Speaker: Paul W. Kroll, University of Colorado

Medieval Chinese poetry, like most self-consciously traditional literature, embraces learning, presumption, and intertextuality with ardor. Scholarship delights to roam in these fields which provide rich fare for the mind. But those moments that suddenly engage the heart (a somewhat neglected organ in the postmodern era) affect us at a deeper level. It is for these irregular but personally cherished splendors and miseries that one continues to read throughout a lifetime. In this lecture readings and...

Read more about Fairbank Center: Personal Moments in Medieval Chinese Poetry with Paul W. Kroll

Co-sponsored by the Early Modern History Workshop and the GSAS workshop “Post-Classicisms: Literary Secondariness in Antiquity and Beyond"

Jan Bloemendal (Huyghens Institute, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Princeton University), “Multi-lingualism in Early modern Europe: Readings of the Praise of Folly.“

Earle Havens (Curator of Rare Books, John Hopkins University)

Drawing on Odessa Recollected, a new collection of her Odessa articles, the historian Patricia Herlihy will discuss how in many respects Jews adopted Odessa as their city more than did any other inhabitants. Present there only in small numbers at the beginning, Jews came to form one third of Odessa’s population by the 1917 Revolution. While some Greeks and Italians made fortunes in the grain trade, only Jews boasted that one could “live like God in Odessa.” At the same time, pious Jews declared that the fires of hell burned around the city. What were the patterns and...

Read more about Davis Center: Jewish Odessa: Trade, Community, and Culture in the Port City

In her personal memoir of Joseph Brodsky, his American friend and publisher Ellendea Proffer Teasley offers much previously unknown material about the great poet’s life in Leningrad, his leaving Russia and his career in the New World. Written in English, Teasley’s book had first come out in Russia to enjoy phenomenal reception and become a bestseller. In 2017 it was finally published in Boston by Academic Studies Press, in a book series on Jews of Russia and Eastern Europe. In her presentation, Dr. Teasley will discuss her book about Brodsky, how she wrote it, and how it was received...

Read more about Davis Center: Brodsky Among Us: One Book, Two Cultures

Speaker(s): 

Ulia Popova Gosart, Visiting Scholar, Institute for the Study of Human Rights, Columbia University

Sponsored by the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies.

For more information, please call 617-495-4037.

National, ethnic, and cultural difference always had a complicated relationship with Marxism in the Soviet Union. From the earliest days of Soviet power, the question of how to make sense of difference, and how to manage it, engaged leading Soviet intellectuals and politicians, including Lenin and Stalin. In the 1960s through 1980s, however, national and cultural differences were increasingly redefined as civilizational differences. One of the leading groups in pushing for a closer assessment of “civilizational” differences were critical intellectuals and policy advisers, who believed...

Read more about Davis Center: Nodari Simonia and the Cultural Turn in Soviet Marxism

Speaker(s): 

Andrew Kahn, Professor of Russian Literature and Fellow of St. Edmund Hall, Oxford University

Cosponsored by the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies and the Gochman Lecture Series, Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures.

For more information, please call 617-495-4037.

Seminar on Russian and Eurasian Jewry

This talk focuses on the presence and the role of Jewish émigrés from Russia in Italy in 1905-1922. During this period many Jewish-Russian intellectuals and revolutionaries found both a shelter and a fertile ground for their activities in Italy—above all in Rome, Naples, Florence, Milan and on the Ligurian coast. Several Jewish representatives of the socialist movement (for instance, Mark Slonim) as well as Zionism (Vl. Zhabotinsky first and foremost) were...

Read more about Davis Center: Russian Jews in Italy: 1905-1922

Seminar on Russian and Eurasian Jewry

Ellen G. Friedman’s presentation centers on the largely unknown story of Polish Jews who were saved from Hitler by Stalin. This story is at the center of her new book, The Seven, A Family Holocaust Story. Of the 3.3 million Jews in Poland before WWII, only about 350,000 survived, most of them by being banished to remote areas in the USSR. The reasons for the obscurity of this Holocaust narrative relate to its being the “wrong”...

Read more about Davis Center: The Wrong Family Holocaust Story: Survival of Polish Jews in Stalin's Russia

Speaker(s): 

Stephen Kotkin, John P. Birkelund '52 Professor in History and International Affairs; Co-Director, Program in History and the Practice of Diplomacy; Director, Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, Princeton University

Sponsored by the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies.

For more information, please call 617-495-4037.

This panel discussion marks the fiftieth anniversary of the 1968 Paris protests and will focus on the ongoing legacy of the 1968 "occupation" of public space in contemporary politics. Following this dialogue, join CES for the opening of our new exhibit in the Jacek E. Giedrojc Gallery, entitled “Occupying Paris: 1968 and the Spaces of Protest," which maps out the spaces of protest along the Seine, leveraging the spectacular collection of Paris 1968 posters held at Harvard’s Houghton Library as well as photos from Yale’s Beinecke Library.

SPEAKERS

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Read more about CES Special Event & Art Exhibit Opening: Occupying Paris: 1968 and the Spaces of Protest

No one did more to promote the thought of Raymond Aron in the United States than his mentee Stanley Hoffmann. Aron, the French Cold War liberal, profoundly influenced Hoffmann's thinking on international relations theory and French political history. In many ways some of Hoffmann's most profound political insights of the 1950s and 1960s were appropriations of Aron's thought that he was the first to introduce in the United States. Yet, by the 1970s, Hoffmann began to distance himself from the conservative turn in Aron's thought. He criticized Aron's views of May 1968, his negative...

Read more about Harvard Colloquium for Intellectual History: Resisting Neoconservatism: Explaining the Intellectual Evolution of Stanley Hoffmann's Relationship with Raymond Aron

Asia Center Seminar Series

Professor Daisy Yan Du, Harvard-Yenching Visiting Scholar: Assistant Professor, Division of Humanities, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Sponsored by the Harvard University Asia Center

Asia Center Special Event

Professor Michael Szonyi, Author; Director, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies; Professor of Chinese History, Harvard University

Chair: Professor Karen Thornber, Victor and William Fung Director, Harvard University Asia Center; Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations and of Comparative Literature, Harvard University

Discussants:

Professor Peter Bol, Charles H. Carswell Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations; Vice Provost...

Read more about Asia Center: Book Talk: The Art of Being Governed: Everyday Politics in Late Imperial China