From October 1 through November 12, join the Nanovic Institute, Department of Political Science, and Notre Dame International for a new lecture series, “Europe in Context.” The lectures will be every Thursday from 11:10 a.m. to 12:25 p.m. online
This lecture series will foster a deeper understanding of the broader social and political context of European countries and will encourage you to engage broadly with ideas surrounding global citizenship. The series will pay special attention to the idea of the traveler as an informal ambassador, aimed at creating greater awareness and heightened engagement through its rotating lectures (listed below) by faculty who include native Europeans and experts on European phenomena and countries:
OCTOBER 1: AN INTRODUCTION TO EUROPE
McAdams has written widely on European affairs, especially on central Europe. His books include "East Germany and Detente, Germany Divided, Judging the Past in Unified Germany," and "The Crisis of Modern Times." His latest book, "Vanguard of the Revolution: The Global Idea of the Communist Party" (Princeton University Press, 2017) examines the political history of the party from the 1840s to the present. Covering the panoply of communist parties from Germany to Russia, China, Poland, North Korea, Cuba, and many others, the book is the first comprehensive international history of the communist party. "Vanguard of the Revolution" was named one of the Best Books of 2018 by "Foreign Affairs." He is now working on the topic of “European and American New Right Thinkers and the Threat to Liberal Democracy.”
OCTOBER 8: GERMANY
Add to Google Calendar (Must be signed in to Gmail account)
Donahue, who holds a Ph.D. in German Literature from Harvard, is a scholar of contemporary German literature and film. The author of “Holocaust as Fiction: Bernhard Schlink’s ‘Nazi’ Novels and Their Films” and “The End of Modernism: Elias Canetti’s Auto-da-Fé,” he is a concurrent professor of Film, Television, and Theatre. He also served as chair of Notre Dame’s Department of German and Russian Languages and Literatures.
A fellow of the Nanovic Institute since 2015, Donahue is co-director of the Notre Dame Berlin Seminar, which brings American scholars of German literary and cultural studies together with experts and leading figures of Germany’s literary scene.
OCTOBER 15: IRELAND
Kevin Whelan, Michael Smurfit Director of the Notre Dame Dublin Global Gateway
Add to Google Calendar (Must be signed in to Gmail account)
Kevin Whelan, one of Ireland’s best known and widely published scholars, was named the inaugural Michael Smurfit Director of the Notre Dame Dublin Global Gateway in 1998. During his tenure, he has taught over 3,000 Notre Dame undergraduates. He has been a visiting professor at New York University, Boston College and Concordia University (Montreal). He has lectured in fourteen countries, and at the Sorbonne, Cambridge, Oxford, Torino, Berkeley, Yale, Dartmouth and Louvain. He has written or edited over twenty books and over one hundred articles on Ireland’s history, geography and culture. These include The Tree of Liberty. Radicalism, Catholicism and the Construction of Irish Identity 1760-1830 (1996), Fellowship of Freedom: The United Irishmen and the 1798 Rebellion (1998), the best selling Atlas of the Irish Rural Landscape (1997, second edition 2011), Paris: Capital of Irish Culture (2017) and Religion, landscape and settlement in Ireland 432 -2018 (2018). Among influential articles are those on ‘An underground gentry?,’ ‘The Republic in the Village,’ ‘The Memories of “The Dead”’ and ‘The Green Atlantic.’ From 1999 to 2011 he directed the annual Irish Seminar, the leading seminar in the field of Irish Studies, whose faculty has included Edward Said, Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, Edna O’Brien, Homi Bhabha, Fred Jameson and Benedict Anderson.
OCTOBER 22: THE SOUTHERN MEDITERRANEAN
Maurizio Albahari, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology
Add to Google Calendar (Must be signed in to Gmail account)
Maurizio Albahari is associate professor of anthropology and a concurrent associate professor in the Keough School of Global Affairs. Albahari is a social-cultural anthropologist (Ph.D., U.C. Irvine) who explores the tension between human existence and structures of power. He is the author of Crimes of Peace: Mediterranean Migrations at the World’s Deadliest Border, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press as part of its Series in Human Rights (2015).
Albahari has published extensively on the humanitarian, socio-cultural, legal, and geopolitical components of the ongoing refugee “crisis,” as well as on forms of civic engagement and migrant integration. His current research traces modalities of participatory citizenship and trans-Mediterranean mobilization emerging in the everyday life of maritime spaces, as well as of changing cities in Italy and in the region. It seeks to capture, ethnographically and conceptually, emerging practices of engaged citizenship that might be maritime, urban, and local, but not parochial; coherently political, but not institutionalized; transnational, but not national in the first place.
Albahari’s research has appeared in Anthropology Today, Anthropological Quarterly, Anthropology News, Social Research, InTraformazione, and the Journal on Migration and Human Security. He also has also written for media outlets including History News Network, openDemocracy, Diritti Globali, Mobilizing Ideas, Perspektif, Fox News, and CNN.
OCTOBER 29: EASTERN EUROPE
Susanne Wengle, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science
Add to Google Calendar (Must be signed in to Gmail account)
Susanne Wengle holds a PhD in political science from the University of California at Berkeley. Before coming to Notre Dame, she conducted research and taught at the University of Chicago.
Wengle’s research focuses on the politics of markets regulations. Her book Post-Soviet Power: State-led Development and Russia’s Marketization (2015, Cambridge University Press) examines the political economy of newly created electricity markets in Russia. Wengle also has conducted research on welfare reforms and the politics of expertise in post-Soviet Russia. She currently is studying agriculture and food production in Russia and the United States.
Wengle’s articles have appeared in Governance & Regulation, Studies in Comparative International Development, Economy and Society, Europe-Asia Studies, the Chicago Policy Review and the Russian Analytical Digest. She also has contributed to the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage blog.
NOVEMBER 5: FRANCE
Add to Google Calendar (Must be signed in to Gmail account)
Professor Rice specializes in 20th- and 21st-century Francophone literature. Her teaching and research interests include autobiography, critical theory, postcolonial studies, immigrant and second-generation literature, translation theory, contemporary women's writing, music in literature, and "Francophonie" in a large sense. Her first book, Time Signatures: Contextualizing Contemporary Francophone Autobiographical Writing from the Maghreb (Lexington Books 2006), closely examines the work of Hélène Cixous, Assia Djebar, and Abdelkébir Khatibi. Her second book, Polygraphies: Francophone Women Writing Algeria (University of Virginia Press, 2012), focuses on autobiographical writings by seven of the most prominent francophone women writers from Algeria today. Her current book project, inspired by a series of filmed interviews she conducted in Paris, explores the present proliferation of women writers of French from around the world.
NOVEMBER 12: THE UNITED KINGDOM
Add to Google Calendar (Must be signed in to Gmail account)
Before coming to Notre Dame, Sedmak was the FD Maurice Professor for Moral Theology and Social Theology at King’s College London. He has held multiple positions at the University of Salzburg, serving as Director of the Center for Ethics and Poverty Research and Chair for Epistemology and Philosophy of Religion. Sedmak also was President of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Social Ethics in Salzburg.
Sedmak holds doctoral degrees in philosophy, theology and social theory. Born in Austria, he has studied at the University of Innsbruck, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich), Maryknoll (New York) and the University of Linz. He has been a visiting professor at the Jomo Kenyatta University in Nairobi, the Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines, the University of Jena in Germany, the Vienna Business University, and the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City. He also is a concurrent professor at Notre Dame’s Center for Social Concerns.
For questions about this lecture series, which is also available as a one-credit course, please contact Nanovic Student Programs Assistant Manager Anna Dolezal at adolezal@nd.edu.