of the socialist film industry for a significant period. Moreover, in the late 60s and early 70s, both genres reinvented themselves and underwent a political revision that ended their respective “classical periods.” Despite being hugely successful in their domestic markets and often cinematically accomplished, many examples of the partisan films never traveled abroad, and most film prints today remain locked up and in dire need of preservation in various national film archives. Aside from a handful of canonical works, the majority of films we will screen have never been shown in the U.S.

Musical Visualization, The Path to Creator’s Subconscious, a Lecture-Concert, featuring George Borisov (USA) and Konstantin Semilakovs (Austria)

Location: Sudler Hall, 2nd fl, William L. Harkness Hall, 100 Wall St.

Visualization of music allows us to sneak into deep level of the creative process and explore something that may not be the composer’s deliberate intention but perhaps dictating by unknown, mystical powers. We invite you to discover with us the amazing meanings and nuances of some controversial music canvases by Alexander Scriabin, Claude Debussy, and Olivier Messiaen.

Sponsored By: The Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund and the European Studies Council of the Yale MacMillan Center

George Borisov was born and educated in Russia, a citizen of the USA since 1992. Concert pianist, educator, and musicologist. In focus of my musicological interests are reflections in music of the 20th century the processes of Russian Empire disintegration. Author of a few books, music albums, and article published in the USA, Russia, Australia, and Argentina. I have been given lectures and concerts at universities and other organizations in the United States, countries of the European Union, Australia, and China.

Konstantin Semilakovs, born 1984 in Riga, Latvia, is a classical pianist, piano professor at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna and first prize winner of the International Piano Competition in Porto. He is particularly interested in studying the phenomenon of color perception in the classical piano repertoire as well as in synaesthetic performance of the music of 19th and 20th centuries.

Konstantin Semilakovs has appeared as a soloist and chamber musician at the International Beethoven Festival Bonn, the Braunschweig Classix Festival, and at the music festivals of Schleswig-Holstein and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. Semilakovs was awarded the Classical Music Prize of WDR Radio and the City of Münster, the Hans Sikorski Memorial Award, and the Sponsorship Award of the Ingolstadt Concert Association.

Semilakovs studied with Wolfgang Manz at the University of Music in Nuremberg and with Michael Wladkowski at the École Normale de Musique Alfred Cortot in Paris.

Preceding the professorship in Vienna, he taught at the Universities of Music in Salzburg, Nuremberg and Regensburg.

ESC-YLS Colloquium #4: Rethinking Democracy in and for the European Union

Prof. Michael Wilkinson (London School of Economics)
Prof. Vivien A. Schmidt (Boston University)
Discussant and Chair: Prof. Samuel Moyn (Yale University)

Michael A. Wilkinson is Professor at LSE Law. He works in the areas of constitutional theory, European integration, and legal, political, and social theory. His monograph on Authoritarian Liberalism and the Transformation of Modern Europe (OUP, 2021) was selected as one of the ‘key books of the year on the future of Europe’ by the Review of Democracy. He recently co-edited a collection on a new approach to the study of constitutional law, The Cambridge Handbook on the Material Constitution (CUP, 2023). He has held visiting professorships at Cornell, Paris II, the National University of Singapore, and Keio University, Tokyo, and his work has been translated into Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, and Turkish.

Vivien A. Schmidt is Professor Emerita of International Relations and Political Science, Jean Monnet Professor of European Integration and Founding Director of the Center for the Study of Europe at Boston University, where she taught from 1998 to 2023. Prof. Schmidt is currently Visiting Fellow in the Schuman Center at the European University Institute in Florence, Honorary Professor at LUISS Guido Carli University in Rome, and Senior Fellow in the Zoe Institute. Over the years, she has held visiting and affiliate positions at a number of European universities. In addition to LUISS University, these include Sciences Po in Paris, the Free University of Berlin, the Free University of Brussels, the European University Institute in Florence, Oxford University, the Max Planck Institute in Cologne, and Harvard University’s Center for European Studies, where she co-chaired the EU study group from 2008 to 2023. Professor Schmidt has published extensively on European political economy, institutions, and democracy as well as on the role of ideas and discourse in political analysis (discursive institutionalism). Her latest book is Europe’s Crisis of Legitimacy: Governing by Rules and Ruling by Numbers in the Eurozone (Oxford, 2020) which received the Best Book Award (2021) from the American Political Science Association’s Ideas, Knowledge, Politics section and Honorable Mention for the Best Book Award (2019-2020) of the European Union Studies Association. Recent honors and awards include decoration as Chevalier in the French Legion of Honor, recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award of the European Union Studies Association, and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship for her current project on the ‘rhetoric of discontent,’ a transatlantic investigation of populism.

Samuel Moyn is Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University. He received a doctorate in modern European history from the University of California-Berkeley in 2000 and a law degree from Harvard University in 2001. He came to Yale from Harvard University, where he was Jeremiah Smith, Jr. Professor of Law and Professor of History. Before this, he spent 13 years in the Columbia University history department, where he was most recently James Bryce Professor of European Legal History. His areas of interest in legal scholarship include international law, human rights, the law of war, and legal thought, in both historical and current perspective. In intellectual history, he has worked on a diverse range of subjects, especially twentieth-century European moral and political theory.

Part of a colloquium series on the future of European integration co-organized by Yale’s European Studies Council and the Yale Law School European Law Association.

Event will be in person and on Zoom.

Visit the ESC-YLS Colloquium Series page to learn more about all of the events: https://europeanstudies.macmillan.yale.edu/events/esc-yls-colloquium-series

ESC-YLS Colloquium #2: EU Borders in a Post-Colonial World

The so-called European “refugee crisis” of 2015 and its aftermath have revealed the true face of the EU: a fortress keeping out third-country nationals from the former colonies leading to thousands of migrants dying in the Mediterranean or at the Belarusian borders, when they are not tortured in the Libyan prisons – financed with EU money. On the other hand, the EU has recently been praised for its solidarity with the Ukrainian refugees welcoming them on the basis of the temporary protection directive although some have denounced the racial selection behind it. This panel aims to discuss the EU as a vehicle of ‘imperial amnesia’ in light of what is happening at EU borders. The speakers will discuss the mechanisms and narrative deployed by the EU and its Member States to keep some migrants out and let others in, particularly in the broader context of post-colonialism and Eurowhiteness.

Prof. Dimitry Kochenov (Central European University)
Dr. Hans Kundnani (NYU / Royal Institute of International Affairs)
Chaired by Prof. Seyla Benhabib (Yale University / Columbia University)

Dimitry V. Kochenov leads the Rule of Law research at CEU Democracy Institute in Budapest and is Professor of Legal Studies at CEU Department of Legal Studies in Vienna. This spring he is also Malyi Fellow at Chicago Law School. Prof. Kochenov focuses on citizenship, justice, colonialism and the principles of public law and held visiting positions and fellowships at Princeton, Oxford, NYU Law School, LUISS, Turin, Osaka and UNAM inter many alia. He advises governments and international organizations in the matters of his interest and seved as the founding chairman of the Investment Mirgation Council (Geneva). His latest book Citizenship (MIT Press) was translated into several languages and reviewed in the NYRB.

Hans Kundnani is a visiting fellow at the Remarque Insitute at New York University and an Open Society Foundations Ideas Workshop fellow. He was previously the director of the Europe programme at the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) in London. His most recent book is Eurowhiteness. Culture, Empire and Race in the European Project (2023).

Seyla Benhabib is the Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy Emerita at Yale University where she taught from 2001 to 2020. She is currently Senior Research Fellow and Professor of Law Adjunct at Columbia University, and Affiliate Faculty in the Department of Philosophy. She is also a Senior Fellow at Columbia University’s Center for Contemporary Critical Thought. She is currently at work on a Monograph for Polity Press called “At the Margins of the Modern State” and has edited a collection of articles with Ayelet Shachar on Migration and Refugee topics called, Lawless Zones, Rightless Subjects: Migration and Asylum New Border Regimes.

Part of a colloquium series on the future of European integration co-organized by Yale’s European Studies Council and the Yale Law School European Law Association.

Event will be in person and on Zoom.

Visit the ESC-YLS Colloquium Series page to learn more about all of the events: https://europeanstudies.macmillan.yale.edu/events/esc-yls-colloquium-series

How were state formation and early modern politics shaped by the state’s proclaimed obligation to domestic welfare? Drawing on a wide range of historical scholarship and primary sources, this book demonstrates that a public interest-based discourse of state legitimation was common to early modern England, Japan, and China. This normative platform served as a shared basis on which state and society could negotiate and collaborate over how to attain good governance through providing public goods such as famine relief and infrastructural facilities. The terms of state legitimacy opened a limited yet significant political space for the ruled. Through petitioning and protests, subordinates could demand that the state fulfil its publicly proclaimed duty and redress welfare grievances. Conflicts among diverse dimensions of public interest mobilized cross-regional and cross-sectoral collective petitions; justified by the same norms of state legitimacy, these petitions called for fundamental political reforms and transformed the nature of politics.

Wenkai He (Ph.D., MIT, 2007), is associate professor of Social Science at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Before joining the Division of Social Science of HKUST, he was An Wang postdoctoral fellow at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University. His research interests include comparative historical analysis in social science, political economy of state formation, and the political and economic history of China. His manuscript, The Paths toward the Modern Fiscal State: Early Modern England, Meiji Japan, and Qing China, is published by the Harvard University Press in 2013. His current research project, funded by Hong Kong’s Research Grants Council (RGC), is a comparative study about legitimation of state power through social policies such as plague prevention, famine relief and river works in early modern England and 18-19th century Japan and China.