General Public

Theodora Patrona teaches literary courses at the School of English of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki as special teaching fellow. She has published extensively on Greek American and Italian American literature and film, and regularly reviews for journals and sites abroad. Dr Patrona is the author of Return Narratives: Ethnic Space in Late Twentieth Century Greek American and Italian American Literature(Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2017), and coeditor of Redirecting Ethnic Singularity: Italian Americans and Greek Americans in Conversation (Fordham University Press, 2022). Dr Patrona is currently working on two projects, co-editing a volume on the unchartered cultural contribution of Greek American women and another one on the concept of the father in Italian American culture.

EVENT #2: SWEET RUINS: INFRASTRUCTURES OF THE SOCIALIST ANTHROPOCENE | Thursday, December 8, 2022, 12:00pm ET
DR. MAJA FOWKES AND DR. REUBEN FOWKES
ART HISTORIANS, CURATORS AND CO-DIRECTORS OF THE POSTSOCIALIST ART CENTRE (PACT), THE UCL INSTITUTE OF ADVANCED STUDIES
Sweet Ruins: Infrastructures of the Socialist Anthropocene
The hollowed-out spaces of derelict sugar factories documented by Slovak artist Ilona Németh in the project Eastern Sugar (2018-21) register the social impact of deindustrialization and symbolize the broken promises of the post-communist transition. The demise of the East European sugar industry also raises questions about the disappearance of the culture, lifestyles, as well as attitudes and practices towards the natural world, that grew up alongside socialist infrastructures. What can be learned from the ruins of sugar factories about the distinctive socialist path through the Anthropocene and what parallels can be drawn between the rise and fall of northern sugar beet and the social and environmental histories of southern sugar cane?
Dr. Maja Fowkes and Dr. Reuben Fowkes are art historians, curators and co-directors of the Postsocialist Art Centre (PACT) at the UCL Institute of Advanced Studies. Their publications include Art and Climate Change (Thames & Hudson, 2022), Central and Eastern European Art Since 1950 (Thames & Hudson, 2020) and Ilona Németh: Eastern Sugar (Sternberg Press, 2021). Recent curatorial projects include the exhibitions “Colliding Epistemes” at Bozar Brussels (2022) and “Potential Agrarianisms” at Kunsthalle Bratislava (2021). Their research on the “Socialist Anthropocene in the Visual Arts” is supported by a UKRI Frontier Research grant.
www.translocal.org
Virtual/Zoom Register: https://bit.ly/3EWmtcD

Professor Briggs is an expert on U.S. and international child welfare policy and on transnational and transracial adoption. Briggs’ most recent book, Taking Children: A History of American Terror (University of California Press, 2020), examines the 400-year-old history of the United States’ use of taking children from marginalized communities—from the taking of Black and Native children during America’s founding to the Donald Trump’s policy of family separation for Central American migrants and asylum seekers at the U.S./Mexico border—as a violent tool for political ends.

On November 9, 2022, please join the Fortunoff Archive, the Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies Program, the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, and the Baltic Studies Program for The Shoah in Lithuania: A Different Approach; New Insights, presented by Dr. Christoph Dieckmann (Vienna Wiesenthal Institute). Timothy Snyder (Richard C. Levin Professor of History and faculty advisor to the Fortunoff Archive) will introduce the program and Bradley Woodworth (Baltic Studies Program Manager) will provide comments.
About 420,000 people were murdered during the German occupation of Lithuania 1941-1944. Almost half of the victims were Jews, close to 200,000 from Lithuania in the borders of 1941 and 5,800 Jews from Germany, Austria and France. About 170,000 Soviet Prisoners of War were shot and starved, mostly during the first nine months of occupation. Dieckmann takes a new look at the relation between warfare, occupation policy and mass crimes. Working with hardly-known German and Lithuanian sources, the context of decisions for mass crimes and the Shoah might become both more complicated and clearer.
Dr. Christoph Dieckmann is the William Rosenberg Senior Scholar at the Fortunoff Video Archive. He taught Modern European History at Keele University, United Kingdom, researched Yiddish historiography of the Russian Civil War at the Fritz Bauer Institut in Frankfurt am Main, and has worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bern on the project “Sounds of anti-Jewish Persecution.” At present he is teaching – mostly via Zoom – at Haifa University in the Weiss-Livnat International Program of Holocaust Studies. His study Deutsche Besatzungspolitik in Litauen 1941-1944 [German Occupation Policy in Lithuania 1941-1944] was published in 2011 and was awarded the Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research in 2012. He co-edited the Deskcalendar Heinrich Himmlers 1941/42 (Hamburg 1999), and has published on ghettos (2009) and the impact of German warfare on mass crimes (2015). His latest publications include 2021’s How Did It Happen? Understanding the Holocaust Lithuanian with author Ruta Vanagaite, based on a series of talks with Dieckmann on the common history of Germany and Lithuania in Europe during the Shoah. In spring 2022, Dieckmann and Arkadi Zeltser edited Distrust, Animosity, Solidarity, a book by Yad Vashem Publications on the relation of Jews and Non-Jews during the Shoah in the Soviet Union.

The EU Studies Program welcomes Secretary-General Klaus Welle, of the European Parliament to Yale University to present on “Europe and the War in Ukraine: Russia’s Intent and Impacts on the EU System and Transatlantic Relations”
In person: Luce Hall, Rm 202, 34 Hillhouse Ave.
Virtual Registration/Zoom Link: https://bit.ly/YaleEUNov1
Klaus Welle, Secretary General of the European Parliament, will talk about the politics of Russia’s war on Ukraine - looking why President Putin launched the war, what he hopes to achieve both in Europe and in shifting the wider geopolitical balance, how the war is changing the policies and institutions of the European Union, and what the implications are for the future of Transatlantic relations. After opening remarks, he will be happy to take questions on the Ukraine war and other aspects of contemporary European politics.
Klaus Welle has been Secretary General of the European Parliament, a key administrative post in the European Union political system in Brussels , since 2009. He previously served as chief of staff to the President of the European Parliament, as Director General for EU Internal Policies in the Parliament’s administration, and as Secretary General successively of the (center-right) European People’s Party (EPP) transnational political party and of the EPP political group in the European Parliament. Mr Welle started his career as a banker and then became head of European and foreign policy at the headquarters of the CDU party in Germany, working closely with then Chancellor Helmut Kohl. He is also a visiting professor in European politics at KU Leuven University in Belgium.
This lecture is generously supported by: George Herbert Walker, Jr. Lecture Fund in International Studies at the Yale MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies. Co-Sponsored by the Yale MacMillan Center’s Program on EU Studies and the European Studies Council