News Archive

On December 10, 2014, faculty member Dr. Agata Lisiak gave the talk "Immigrant Mothers and Cultural Memory in Berlin" at Humboldt University. In her talk, Dr. Lisiak described her current work-in-progress on how immigrant mothers makes sense of the city they live in. She discussed how immigrant mothers in Berlin's gentrified neighbourhoods navigate the intersections of various levels of local, national, and translational cultural memory and how, in turn, they communicate their understandings thereof to their children. Whereas most research on gentrification in Berlin addresses consumption patterns, processes of exclusion and inclusion, and real estate, Dr. Lisiak proposed to look at the workings of cultural memory in those neighborhoods. Further, her talk was an attempt to extend the scholarly and popular discussion on immigrant motherhood in Berlin beyond the dominant picture of low-income, stay-at-home Muslim mothers.

Meta: Type(s): Faculty | Subject(s): Bard College Berlin | Institutes(s): Bard College Berlin |

On December 11, 2014 Bard College Berlin hosted a talk by H.E. José Joaquín Chaverri Sievert, the ambassador of Costa Rica to Germany. In his talk, the ambassador introduced Costa Rica by mentioning some of the places that are renown for their natural beauty and some of the particularities of the country's political, social and educational systems. His Excellency also discussed Costa Rica's relation to the neighbouring countries and its role in the changing geopolitical framework of Central America, and gave a brief overview of the current bilateral partnerships and opportunities through which foreign students can volunteer in Costa Rica. After the presentation the ambassador took questions from the audience. In addition to his current assignment in Germany, Mr. Chaverri Sievert also serves as an ambassador to Hungary and the Czech Republic. He previously served as an ambassador of Costa Rica to Denmark and held several functions in the Costa Rican Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as well as in the radio and press business.

Meta: Type(s): Guest Speaker | Subject(s): Bard College Berlin | Institutes(s): Bard College Berlin |

On December 6, 2014 Prof. Dr. Matthias Hurst participated in the research seminar "Literarische Welterkundungen" (Literary World Explorations) organised by Prof. Dr. Misia Doms from the Department of German Literature, University of Düsseldorf. Prof. Dr. Hurst gave a talk on the tradition and development of "Weltraumfilme" (space films) from Le voyage dans la lune (1902, directed by Georges Méliès) to Gravity (2013, directed by Alfonso Cuarón), a spectrum of films ranging from flights of imagination to authentic depictions of space exploration, from science history to space fantasy. He covered classical and popular films like Frau im Mond (1929, Fritz Lang), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968, Stanley Kubrick), Silent Running (1972, Douglas Trumbull) and Star Wars (1977, George Lucas), historical accounts of the Mercury and the Apollo space programs like The Right Stuff (1983, Philip Kaufman) and Apollo 13 (1995, Ron Howard), the documentary Out of the Present (1999, Andrei Ujic?) about the Soviet space station MIR, but also influential TV shows like Star Trek (1966-1969), Raumpatrouille (1966), Space: 1999 (1975-1976) and Battlestar Galactica (2003-2009). The main focus of the presentation was to highlight the specific aesthetics of space cinematography, the art of depicting the infinite dimensions of space and ideas of travelling through space, based on either simple visual special effects in the past or the sophisticated CGI wizardry of contemporary cinema as well as political and ideological connotations of the films that echo the conflict of the Cold War and the space race of the 1950s and 1960s, or more recent political debates.

Meta: Type(s): Faculty | Subject(s): Bard College Berlin | Institutes(s): Bard College Berlin |

Faculty member Dr. David Martínez Perucha recently published the volume La traducción del orden natural al ámbito humano - El pensamiento político de Tommaso Campanella (Peter Lang, 2014). The book is a study of Tommaso Campanella's entire career path as a political thinker. It aims to identify and describe the conceptual kernel that articulates the variety of texts he devoted to political matters over five decades. Campanella developed a powerful analytical model that formally belongs within the scope of perennial philosophy but cannot be explained without the influence of two central Early Modern thinkers: Machiavelli and Bernardino Telesio. The study is also an attempt to avoid the theoretical consequences of the long-lasting polarization between the Catholic and the Marxist scholarship. As a result of this antagonism, Campanella was declared either a faithful Catholic--who nonetheless spent over 30 years incarcerated--or an inveterate pretender whose political texts were forced into constrained patterns by the Inquisition and the Spanish Monarchy and reveal unresolved contradictions. The resort to psychological categories such as sincerity or simulation reduces Campanella's writings to their undeniable instrumentality, thus overlooking the internal consistency of his textual corpus. His lifelong intellectual project always pursued a complete transformation of the world by translating the natural law to the human realm, by imposing on humankind a rational order to finally achieve a state of full harmony and general happiness. Read more about the book here (publisher's website).

Meta: Type(s): Faculty | Subject(s): Bard College Berlin | Institutes(s): Bard College Berlin |

On December 3 2014, faculty member Dr. Kerry Bystrom delivered a lecture on "Escaping the Service Circle? Domestic Work in Post-apartheid Art and Literature" in the frame of the Seminar on African Studies at the Humboldt University. Dr. Bystrom set forth to examine social and artistic visions of domestic work in the democratic South Africa. Evidence from the first two decades of democracy shows a troubling continuity of contemporary domestic work with the apartheid past, with this work until recently continuing to fall outside of mainstream cultural discourse even as it remains an entrenched part of middle-class culture—for whites and increasingly for people of color. In her lecture Dr. Bystrom traced the way post-apartheid writers and artists have attempted to render domestic work visible among various "new" South African publics, and explored the options they offer for both transforming the institution of domestic service and making South Africa more meaningfully democratic.

Meta: Type(s): Faculty | Subject(s): Bard College Berlin | Institutes(s): Bard College Berlin |