Event Archive

Live Zoom Performances
7:00 - 9:30 pm CET + digital aftershow foyer
THE PERFORMANCE FACTORY presents works from various performing arts courses at the end of each semester. It offers a platform for experimenting with formats, topics and performance related ways of engagement.

For the second time THE PERFORMANCE FACTORY expands into digital space. You are warmly invited to join student’s digital performance experiments that explore video conferencing as a space of live performance and augmented theater.

Participating classes:

Dance Lab: Body Space Image. Dance and Visual Arts
(Instructor: Eva Burghardt)

Rethinking “Regie”: An Introduction to Directing
(Instructor: Julia Hart)

Postdramatic and Contemporary Theater in Berlin
(Instructor: Nina Tecklenburg)

Video Event
5:00 pm CET
Dafna Maimon's class FA328 Embodied Storytelling Through Video
is inviting you to to their video event: 

Through the use of visual storytelling inspired by the body and its senses, our personal contexts have transformed into narratives communicated through artistic short films and/or video art. After delving into our relationships with embodiment, we have expanded our notion of memory, interpersonal relationships, and locating the body through a technological landscape as a collective body.

Through the use of visual storytelling inspired by the body and its senses, our personal contexts have transformed into narratives communicated through artistic short films and/or video art. After delving into our relationships with embodiment, we have expanded our notion of memory, interpersonal relationships, and locating the body through a technological landscape as a collective body.

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Online Showcase
8:00 pm CET
Paul Festa's class 
MU124 Music for Masochists: Five centuries of “difficult listening” in Western Classical Music
invites you to their online screening:

Writing about music, according to the variously attributed adage, is like dancing about architecture. MU124 Music for Masochists—Five Centuries of Difficult Listening in Western Classical Music—takes the simile as invitation. In addition to the more traditional papers and exams, those enrolled undertake a masochism challenge in which they bring a multidisciplinary approach to the interpretation of scores and texts on the syllabus. Suggested options include, but are not limited to, a semi-staged scene from Thomas Mann's novel Doctor Faustus, "Lip-synch For Your Grade" (to an atonal aria), and, following the architecture quote, interpretive dance to difficult music (props, costumes, concept!). Please join our online showcase and see what this semester's pioneering masochists have to offer.

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Conversation
2:00 pm CET
The Internship Program at Bard College Berlin and Agata Lisiak are inviting you to a conversation with translator Katy Derbyshire.


Katy Derbyshire translates contemporary German writers and co-hosts the Dead Ladies Show. Her translation of Clemens Meyer’s Bricks and Mortar was nominated for the Man Booker International Prize and won her the Straelener Translation Prize in 2018. Katy is now also publisher at V&Q Books, exporting remarkable writing from Germany to the UK and Ireland.


Photo credit: Anja Pietsch

Lecture
7:30 pm CET
Glenn W. Most retired in November 2020 as Professor of Greek Philology at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, and remains a regular Visiting Professor on the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago and an External Scientific Member of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. Among his recent publications are the second, revised edition of Hesiod in two volumes in the Loeb series, a co-edited comprehensive Loeb edition of the early Greek philosophers in nine volumes, and a co-edited volume on scholarly methods in a variety of canonical written traditions. He is currently working on various projects involving both ancient Greek philology and the comparison of philological practices in different periods and cultures throughout the world.

This event is the first in a series of seminars organized by the BCB Science & Religion Project, a part of the Oxford-led project "New Horizons for Science and Religion in Central and Eastern Europe" with support from the Templeton Foundation.


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Online Lecture
10:45 am CET
Joshua Craze was educated at the University of Oxford, l'EHESS-Paris, the University of Amsterdam, and the University of California, Berkeley; he has a Ph.D. in Socio-Cultural Anthropology from the latter institution. He has lived in Britain, Cambodia, Egypt, France, the Netherlands, Kenya, America, Germany, and South Sudan, and has taught political philosophy at Sciences-Po, Paris, and anthropology at Berkeley, and in San Quentin State Prison, California. From 2014-18, he was a Collegiate Assistant Professor and Harper-Schmidt Fellow at the University of Chicago, teaching in the Social Science core. From 2013-19, Craze was the nonfiction editor of Asymptote, a journal of literature in translation, for which he edited and published authors including Dominique Eddé, Abdourahman A. Waberi, Abdelfattah Kilito, Abdellah Taïa, Antonin Artaud, Gonçalo M. Tavares, Miljenko Jergović, and Semezdin Mehmedinović, amongst many others. In 2014, he was UNESCO Laureate Artist in Creative Writing, and also held a residency at the Dar Al-Ma'mûn, in Marrakech, Morocco. In addition to his work as a writer, Craze is also a researcher on South Sudan who has been published by Small Arms Survey and the Conflict Sensitivity Resource Facility, amongst others. His journalism has been published in the British Guardian, the Washington Monthly, and Onsite Review.

The event is moderated by BCB faculty Aaron Tugendhaft.


This lecture is the final installment of the lecture series on Migration in Global History that is taking place within the framework of the Mellon sponsored Consortium of Forced Migration, Displacement, and Education.

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Online Reading
8:00 pm CET
It has become a tradition now that the writers in Clare Wigfall's fiction writing workshop give a reading of their work as the finale of their course. In the past, the event has been held at an intimate, candle-lit Wein-Salon in Friedrichshain, where the backroom is filled with students and friends, and everyone listens attentively as the writers in the class step up to the tiny stage, take a deep breath, and share the wonderful stories they have written over the course of the semester. This year, of course, the wine bars are closed, but the writers have been just as inspired as ever. This semester, these advanced writing students have been reworking myths and legends, made excursions to write in the city, gone on a (virtual) museum trip to see John Tradescant's Cabinet of Curiosities, even created their own radio stories, and they'd love to share it all with you. Please join us on December 4th for an online literary reading. Bring a glass of wine or, depending on which time zone you're in, a coffee if it is more appropriate. All BCB students, faculty members, friends, and family are warmly welcome.


Writers presenting:

Charles Clateman
Helene Cunningham
Noor Ender
Angela Li
Joshua Lucy
Erick Moreno Superlano
Batu Savas
Julian Thielman
Anna Winslow

Online Discussion
7:30 pm CET
Imagine Plato attending the first performance of Euripides’ Bakkhai. He would have been in his early twenties, living in Athens, and given what we know about the audiences of Attic drama, it’s likely he would have been in attendance. What was that experience like for Plato? About this, of course, we can only speculate, but it’s reasonable to assume that his experience of performed dramas at the Theater of Dionysus inform the speculations about tragedy that Socrates makes in the Republic. The Bakkhai was written for performance at a specific place and time, but in the two and a half millennia since, it has inspired countless new performances and adaptations. The Bakkhai lives today both as a written text, as constituted and translated by scholars and poets, and as the source or spur for new incarnations. While we can only speculate about Plato’s own experiences in the theater, the ongoing reception of ancient drama by contemporary artists presents us with new opportunities to take Plato's example and to endeavor to be thoughtful auditors and spectators of drama in performance.

This event will present for discussion a few of these new incarnations, considering briefly several theatrical adaptations, and focusing particularly on a musical setting of the seven choruses of Euripides’ Bakkhai, scored for four voices and a musical ensemble, with lyrics in Ancient Greek, written in 2014 by composer and Bard alumnus Dylan Mattingly. Our aim is to consider both how performance may illuminate aspects of the original play, and also how subsequent artists are inspired by, and transform, what has been handed down to them. The event will include listening to excerpts from the Bakkhai choruses which—though attenuated by digital transmission—may still convey, as Mattingly puts it, not a recreation of the sound, but a reimagining of the feel of the music of Euripides.

Moderated by Bard faculty Thomas Bartscherer.

Virtual Book Launch and Discussion
7:30pm CET, Berlin /12.30pm CT, Chicago
Book Launch of Aaron Tugendhaft's new book, The Idols of ISIS: From Assyria to the Internet (Chicago UP, 2020) with virtual roundtable.

The book unpacks the aftermath of a video that was released by the Islamic State in 2015, showing ISIS members smashing ancient sculptures in Iraq’s Mosul Museum in an effort to cleanse the world of Idolatry.  Analyzing the role of images in our life, the political importance of museums, and the efficacy of videos in furthering an ideological agenda through the internet, Tugendhaft asks whether there can be any political life without idolatry at all.

Discussion with Ewa Atanassow (BCB), BCB alumni David Kretz (University of Chicago) and Glenn Most (Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, University of Chicago). Moderated by David Hayes (BCB).

Jointly organized by Bard College Berlin and the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.

The book is available to students at a discounted rate of 10 EUR per copy. Please get in touch with Aaron Tugendhaft (a.tugendhaft[at]berlin.bard.edu) if you are interested in acquiring a copy.

Register on Zoom>>

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Access to a recording of the conversation on Youtube>>

Lecture
10:00 am CET
Lost in America, which would be currently on view at Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.), is a group exhibition of works by American artists from 1937 to the present (including Michael Asher, Sam Durant, Jimmie Durham, Andrea Fraser, and Dan Graham) which examines the decline of American art as the international reference point that it was in the postwar period. In this talk, its curator, John Miller, will walk us through the exhibition virtually, addressing some of the vital themes it tackles around intrinsic institutional discrimination, especially racism, in his view, the central causes of this decline.


John Miller is an artist, writer, curator and musician based in New York and Berlin. In 2011 he received the Wolfgang Hahn Prize from the Society for Contemporary Art at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne. Miller’s books include Mike Kelley: Educational Complex published by Afterall Books, in addition to The Ruin of Exchange: Selected Writings and The Price Club: Selected Writings (1977-1998), both published by JRP-Ringier and the Consortium as part of their Positions series. La Magasin in Grenoble, the Kunstverein in Hamburg and the Kunsthalle Zurich have held solo exhibitions of his artwork. In 2016 the ICA Miami featured “I Stand, I Fall,” his first comprehensive survey in the United States. The Schinkel Pavillon is currently holding his first major retrospective in Berlin. Miller is a Professor of Professional Practice in Barnard College’s Art History Department.

Photo: John Miller

Online Lecture
2.00 pm CET
Anguezomo Mba Bikoro is a conceptual artist from the region of Woleu-Ntem in North Gabon and is presently based in Berlin. The artist merges archeology, sonic radio, writing, textiles, sculpture, live art performances, film & archives for immersive installations. The work analyses processes of power & science fictions in historical archives critically engaging in migrational struggles and colonial memory. The artist creates environments for alternative narratives and future speculations of colonial resistance movements led by African women of the German, British and French diaspora and indigenous communities. Their most recent significant contributions have been shown in Havana Biennale (2019); Dak'art Biennale Senegal (2012 & 2018); Smithsonian Museum of African Art Washington DC (2013); Biennale De Bogota (2013); Tiwani Contemporary London (2012); Kalao Pan African Galleries Bilbao (2014); 798 Art District Gallery Beijing (2015); Museum of African Art Johannesburg (2011); Michael Stevenson Gallery Cape Town (2011); Tate Britain London (2009); Oxford Museum UK (2014); Bedfordbury Gallery London (2010) and South London Gallery (2010)

The event is moderated by BCB Faculty Fatin Abbas.

This lecture is part of the lecture series on Migration in Global History that is taking place within the framework of the Mellon sponsored Consortium of Forced Migration, Displacement, and Education.

More upcoming events in this series:

December 8:
Joshua Craze (Writer): "'There are no whole lives': Exile, Fiction, and Bureaucracy in the UNHCR Archive"
Moderated by Aaron Tugendhaft

Online Senior Thesis Presentations
You are cordially invited to attend this year's online Senior Thesis Presentations. The Presentations are an essential step towards graduation and are an established and cherished event in the BCB academic year. 

Tuesday, 1 December: 1:00 - 1:30 pm CET 
Aryana Arian Assl - "The Revolution within Music: The global power of ‘Bella Ciao’"

Wednesday, 2 December: 1:00 - 1:30 pm CET
Angus Green - "The Ethics of Brutalist Preservation: A Case Study at St. Agnes Church" 

Thursday, 3 December: 1:00 - 1:30 pm CET
Mateo Rodriguez - "Rethinking Climate Change for Realism: Addressing the Structural Constraints of Interstate Affairs Toward Substantial Planetary Climate Action"

Friday, 4 December: 3:00 - 3.30pm CET
Sujitha Parshi - "The Time of the Other: Auto-Affection and Survivance in Derrida’s The Beast and the Sovereign II"
 

Online Lecture
11.00 am CET
Religious sounds – especially for those believers affected by displaced geographies and geo-chronologies of migration – offer forms of critical intimacy with sacred histories. Equally so, sonic scenes in religious ritual offer a bracketed condition of political possibility in the present. Omar Kasmani invites for an intimate listening of an Islamic ritual as a way to appreciate how religion’s ephemera, in particular its sonic-spectral iterations bear the potential to bend norms of religion’s visibility in the urban, thus also eluding its surveillance and governance. Kasmani is interested in how sound’s obfuscating presence survives beyond the ritual and gestures at the limited ways in which migrant/ minority religion might test, even kink normative orders of a so-called godless city.

The event is moderated by BCB Professor of Migration Studies Agata Lisiak.


This lecture is part of the lecture series on Migration in Global History that is taking place within the framework of the Mellon sponsored Consortium of Forced Migration, Displacement, and Education.


More upcoming events in this series:

December 1, 2.00 pm CET:
Anguezomo Mba Bikoro (Artist): "On The Ruins Of Paradise: Archival Legacies of Women's Movements in Colonial Empire"
Moderated by Fatin Abbas

December 8, 10.45 am CET:
Joshua Craze (Writer): "'There are no whole lives': Exile, Fiction, and Bureaucracy in the UNHCR Archive"
Moderated by Aaron Tugendhaft

 

Lecture
9:00 am CET
Through composition, synthesis, and psychoacoustics, the electronic production of sound creates an amorphous environment. These modernist tools for the production of art and commerce exist in a multidimensional space. By examining these artistic methodologies, we can dissect these sonic expanses and begin to understand the role our ears play in the creation and unfolding of our reality. In his talk, Max Eilbacher will discuss how characteristics of electronic music such as timbre, architecture and technology play a role in shaping his artistic practice and our shared bodily experience of vibration.

Max Eilbacher is an intermedia artist based in Baltimore, USA. His sound practice draws upon traditions of algorithmic composition, musique concréte, and avant-garde performance. With these traditions, he creates conceptual systems in which synthesis and processing-intensive software environments are constructs of compositional and sculptural form. The sonic assemblage of social, political, and physical are reflected and inquired upon by treating space, timbre, and perception as elastic and malleable parameters.

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Lecture
8:00 pm CET
Philip Venables's critically acclaimed most recent opera Denis & Katya has been produced in the United States, the United Kingdom, and in France. It won the 2019 Fedora Generali Prize for Opera and is shortlisted for an International Opera Award and an Ivor Novello Award.Born in England and residing in Berlin, Venables has been described as a “composer of ferocious dramatic instincts” and “an arrestingly original musical personality” by Alex Ross in The New Yorker and as “one of the finest composers around” by The Guardian. His output covers opera, music theater, multimedia concert works, chamber music and song, an eclectic range of styles and influences, and themes such as social politics, violence, gender and storytelling.Venables will lead a discussion of the following works on the MU124 syllabus:WEEK  12 —  Monday, 23 NovemberThe International StylePierre BoulezPremière Sonate Pour Piano (1946) Karlheinz StockhausenGesang der Jünglinge (1955/1956)Toru TakemitsuPiano distance (1961)Iannis XenakisKhoai (1976)Metastaeis (1953-54)Philip VenablesNumbers 76-80 
 TEXT:  Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise, 386 – 396, 424 – 434, 562 – 575

Aucoin on Boulez
 The event is open to the public.

Online Lecture
12:30 pm CET
The talk will take participants through the Guardian investigation which uncovered how the UK government had mistakenly classified thousands of its own citizens as illegal immigrants, with catastrophic and life-shattering consequences for many of them. Some were arrested, detained and deported to countries they had left as children half a century earlier. Others were sacked from their jobs, made homeless or denied access to free medical care under the National Health System. The investigation resulted in the resignation of the Home Secretary and promises of comprehensive reform. Two years on, many of those affected are still waiting for compensation and the reform of the Home Office has yet to happen. Amelia Gentleman will discuss why that change has not yet materialized.  

Please check out the feature on Amelia Gentleman's book on the Windrush Scandal on Deutschlandfunk>> (in German)

Amelia Gentleman is a reporter for The Guardian. Her book The Windrush Betrayal. Exposing the Hostile Environment (Guardian Faber, 2019) was longlisted for the Baillie Gifford prize in 2019. 

Gentleman has won numerous prizes (selection):

2019
The Cudlipp award for the Windrush investigation
The Amnesty impact award for the Windrush investigation
Print Journalist of the Year, London Press Club
Sue Lloyd Roberts Media Award, in association with UNHCR and Migrants Organise
Best Campaigning/Investigative Journalism, Drum Online Media Awards

2018
Paul Foot Award
Political Studies Association Journalist of the Year (joint award with Carole Cadwalladr)
Journalist of the Year, British Journalism Awards


The event is moderated by BCB Professor of Literature Laura Scuriatti. Please send an email to her in order to attend.


This lecture is part of the lecture series on Migration in Global History that is taking place within the framework of the Mellon sponsored Consortium of Forced Migration, Displacement, and Education.

More upcoming Events:

November 25, 11.00 am CET :
Omar Kasmani (Free University): "Audible Intimacies: Migrant Saints in a Godless City"
Moderated by Agata Lisiak

December 1, 2.00 pm CET:
Anguezomo Mba Bikoro (Artist): "On The Ruins Of Paradise: Archival Legacies of Women's Movements in Colonial Empire'"
Moderated by Fatin Abbas

December 8, 10.45 am CET:
Joshua Craze (Writer): "'There are no whole lives': Exile, Fiction, and Bureaucracy in the UNHCR Archive"
Moderated by Aaron Tugendhaft

Online Lecture
7:30 pm CET
Mathieu Ossendrijver (FU Berlin) is an historian of ancient science who holds doctorates in both assyriology and astrophysics. His research focuses on Babylonian astral science and mathematics, contextual aspects of Babylonian scholarship and cross-cultural transformations of knowledge between Babylonia, Egypt, and the Greco-Roman world. He is the author of Babylonian Mathematical Astronomy: Procedure Texts (2012).
In his talk, Mathieu Ossendrijver will discuss: The nature of cuneiform writing Gods, divine manifestations, and divine agency Stars, planets, and gods: their manifestation and signification
Readings for this seminar can be obtained by emailing Aaron Tugendhaft at [email protected]. It will be expected that all participants will have done the reading ahead of time.


This event is the first in a series of seminars organized by the BCB Science & Religion Project, a part of the Oxford-led project "New Horizons for Science and Religion in Central and Eastern Europe" with support from the Templeton Foundation.

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Online Lecture
10:00 am CET
Aura Rosenberg’s work probes sexuality, gender, motherhood, childhood, artistic identity and historical construction. In this lecture, she will discuss some of her critically acclaimed projects, such as Head Shots (1991-1996) and Dialectical Porn Rocks (1989-1993), in which she performs a humorous reversal of the male gaze in pornography, as well as more recent works that deal with topics as diverse as childhood and the secret life of statues.

Bio:

Rosenberg lives in New York City and Berlin, and her work has been exhibited at, among others, the Berlin Biennale, MoMA PS1, Long Island City, Institute of Contemporary Art / ICA, Philadelphia, Julia Stoschek Collection, Düsseldorf, Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt, Hamburger Banhof, Berlin, MAMCO / Musee d'art Moderne et Contemporain, Geneva, The Swiss Institute, New York; The Sculpture Center, Long Island City, and JOAN, Los Angeles.
She has published three books of photographs. Head Shots, (StopOver Press 1996),  Berlin Childhood (Steidl/DAAD 2001), and Who Am I? What Am I? Where Am I ? (Hatje Cantz 2006), and is also a member of the art rock bands Dirty Mirrors and The Cornichons who have performed in such venues as The Rubell Family Collection, Miami and the Palazzo Grassi, Venice.
She is currently preparing for a solo exhibition in June at Efremidis Gallery in Berlin.

Virtual Panel Discussion
7:00 pm CET
The Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act AKA Caesar Act was adopted by the US-American Congress at the end of 2019 and put into action by mid-2020. It can be seen as a result of advocacy of Syrian NGOs, to exert pressure on the Assad regime, which still holds tens of thousands of political detainees in its power. However, it is compromised by Trump’s unilateral, unreliable, cynical way of doing politics; and one can challenge its effectiveness, as sanctions always tend to mostly hit the population, while the dictatorships manage to maneuver around them. Our panel will host experts, students and alumni from Bard College Berlin, to discuss the arguments for and against the sanctions. The panel does not intend to arrive at conclusive judgements, but seeks a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the dilemmas that we find ourselves in, on political, economic and humanitarian levels.

Students of Bard College Berlin will discuss with online participants.

7 PM Panel (Pre-recorded at the Volksbühne):
Nawara Alaboud
Sohaib Alzoubi

Moderated by
Sam Zamrik

8 PM Online Response:
Kristin Helberg

8.10 PM Online Discussion:
Panelists will discuss with the audience; moderated by Sam Zamrik.


Watch a recording online on Facebook>>


Real Talk is a series at the Grüner Salon that boosts the visibility of the political discourse among the young, resistance-oriented, democratic and activist Middle-Eastern diaspora in Berlin and provides space for its debates. This series aims to focus on transnational realities and struggles between ‘here’ and ‘there’; ‘then’ and ‘now’, differences that nationalism seeks to deny and erase, and that reveal themselves in the diasporas. The talks serve as a platform to explore the diaspora’s thoughts about and reactions to these realities. Real Talk gives Syrian, Afghan and Iraqi intellectuals and artists, as well as those of other nationalities, a platform to bring political topics to the stage, together with experts, in various discussion and/or artistic formats.
The program is composed of lectures, short-films and panel discussions, as well as performances and concerts. The diaspora- and globe-spanning topics on its agenda include: civil society’s struggle for survival in the Middle East; re-claiming political agency; the political dimension of the (post-)traumatic; disappeared and missing prisoners; the fate of women in the revolution; and the experience of statelessness.

A cooperation between Bard College Berlin, the Volksbühne Berlin and the German Council on Foreign Relations.


Past Events in 2020:

October 8, 2020: Real Talk - Learning from Afghanistan >>

May 19, 2020: Real Talk: Syria's State Torture on Trial - A Route to Justice and the Role of the Survivors >>

February 4, 2020: Real Talk: The Oblivious Tongue – Diaspora, Poetry, and Transnational Expression >>


Photo Credit: Karam Alhamad
 

Online Conversation
8:00 pm CET

Alex Ross, author of The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, will be answering questions and discussing his just-published Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music.


Alex Ross has been the music critic of The New Yorker since 1996. His first book, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, published in 2007, won a National Book Critics Circle Award and the Guardian First Book Award, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. An essay collection, Listen to This, appeared in 2010. His third book, Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music, was published in 2020.  Ross has received the George Peabody Medal, an Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Belmont Prize in Germany, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a MacArthur Fellowship. 

Open to the public.

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  Virtual Reception
3:00 pm CET
As most classes have moved online again it is especially important that we take a moment to come together and celebrate the four seniors who submit their thesis this semester:

Sujitha Parshi
Angus Green
Aryana Arian Assl
Mateo Rodriguez

All members of the BCB Community are warmly invited to join us online for a virtual reception!

Online Lecture
6:00 pm CET
An award-winning cultural historian, critic and curator, Josh Kun is a 2016 MacArthur Fellow and expert on the intersection of arts, culture and politics, with an emphasis on popular music. Kun is an author and editor of many books and anthologies including The Autograph Book of L.A.: Improvements on the Page of the City (Angel City Press, 2019) and Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America (University of California Press, 2005) and the curator of numerous art, music and public humanities projects. His research and practice focus on the arts, music and politics of cultural connection, with an emphasis on archives, global migration and Los Angeles. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The New Yorker, and more.

This lecture is part of the lecture series on Migration in Global History that is taking place within the framework of the Mellon sponsored Consortium of Forced Migration, Displacement, and Education.

More upcoming Events:

November 18, 12.30 pm CET:
Amelia Gentleman (Journalist): "The Windrush Scandal - Is It Over?"
Moderated by Laura Scuriatti

November 25, 11.00 am CET :
Omar Kasmani (Free University): "Audible Intimacies: Migrant Saints in a Godless City"
Moderated by Agata Lisiak

December 1, 2.00 pm CET:
Anguezomo Mba Bikoro (Artist): "On The Ruins Of Paradise: Archival Legacies of Women's Movements in Colonial Empire'"
Moderated by Fatin Abbas

December 8, 10.45 am CET:
Joshua Craze (Writer): "'There are no whole lives': Exile, Fiction, and Bureaucracy in the UNHCR Archive"
Moderated by Aaron Tugendhaft

 

Online Conference
Bard College Berlin and the John-F.-Kennedy-Institute at the Free University Berlin are hosting this year's annual conference of the Political Science Section of the German Association for American Studies.

Democratic institutions in the United States are generally thought of as bulwarks against manifold threats, both from inside and outside of the American polity. Donald Trump’s first term in office has been a stress test to these democratic institutions and processes. This conference asks for the causes as well as the consequences of Trump’s electoral success. We consider illiberal tendencies as a serious political phenomenon in the United States and see Trump as a symptom of a longer-standing set of dynamics that we can better grasp through a comparative view and against the backdrop of global dynamics. 

As a glimpse at different cases from Jair Bolsonaro to Boris Johnson shows, demagogues, once in office, alter the structures of the state and civil society in ways that are likely to inflict long term damage. Compromises to the separation of powers, public officials' conflicts of interest, the defamation of the media: some of the essential pillars of democracy and core ideals of the Enlightenment are under attack. As such, this conference examines the effects of Donald Trump on democratic processes and institutions, and reflects on the immediate and potential long term consequences of his administration for democratic participation in the political system of the United States, and how these processes compare to other democracies in crisis. 

The conference will be held online. Links will be shared after registration and shortly before the respective event.
Please register for free here until noon (CET) November 1, 2020.



Program:

Thursday, November 5

15:00-16:30
Opening Remarks & Panel 1: Trump in Power: Illiberalism and Democracy
Chair: Betsy Leimbigler (Freie Universität Berlin)
Michael Weinman (Bard College Berlin): A Passing Storm? American Illiberalism and the 2020 Elections
Jörg Hebenstreit (Friedrich-Schiller Universität Jena): Independence under Threat – Attempts of Expanding Presidential Supervisory Authority over Independent Agencies under the Trump Administration
Michael Dreyer (Friedrich-Schiller Universität Jena): Packing the Courts? Donald Trump, Checks and Balances, and the “Least Dangerous Branch”
Elena Broda (Universität Passau): Perfect Phone Call or Abuse of Power? How Ideological Media Framed Trump’s Impeachment


17:00-18:30
Panel 2: Fake News, Social Media, and Political Communication
Chair: Gülçin Balamir Coşkun (Humboldt Universität Berlin)
Maren Schäfer (Heidelberg Center for American Studies): “Totally Compromised Kangaroo Courts” and the “Fake News Media” – Donald Trump’s Anti-Democratic Right-Wing Populist Rhetoric
Curd Knüpfer (Freie Universität Berlin) and Michael Oswald (Universität Passau): Tapping the Sphere of Deviance: Right-wing News Sites as a Peripheral Network to the Trump-Fox News Information Nexus
Mike Cowburn (Freie Universität Berlin): Republican Legislator Adoption of the Fake News Label on Twitter
Martin Thunert (Heidelberg Center for American Studies): (Dis)Trust of Experts and Contemporary Populism: The Case of the United States in Perspective


19:30-21:00
Assessing the Elections
Panel Chair: David Sirakov (Atlantische Akademie)
Sean Theriault (University of Texas): Congressional Elections: What Happened and Why?
Rachel Bitecofer (Niskanen Center): Negative Partisanship in the 2020 American Election



Friday, November 6

13:30 -14:45
Panel 3: The New Normal? International Relations under Trump
Panel Chair: Florian Böller (TU Kaiserslautern)
Cornelia-Adriana Baciu (Johns Hopkins University): Paradoxes of American Exceptionalism and Restraint. A Neo-Classical Realism Perspective
M.J. Packo (Humboldt Universität Berlin): The International Implications of Anti-abortion Rights Narratives under the Trump Administration
Ana-Constantina Frost (Freie Universität Berlin): Whose Foreign Policy Is It Anyway? Studying Diaspora Politics in a Time of International Upheaval
Jakob Wiedekind (Leibniz Universität Hannover): The New De Facto Veto? Tracing the Impact of SAPs as a New Measure of Presidential Power in Foreign Policy


15:00-16:15
Panel 4: Persisting Problems: Inequalities and Social Rights
Chair: Aysuda Kölemen (Bard College Berlin)
Guido Rohmann (Freie Universität Berlin): ‘Left behind' - A Term We Should Leave Behind?
Betsy Leimbigler (Freie Universität Berlin): Interactions between Illiberalism and Institutions: Economic and Social Rights in the U.S.
Laura Kettel (Freie Universität Berlin): Contested Governance: The Federal Response to Homelessness in the United States


16:30-17:45
Panel 5: Race and Public Policy
Chair: Christian Lammert (FU Berlin)
Rachel Wetts (Brown University): Activating and Harnessing White Racial Prejudice in the 2020 US Election
Aysuda Kölemen (Bard College Berlin): Race as a Category in Evaluations of Deservingness and Undeservingness of Government Assistance
Candis Smith (Penn State University): Who Stands a Chance? Disparate Worldviews on the Social Constructions of Vulnerable Populations



19:00-20:30
What Is to Be Done?
Keynote Lecture by Ruth Wilson Gilmore (CUNY Graduate Center)
Introduction: Boris Vormann (Bard College Berlin)


Please direct questions regarding registration to [email protected].

Sponsored by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the Atlantische Akademie Rheinland Pfalz

Online Lecture
7:30 pm CET
This talk will explore the intellectual origins of American slavery in order to ask how what Americans now understand to have been the great wrong in the history of the nation came to be considered not only as necessary or profitable but as legitimate from a moral point of view. An effort to answer this question will lead in unexpected directions and require that we revisit ideas of freedom, as well as ideas of slavery, in the period when American slavery and the English trade in enslaved persons from Africa began.

John Harpham received his PhD from the Department of Government at Harvard University and is a Junior Fellow in the Harper-Schmidt Society of Fellows at the University of Chicago. His articles on the history and memory of American slavery have appeared in a number of scholarly journals, and he is preparing a book manuscript on the ideological origins of American slavery.

The event is moderated by BCB Professor of Political Thought, Ewa Atanassow.


This lecture is part of the lecture series on Migration in Global History that is taking place within the framework of the Mellon sponsored Consortium of Forced Migration, Displacement, and Education.

More upcoming events in this series:

November 11:
Josh Kun (University of Southern California): "Listening to the Migrant Songbook"
Moderated by Agata Lisiak

November 18:
Amelia Gentleman (Journalist): "The Windrush Scandal - Is It Over?"
Moderated by Laura Scuriatti

November 25:
Omar Kasmani (Free University): "Audible Intimacies: Migrant Saints in a Godless City"
Moderated by Agata Lisiak

December 1:
Anguezomo Mba Bikoro (Artist): "On The Ruins Of Paradise: Archival Legacies of Women's Movements in Colonial Empire'"
Moderated by Fatin Abbas

December 8:
Joshua Craze (Writer): "'There are no whole lives': Exile, Fiction, and Bureaucracy in the UNHCR Archive"
Moderated by Aaron Tugendhaft

Lecture Series
This lecture is part of the lecture series on Migration in Global History that is taking place within the framework of the Mellon sponsored Consortium of Forced Migration, Displacement, and Education.

Program:
November 4:
John Harpham (University of Chicago): "Freedom and Slavery in the Origins of Modern Political Thought"
Moderated by Ewa Atanassow

November 11:
Josh Kun (University of Southern California): "Listening to the Migrant Songbook"
Moderated by AgataLisiak

November 18:
Amelia Gentleman (Journalist): "The Windrush Scandal - Is It Over?"
Moderated by Laura Scuriatti

November 25:
Omar Kasmani (Free University): "Audible Intimacies: Migrant Saints in a Godless City"
Moderated by AgataLisiak

December 1:
Anguezomo Mba Bikoro (Artist): "On The Ruins Of Paradise: Archival Legacies of Women's Movements in Colonial Empire"
Moderated by Fatin Abbas

December 8:
Joshua Craze (Writer): "'There are no whole lives': Exile, Fiction, and Bureaucracy in the UNHCR Archive"
Moderated by Aaron Tugendhaft

 

  Workshop
1:00 pm CET
 
Some final essays, and certainly senior theses, require independent research. How do you access scholarly articles and sources? Join Writing Tutors Schuyler Curriden and Julian Thielman for a one-hour online session full of tips for finding the resources you need, covering not just the resources available through the BCB library but also alternative strategies, sites, and libraries. Julian and Schuyler will also offer ways to improve your keywords and begin your search for scholarly sources. 

Check the BCB Calendar for the link to join online.

Lecture Series
7.30pm CET
Curated by Jacalyn Carley, co-founder of Tanzfabrik Berlin, choreographer, and author of  “A Handbook: Royston Maldoom: Community Dance—Everyone Can Dance!”


What makes a more perfect society? Plato and Socrates began the discussion, they went so far as to provide detailed plans for a utopian community. It included a specific number of sheep, liberating women to do soldiering, finance rules, and dance—‘beautiful movement.’ Later in the 19th century, a Greek revival movement spurned the creation of experimental nonreligious (as opposed to those in the US) utopian communities. Again, dance—expressive and modern, not folk dance or acrobatics—played a central role in these very real places. “Community Dance” evolved directly from those utopian experiments to become a major force in education and European arts today. It removes the ‘elite’ from modern dance without compromising artistic integrity, while helping to establish, giving purpose and support, and even redefining ‘community’ in places like refugee homes, prisons, inner city schools, conflict zones—from Addis Ababa to Berlin, from Ireland to Iran. Community Dance is thriving in Europe yet is hardly understood in the US. This short lecture series explores the role dance has and continues to play in improving both community development and the lives of its individuals, from the vantage point of experienced practitioners. 

This lecture series forms the first part of a course that will be offered next fall entitled "Dance and Community Building: Utopian Practice in the 21st Century". It is sponsored by the Mellon Consortium on Forced Migration, Displacement and Education.

Dates 

Lecture 1
Weds., Oct. 28 - An Overview: Dancing through the History of Utopias — Jacalyn Carley (Co-founder of Tanzfabrik Berlin, author of 'A Handbook for Community Dance' (Henschel Verlag), On-site Director Summer Arts in Berlin/Sarah Lawrence College).

Lecture 2
Thurs., Nov 5 - What Community Dance can Achieve: Looking at the Life and Work of Royston Maldoom — with Royston Maldoom (Pioneer of Community Dance, numerous international projects and awards, Order of the British Empire recipient)

Lecture 3
Tues., Nov 10 - Hands On: Community Dance Practice — Prof. Ingo Reulecke (mentor/educator Hochschulubergreifendes Zentrum Tanz Berlin and Ernst-Busch-Hochschule, choreographer and Real-Time-Composer)



 

Lecture Hall
1.00pm CET
The BCB Internship Program gives you the opportunity to gain an off-campus workplace experience in a field that interests you. You can work 10-13 hours/week in an internship while also exploring various questions regarding work in the internship seminar taught by Agata Lisiak and Florian Duijsens. Internships are generally unpaid, but you can earn academic credits through the internship seminar.
If you are a current or upcoming third-year student and curious about BCB’s Internship Program and the opportunity to gain practical experience alongside your studies while interning for an organization/individual in Berlin, please save the date for one of the two internship program sessions we are offering this semester. 

For those of you who attend classes on campus, we are offering an in-person information session with Agata Lisiak and Judith Weber, BCB’s new Internship and Career Networking Officer — join them in the Lecture Hall on Wednesday, 28 October, 1:00 pm CET.

[In order to accommodate the needs of students who are unable to be on campus, but are considering applying for an internship in Spring 2021, we are offering one session via zoom on Tuesday, 27 October, 1:00 pm CET.]



 

Online Session
1.00pm CET
The BCB Internship Program gives you the opportunity to gain an off-campus workplace experience in a field that interests you. You can work 10-13 hours/week in an internship while also exploring various questions regarding work in the internship seminar taught by Agata Lisiak and Florian Duijsens. Internships are generally unpaid, but you can earn academic credits through the internship seminar.
If you are a current or upcoming third-year student and curious about BCB’s Internship Program and the opportunity to gain practical experience alongside your studies while interning for an organization/individual in Berlin, please save the date for one of the two internship program sessions we are offering this semester. 

In order to accommodate the needs of students who are unable to be on campus, but are considering applying for an internship in Spring 2021, we are offering one session via zoom on Tuesday, 27 October, 1:00 pm CET.

For those of you who attend classes on campus, we are offering an in-person information session with Agata Lisiak and Judith Weber, BCB’s new Internship and Career Networking Officer — join them in the Lecture Hall on Wednesday, 28 October, 1:00 pm CET.

 

  1.30 - 3.30 pm CET
Hanan Toukan’s class on "Postcolonial Politics: The Middle East and Beyond" is inviting students to join the seminar on a workshop at A.L. Berlin, BULBUL.
In this workshop, students will visit the exhibition ERRATA held at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt independently, in small groups. Their visit will be guided by an assignment that will include different questions and interventions in the exhibition. One of the tour's focuses will be seeking ways and experimenting with ways of communications that involve bringing fellow students who are abroad and unable to attend Bard in person into the tour and the group experience.

In the following meeting at Bulbul Al Berlin*, the students will work with their impressions from the exhibition and examine their connections to the narratives, histories, and objects they encounter at the exhibition, together with materials and objects they will be asked to bring to the meeting. During the workshop, students will question their relations to immigration, movement of objects, ideologies, historical narratives, and the constructions of identities; they will ask how to tear the threads of connections and weave them in new world orders.

Hagar Ophir, artist, curator, and research assistant for Ariella Azoulay's work on show at the HKW will be leading the two workshops with the students.

Students interested in participating in the workshop are required to visit the show beforehand.

Students will also be reading chapters from Azoulay's newest publication Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism.

Please email Hanan Toukan by Oct 6 at the latest in order to receive the assignments to be taken to the exhibition.

Virtual Panel Discussion
7:00pm CET
Since the US has signed an agreement with the Taliban to pull out foreign troops in exchange for security guarantees, “peace talks” are under way in Afghanistan. What that means becomes evident in the most recent efforts to build trust by releasing 400 militant Taliban inmates.

Is there an alternative to these kinds of “peace talks”? What would these measures entail so that the suffering of civilians does not grow even more? What role can the millions of exiled Afghans, some of which have lived abroad for decades, play in this process? How can the Afghan diaspora react to this betrayal by the “Free World”?

Students of Bard College Berlin will discuss with online participants.

7 PM Panel (Pre-recorded at the Volksbühne):
Omar Haidari
A. Qais Sangarkhail
Sayed Parviz

Moderated by
Emran Feroz, Journalist

8 PM Online Response:
Muzghan Noori

8.10 PM Online Discussion:
Panelists will discuss with the audience; moderated by Emran Feroz.


Real Talk is a series at the Grüner Salon that boosts the visibility of the political discourse among the young, resistance-oriented, democratic and activist Middle-Eastern diaspora in Berlin and provides space for its debates. This series aims to focus on transnational realities and struggles between ‘here’ and ‘there’; ‘then’ and ‘now’, differences that nationalism seeks to deny and erase, and that reveal themselves in the diasporas. The talks serve as a platform to explore the diaspora’s thoughts about and reactions to these realities. Real Talk gives Syrian, Afghan and Iraqi intellectuals and artists, as well as those of other nationalities, a platform to bring political topics to the stage, together with experts, in various discussion and/or artistic formats.
The program is composed of lectures, short-films and panel discussions, as well as performances and concerts. The diaspora- and globe-spanning topics on its agenda include: civil society’s struggle for survival in the Middle East; re-claiming political agency; the political dimension of the (post-)traumatic; disappeared and missing prisoners; the fate of women in the revolution; and the experience of statelessness.

A cooperation between Bard College Berlin, the Volksbühne Berlin and the German Council on Foreign Relations.

Watch a recording of the talk here >>


Photo Credit: Ahmad Quais Sangarkhail
 

Online Panel Discussion
7:30 pm CET
Panelists:

Kenneth S. Stern, Director of the Bard Center for the Study of Hate
PD Dr. Frank Wolff, Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies, Osnabrück University

Moderator:

Kerry Bystrom, Associate Dean, Bard College Berlin

Bios:
Kenneth S. Stern is the director of the Bard Center for the Study of Hate and an attorney and award-winning author. For twenty-five years, he was the American Jewish Committee's expert on antisemitism, and he was also the lead drafter of the “Working Definition of Antisemitism." He has argued before the Supreme Court of the United States and testified before Congress, and he is a frequent guest on television and radio. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, and The Forward. His newest book is The Conflict Over the Conflict: The Israel/Palestine Campus Debate (New Jewish Press, 2020).

PD Dr. Frank Wolff teaches Modern History and Migration Studies at Osnabrück University. He received his PhD from Bielefeld University, was a visiting fellow at Johns Hopkins University and the Max Kade Visiting Professor in German Studies and Notre Dame University. He is appearing in public media such as Deutschlandfunk Kultur, Deutsche Welle and FAZ as an expert on Migration Studies and German history. His prize-winning books include Yiddish Revolutionairies in Migration, a transnational history of the Jewish Labor Bund (Böhlau 2014, in English: Brill 2020 and Haymarket Books 2021, forthcoming) and Die Mauergesellschaft, a study of migration in divided Germany (Suhrkamp 2019). Currently he is finishing a book on homosexuality in postwar Germany and has started writing on the Intellectual History of “border”.

In the Spring Semester, Frank Wolff will teach a class on Racism and Antisemitism at Bard College Berlin.
 

Online Workshop
10:00 am CET
Are you curious about ancient Syria? Does imperialism interest you? This workshop will get you thinking about both ancient Syria and the politics of foreign intervention. Over the course of four consecutive Friday seminars, experts on ancient Syria (c. 1400-600 BC) will guide us through a wide range of ancient sources and the politics of their discovery in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Together, we will consider how the Hittite and Assyrian empires operated in Syria in order to reflect on the nature of imperial politics—in antiquity and today.
 This workshop with Allessandra Gilibert will discuss: What is the relationship between monuments and politics in (ancient) Syria? Are there (ancient) monuments in Syria that were erected by foreign powers as a specific political statement? Are there (ancient) monuments in Syria that were damaged or destroyed because they were foreign political statements?All are welcome, no prior knowledge necessary.
 Alessandra Gilibert is Professor for Archaeology of the Levant at Ca’ Foscari University Venice (Italy). Her research focus is on the relationship between ancient politics, art and architecture. She completed her PhD at the Freie Universität Berlin, where she worked several years as a research fellow at the Institute for Ancient Near Eastern Archaeology. She currently leads field projects in Iraq and Armenia.
 


More upcoming events in the series:October 9: Archaeology of Intervention with Cinzia Pappi (University of Innsbruck)
 All workshops meet on Zoom from 10am to 12pm, noon CET. Contact the organizer, Aaron Tugendhaft, with any questions. ([email protected])

Co-sponsored by Baynatna: The Arabic Library in Berlin, and made possible by the generous support of the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung.

Online Workshop
10:00 am CET
Are you curious about ancient Syria? Does imperialism interest you? This workshop will get you thinking about both ancient Syria and the politics of foreign intervention. Over the course of four consecutive Friday seminars, experts on ancient Syria (c. 1400-600 BC) will guide us through a wide range of ancient sources and the politics of their discovery in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Together, we will consider how the Hittite and Assyrian empires operated in Syria in order to reflect on the nature of imperial politics—in antiquity and today.
 This workshop with Nathan Morello will discuss: What are the ancient sources for the history of the Assyrian intervention in Syria? What was Syria's political landscape during the Iron Age? How did the Assyrian intervention in Syria change through time (eleventh to seventh century BC)?All are welcome, no prior knowledge necessary.
 Nathan Morello is part of the research staff of the Alexander von Humboldt-Professorship for the Ancient History of the Near and Middle East at Ludwig Maximilians-University (Munich, Germany), where he works for the Munich Open-access Cuneiform Corpus initiative (MOCCI), headed by Prof. Dr. Karen Radner and Dr. Jamie Novotny. After receiving his PhD at the University of Udine, he has worked in Germany (Universität Leipzig, Universität Heidelberg, Ludwig Maximilians-Universität München) with several postdoctoral projects. His main interests are the history, geography, and the history of art of Assyria, with special focus on the monuments, royal inscriptions, and archival documents of Middle and Neo-Assyrian periods. A list of his publications can be found here.


More upcoming events in the series:October 2: Architectures of Intervention with Alessandra Gilibert (University of Venice)October 9: Archaeology of Intervention with Cinzia Pappi (University of Innsbruck)
 All workshops meet on Zoom from 10am to 12pm, noon CET. Contact the organizer, Aaron Tugendhaft, with any questions. ([email protected])

Co-sponsored by Baynatna: The Arabic Library in Berlin, and made possible by the generous support of the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung.

Online Workshop
10:00 am CET
Are you curious about ancient Syria? Does imperialism interest you? This workshop will get you thinking about both ancient Syria and the politics of foreign intervention. Over the course of four consecutive Friday seminars, experts on ancient Syria (c. 1400-600 BC) will guide us through a wide range of ancient sources and the politics of their discovery in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Together, we will consider how the Hittite and Assyrian empires operated in Syria in order to reflect on the nature of imperial politics—in antiquity and today.
 This workshop with Elena Devecchi will discuss:

How did the Hittites conquer Syria?
What was Syria's political landscape during the Late Bronze Age?
What did it mean to be a Hittite vassal?

All are welcome; no prior knowledge necessary.


Elena Devecchi is Professor of History of the Ancient Near East at the Department of Historical Studies of the University of Turin. After receiving her PhD at the University of Venice, she worked in Germany (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, München and Julius-Maximilians-Universität, Würzburg), Belgium (KU Leuven) and Austria (University of Innsbruck), where she carried out postdoctoral projects and taught classes on Akkadian and Hittite.
Her scientific interests focus on the international relations during the Late Bronze Age, in particular in historical and diplomatic texts from Anatolia and Syria (see e.g. Trattati internazionali ittiti, Brescia 2015), and on the economic and administrative institutions of Babylonia during the Kassite period (see Middle Babylonian Texts in the Cornell Collections, Part 2 The Earlier Kings, University Park 2020).
Devecchi is epigraphist of the archaeological mission conducted at the site of Tulūl al-Baqarat (Iraq) by the University of Turin and by the “Centro Ricerche Archeologiche e Scavi” of Turin.
A list of her publications can be found here.


More upcoming events in the series:
 September 25: Assyrian Intervention with Nathan Morello (LMU Munich)October 2: Architectures of Intervention with Alessandra Gilibert (University of Venice)October 9: Archaeology of Intervention with Cinzia Pappi (University of Innsbruck)
 All workshops meet on Zoom from 10am to 12pm, noon CET. Contact the organizer, Aaron Tugendhaft, with any questions. ([email protected])

Co-sponsored by Baynatna: The Arabic Library in Berlin, and made possible by the generous support of the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung.

Workshop Series
10:00 am CET
Are you curious about ancient Syria? Does imperialism interest you? This workshop will get you thinking about both ancient Syria and the politics of foreign intervention. Over the course of four consecutive Friday seminars, experts on ancient Syria (c. 1400-600 BC) will guide us through a wide range of ancient sources and the politics of their discovery in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Together, we will consider how the Hittite and Assyrian empires operated in Syria in order to reflect on the nature of imperial politics—in antiquity and today. All are welcome; no prior knowledge necessary.
 September 18: Hittite Intervention with Elena Devecchi (University of Turin)September 25: Assyrian Intervention with Nathan Morello (LMU Munich)October 2: Architectures of Intervention with Alessandra Gilibert (University of Venice)October 9: Archaeology of Intervention with Cinzia Pappi (University of Innsbruck)
 All workshops meet on Zoom from 10am to 12pm, noon CET. Contact the organizer, Aaron Tugendhaft, with any questions. ([email protected])

Co-sponsored by Baynatna: The Arabic Library in Berlin, and made possible by the generous support of the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung.

Online Book Discussion 
3:00 pm CET
Professor of Literature, Laura Scuriatti will introduce and discuss her book Mina Loy's Critical Modernism, (University Press of Florida, 2019). The book has recently been reviewed by Prof Daniela Caselli (Manchester University) and praised as an "original and welcome intervention in modernist studies" that offers a "genuine international perspective".

Review in Libra >>
Review in The Times Literary Supplement >>
Access to the recording of the lecture on youtube >>

Language: Italian

In order to attend the event, please contact Laura Scuriatti ([email protected]).

Virtual Panel
7:00 pm CET
On 23 April the Higher Regional Court in Koblenz, Germany, began the first trial worldwide on state torture of at least 4,000 people, 58 murders and related crimes of rape and sexual assault at the detention centre of the General Intelligence Service's Al-Khatib Branch in Damascus. Eyad al-Gharib is accused of aiding and abetting torture in at least 30 cases. 

Syria's survivors of torture will testify before the German court as part of the trial. This trial sets an important precedent, as Syrian officials have so far escaped prosecution for crimes against humanity. The International Criminal Court is not authorized to start an investigation into the crimes, as Syria is not a party to the Roman Statute. At the same time, a referral to the court by the UN Security Council is currently blocked by Russia and China. However, there are other legal avenues to be pursued in the EU. In Germany, cases are now being brought against individuals for crimes committed in Syria through the principle of universal jurisdiction. This principle allows for a state's jurisdiction over crimes against international law, even when the crimes did not occur on that state's territory, and neither the victim nor perpetrator is a national of that state. The principle allows national courts in third countries to address international crimes occurring abroad, to hold perpetrators criminally liable, and to prevent impunity. 

Two days into the court hearings and as a part of the Real Talk Series at the Volksbühne Berlin, The Syria Campaign, Families for Freedom, the Volksbühne and Bard College Berlin are co-hosting a discussion with a panel of human rights activists and legal experts about the significance of this trial, the limitations of the principle of universal jurisdiction, and what it will mean in the long term for justice and accountability in Syria.

Speakers:

Andreas Schüller: Director of the international crimes and accountability program at the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights
Anwar Albunni: Syrian human rights lawyer and the director of the Center for Legal Research and Studies
Wafa Moustafa: Syrian activist and journalist and a member of Families for Freedom
Bente Scheller: Panel Chair, Head of Middle East and North Africa Division, Heinrich Böll Stiftung

There will be time for questions during the panel, and you are welcome to submit questions in advance to [email protected]
Language: English

A cooperation between Bard College Berlin, the Volksbühne Berlin, the Families for Freedom, the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights and the German Council of Foreign Relations

Online Student Performance Lecture
4:00 pm CET
Top Secret: Hans Ulrich Scappa von Bülow

Jessie Kao presents her research project based on the German physician Hans Ulrich Scappa von Bülow who invented "das Vimana Echo", a method to improve soldier obedience. In her performance lecture we will take a look at von Bülow's life as a queer person in both Nazi Germany and during the GDR times, and how his invention affects current technology.

Open to the BCB Community

Virtual Graduation
6:00 pm CET
 
You are cordially invited to attend the Fauxmencement 2020 of Bard College Berlin.
The online ceremony to celebrate the achievements of the graduating class of 2019-2020 will take place on May 16, at 6 pm CET on the video conferencing platform Zoom.

Sie sind ganz herzlich zur Fauxmencement 2020 des Bard College Berlin eingeladen.
Die Online Zeremonie, die die Erfolge des Abschlussjahrgangs 2019-2020 feiert, findet am 16. Mai um 18 Uhr CET auf der Video Platform Zoom statt.

Open to the BCB Community, their family and friends
Zugänglich für die BCB Community und deren Familien und Freunde

Virtual Performance
4:00 - 7:00 pm CET
Bard College Berlin  Final presentations of theater & performances courses

The PERFORMANCE FACTORY presents works from various theater and performance related courses at the end of each semester. It offers a platform for experimenting with formats, topics and theatrical ways of engagement. 

This semester's ZOOM edition of THE PERFORMANCE FACTORY explores possibilities of using video conferencing as a space for live and recorded performance. And, as always in any kind of theater, it relies on the audience: You are warmly invited to join this unusual and unique theater experiment!

Date & Time: Tuesday, May 12, 2020, from 4:00-7:00 pm

Participating classes and program:

16:00-16:40
Making a Performance: Devised Theater as Artistic Research  (Instructor: Nina Tecklenburg)
How to Kill a Wasp – performances and videos on COVID-19 self-defense 10 Min Intermission:
breakout rooms Foyer
16:50-17:50The Threepenny Opera: A New Musical Theater  (Instructor: Julia Hart)
A virtual restaging and reinventing of scenes and songs from Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's The Threepenny Opera 10 Min Intermission:
breakout rooms Foyer
18:00-18:50
Expanded Narration: Telling Stories in Contemporary Theatre and Performance (Instructor: Nina Tecklenburg)
Artistic experiments with ZOOM as a theatrical and narrative spaceAfter show gathering:  
breakout rooms Foyer

Online Conversation
3:00 - 4:00 pm CET
9:00 - 10 am EDT
Presented by Bard College, Bard College Berlin and American University of Central Asia

Prof. of Migration Studies Agata Lisiak will join a conversation with speakers from the US and Kyrgyzstan to discuss what is being done on a local level to address the issues women are facing during the current pandemic:

Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic a dramatic increase has been reported in violence against women and domestic violence. The policy of isolation and confinement has magnified and aggravated already existing inequalities and disproportionally affected women of color, indigenous women, and trans women. The closing of borders has fractured global care chains and limited women’s access to crucial medical services. As schools and daycare centers remain closed across the globe, women everywhere are facing an additional burden of care work. All these developments are bound to have long-lasting effects on women's rights, economic independence, and participation in decision making and therefore need to be urgently addressed. 

To join via Zoom:
https://zoom.us/j/91158452514?pwd=aEY2N0N3YmtHK1VVVXBhb1ZHcTc3Zz09 

  Online Workshop
12:00 - 1:00 pm CET
 
You may have heard about Google Scholar, or Jstor but do you know really know how these platforms work? Do you have difficulties in locating exactly the type of research you need? Are you frustrated because you keep running into databases you can't access? In this second installment of the Writing Tutor workshops we will delve into the world of research. We will outline useful tools such as databases, research shortcuts, and how to properly access the information you need for your academic projects. Whether you are a first year or a senior, we are sure there is something to be learned and we hope to see many of you. 

Writing Tutor in the Learning Commons, Hanna Bargheer, will host a one hour online workshop for all interested BCB students.

Date & time: Wednesday, May 6th, 2020, from 12:00 to 1:00 pm CET  
Remote event. Link to join>>  

Open to all BCB Students

Online Senior Thesis Presentation
 
Bard College Berlin  You are cordially invited to attend this year's online Senior Thesis Presentations. The Presentations are an essential step towards graduation and are an established and cherished event in the BCB academic year. 
May 4, 2020
10:00  Nikoloz Adeishvili: The twin crisis - an analysis of the monetary policy of the Georgian Central Bank and its comparison with the Taylor Rule           
11:00  Xiaojing Li: Reimagining Power Relations in Inclusive Theater  
11:00  Zurab Bakradze: Healthcare Expenditure and Economic Growth - an Analysis of the General Mechanisms and the Georgian Healthcare Reform in 2013          
11:30  Veronika Rišnovská: Freies Staatstheater: Attempts of Restructuring the German State Theatres for the 21st Century           
14:00  Lika Lekishvili: Kinto: a Traditional Georgian Dancer or a Symbol of Tbilisi Pride?         
15:00  Pilar Petropoulus-White: The Century of Faith: Tradition in Technologies of Re-enchantment           
16:00  Claire August: The Speech as Literary Form: A Narratological Analysis of Oratory and Persuasion in the Novel          
16:00  Vera Yung: Trauma in Aeschylus's The Oresteia     
 
May 5, 2020
10:00  Armanda Serwah: Colonial Amnesia: Rethinking Germany’s Erinnerungskultur  
11:00  Karam Alhamad: Governance Without Government: The Case of Eastern Syria   
11:45  Wah Sing Leng: Policy Regimes Transition Under the New Economic Policy (NEP): Explaining Malaysia’s policy responses in Asian Financial Crisis 1997 
13:00  Jude Macannuco: One’s Own Boss? Contested Discourses in Digital Platform Labor       
14:00  Mariia Mishchenko: Russian Language and Multilingualism as Cultural Capital for Russian Migrants in Berlin           
14:00  Åsa Dahlborn: The International Condonation of the Argentinian Military Junta 1976 - 1982     
14:15  Hannah Bargheer: From Palace to Public Space: Private Museums and Urban Reconstruction  
15:00  Gena  Haensel: How Chintz came to Europe: The Appropriation of an Indian Textile       
15:45  Anabel Polin: Reclaiming The Gaze: Asserting Sexual and Bodily Autonomy via the use of Exhibitionism in Contemporary Feminist Nude Self Portraiture    
16:00  Stella Burke:  Body as Canvas: The Recognition of Tattoos in the Western World           
17:00  Halliday Hartley: Sensation and Painting: A philosophically inspired reading of the body in the paintings of Miriam Cahn and Maria Lassnig           
17:00  Ania Flanigan: Enjoy Documentary: Filmmaking, Ethics, and Ai Wei Wei’s Human Flow  
 
May 6, 2020
 
11:00  Nele Pätzold: Spectator as Citizen: The Phenomenology of Performative Encounters     
14:00  Ana Ninidze: Happiness: What Income Can't Buy?: A Critical Review of the Easterlin Paradox Debate 
14:00  Micaela da Silva: Troubled Black Representation & the Emotion of Horror   
15:00  Colomba Dumay Neder: Making the Case for Tiny Houses: What is the demand for tiny Houses in Berlin?
 
May 7, 2020
12:30  Nikita Andromachi Moutsopoulou  Lilith: The Potential that Lies Behind the Myth        
13:30  May Keren: The Women of Pre-State Israel: An Inquiry of Identity and Nationalism
14:00  Kelly Huen: Lilith: "Depersonalisation through Assimilation"
14:00  Mandula van den Berg: Playing Cowboys: Imaginaries of 19th Century Amerika in East Germany
15:00  Mila Hamp: The Subject in Perspective     
15:45  Anna Zakelj: The Sphere: Possibilities for Dissolution in Titian’s the Allegory of Marriage        
16:00  Elle Hartell: The Witch: Horror, Women, Psychoanalysis, and Suspiria
17:15  Regan Dooley: The Intention and Necessity of the Judas Figure      
18:00  Jody Lam: Imagined Values: The Construction of Third Wave Coffee in Berlin
 
May 8, 2020
10:00  Sharifah Khalfan: From Metaphysics to Manifestation: Archetypes of Magical realism in Middle Eastern folklore, and the Politics of Re-imagination
11:00  Jack Jagelski: Cultural Understanding in Internationalized Space: International Schools as Places of Identity Building for Third Culture Kids
14:30  Abdul Wahed Alkhamrah: Writing Towards the Archive: Recollection, and Palestinian History Houses         
14:45  Kuo-Jam Chen-Sanchez: Ethos of the Digital Age: Cyber Utopia, Net Art and Digital Aesthetics       
15:30  Wafa Mustafa: Creative Memory of the Syrian Revolution
16:00  Sonya Devyatkin: How did Charles Bukowski challenge the idea of living conventionally within the constructs of society through his poems on love, society and work?
 
Open to the BCB Community

Online Reading
8:00 - 10:00 pm CET
 
It has become a tradition now that the writers in Clare Wigfall's fiction writing workshop give a reading of their work as the finale of their course. Normally, the event is held at an intimate, candle-lit Wein-Salon in Friedrichshain, where the backroom is filled with students and friends, and everyone listens attentively as the writers in the class step up to the tiny stage, take a deep breath, and share the wonderful stories they have written over the course of the semester. This year, the writers have also been creating amazing work and would love to share it with you. The class is excited to announce that they are taking their reading online!  Please join them, bring a glass of wine, or depending on which time zone you're in, a coffee if it is more appropriate. All BCB students, faculty members, friends, and family are warmly welcome.

Writers presenting:

Ásdís Ágústsdóttir
Claire August
Talula Benson-Stack
Penelope Bernal
Zoey Collea
Teah Cory
Adelaide Delfosse
Jude Macannuco
India Peluce
Eliane Zwart

Date & time: Friday, May 1st, 2020, from 8:00 to 10:00 pm CET
Remote event. Link to join>>

Meeting ID: 849 6370 4247
Password: 1aWDxF  ​​​​​​​

Access: Open to the Public

 

Online Guest lecture
7:30 pm CET
 
The Forms of Love core course is honored to welcome Wendy Doniger for a lecture on Love in the Mahabharata on Thursday, April 30 @ 19:30 CET. 

Prof. Doniger is Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor Emerita at the University of Chicago. A world renowned expert on Sanskrit literature and comparative mythology, she is the author or editor of over forty books, including The Hindus: An Alternative History and Redeeming the Kamasutra.

For more information contact Aaron Tugendhaft at [email protected]

Date & Time Thursday, April 30, 7:30 PM CET

Open to the BCB community.

 

  Online Workshop
5:30 - 6:30 pm CET
 
As the semester nears its end, assignments multiply and in many of us, this always creates a feeling of pressure -- one that we often discuss in small talk, but rarely have in-depth conversations about.

Please join a discussion on 30th April, this coming Thursday, on what mental health means for our academic work, and more specifically, writing. We will try and exchange some thoughts on how much the stress and anxiety of having to do assignments affects the quality of our work, and what we could do (as individuals and as a college) to minimize these effects and make sure to present our ideas in their strongest form, and possibly even feel more comfortable in doing so. The conversation will also entail possible resources to reach out to (both mental-health and writing ones), or how we feel about communicating with faculty about this. 

As the discussion will be open to all BCB students and held in a safe and non-judgemental atmosphere, we encourage everyone to come and share your own experiences and comments. 

The discussion will be co-hosted by the BRAVE Counselors (Jessie, Shreya, Karina), and the Writing Tutors (Mátyás), and we have also invited Ariane Simard, BCB’s Writing Instructor, to give us her perspective.
 
Date & time: Thursday, April 30th, 2020, from 5:30 to 6:30 pm CET

This event is only open to the students of Bard College Berlin.
 

Online Guest Lecture
7:00 - 8:15 pm CET
 
The Berlin Internship Seminar, held by Agata Lisiak and Floriain Duijsens, will host Mary Sherpe for a guest lecture on “Work during Covid 19”.
How is the Covid-19 pandemic affecting how we work today? Who continues to work and get paid, who continues to work without pay, and who had to stop working altogether? When small businesses and organizations were ordered to shut down, how do those employers and workers organize and reinvent their work to survive? 

Mary Scherpe has recently started a talk series aimed at supporting independent gastronomy business in these unprecedented times and will be sharing her expertise and reflections on work during Covid-19.  

Mary Scherpe runs Stil in Berlin, a website she founded in 2006 that recommends great places to go, shop, eat, and drink in Berlin. She also co-founded the Feminist Food Club, published a memoir, and organizes yearly fundraisers for refugees and homeless people in Berlin.
 
Date & time: Thursday, April 30th, 2020, from 7:00 to 8:15 pm CET

This event is only open to members of the Bard College Berlin community.
 

Online Guest Lecture
5:30 pm CET
 
Playwright and director Carey Perloff, artistic director of American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco for a quarter-century, will lead Paul Festa's seminar LT140: "Close Reading" in a study of Shakespeare's play The Merchant of Venice.

For those who lack a paper copy of the play, you can find it online here, and the class is using Stephen Greenblatt's annotations. If you care to watch the play in addition to reading it, Carey Perloff recommends Jonathan Miller's production at the National Theatre, with Joan Plowright and Laurence Olivier.

Carey will focus on the following speeches: PORTIA  Act III, Scene 2, lines 1-23  (Belmont), "I pray you tarry..." PORTIA  Act III, Ac 2, lines 149-174   "You see me, Lord Bassanio, where I stand..." PORTIA  Act IV, Sc 1, lines 180- 201  "The quality of mercy is not strained" SHYLOCK  ACT I, Sc 3, lines 36-47 "How like a fawning publican he looks"   and lines 66- 85 SHYLOCK ACT IV, Sc 1, lines 35-62   "I have possessed your grace..."Those interested in reading Carey's essay on casting a woman as Shylock—which touches on the challenges a Jewish director faces in approaching this play—can find it here.

For more information please contact Paul Festa.

Date & Time Wednesday, April 29th, 2020, 5:30 pm CET

Open to the BCB Community and friends of BCB
 

Online Guest Lecture
5:30 pm CET
 
Bard College Berlin  Talk:
Laura López Paniagua's seminar on "Exceeding the Framework: Approaches to the Contemporary Sublime" invites you to join a guest lecture and discussion with contemporary artist Julian Irlinger. Irlinger will give a presentation of his work and discuss his practice. He negotiates institutions and image politics that are related to the writing of history. For that he combines research with the presentation of materials for their economically and politically illuminating value. The discussion will focus on notions of beauty and sublime in relation to his practice and Contemporary Art.


Biography: 
Julian Irlinger (1986, based in Berlin). Irlinger studied art at the academy of visual arts in Leipzig and Städelschule in Frankfurt before attending the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York City. He also received a BA in art history from FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg. He had solo shows at Wilhelm-Hack-Museum (Ludwigshafen), Galerie Thomas Schulte (Berlin) and Kunsthalle Darmstadt. He has been included in group shows at MMK Frankfurt, artists space (New York) and Kunsthalle Wien. His publications "byproducts/matters", "props" and "Fragments of a Crisis" are published by Spector Books. His upcoming project "gift" will be shown in two solo presentations at Galerie Wedding (Berlin) this year and in 2021 at the Wende Museum of the Cold War in Los Angeles. The project will be accompanied by a publication with Spector Books.

Date & time: Tuesday, April 28th, 2020, 5:30 pm CET

This event is only open to members of the Bard College Berlin community.

Online Reception
3:00 - 4:00 pm CET
 

The traditional reception for seniors submitting their theses will be brought online! Complete with ceremonial gong and crown. All BCB community members are welcome to join in and congratulate the class of 2020.

Date & time: Friday, April 17, 2020 3:00-4:00 pm

This event is only open to members of the Bard College Berlin community.

Link to join

Webinar
Remote  3:00 pm – 4:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
On April 1st, from 3:00pm CET, BCB's Director of Academic Services and the Learning Commons James Harker and Head of Student Life Brian Gallagher will offer a webinar on "Study Habits for Connected Learning."

The webinar will be recorded and shared across the OSUN network. 

Date & time: Wednesday, April 1st, from 3:00pm CET
This event takes place remotely and is open to everyone interested
Link to join>>

Conversation and Q&A with director Isa Willinger
 
Remote event  2:00 pm – 3:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
"Willinger’s film says more about humans than it does about robots." -Point of View Magazine

On Thursday, March 26, from 2:00pm, Bard College Berlin is delighted to host German director and writer Isa Willinger for a conversation and Q&A on her documentary about identity and self-expression in the age of humanoid artificial intelligence “Hi, AI” (Germany, 2019, 90’). 

About "Hi, AI":
Humanoid robots are like new creatures on our planet. They work at reception desks, in shopping malls or as chefs. And they are coming into our private lives… „With an A.I., you have to keep your sentences short and to the point.“ This piece of advice is given to Chuck as he’s picking up his new robot partner Harmony fresh from the factory. In Tokyo, Grandma Sakurai is introduced to the cute robot Pepper, a present from her son, so she has someone to keep her company. While Harmony and Chuck are searching for love, and Pepper and Grandma are killing time, pressing questions arise: How will robots and artificial intelligence change our lives? What will we win, what will we lose? And, who will be the main protagonists of the future world? The documentary shows us tomorrow’s world today.

Isa Willinger is a documentary film director. She studied directing at the University of Film and Television in Munich. She also holds a Master’s degree in Slavic Studies, North American Studies and Sociology. Isa has been awarded scholarships by the Fulbright Foundation, the DAAD, the Heinrich Böll Foundation, the German Bundestag and the American Congress. As a filmmaker, Isa is interested in social changes and in the history of human ideas. She has contributed to film magazine Revolver and she is the author of a book on the films of Kira Muratova.

The event takes place in connection to the course Freedom of Expression taught by Michael Weinman. 

Date & time: Thursday, March 26, 2020, from 2:00 to 3:30pm CET
Remote event. Link to join>>

Image on poster: copyrighted film still

NOTICE: Please be aware that photos / videos might be recorded during BCB events for use on websites, social media and in publications. As a participant in the event, you are presumed to consent to the recording.

A Conversation with John Miller and Laura López Paniagua
 
Remote event  5:30 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
In the eighteenth century, the philosopher Edmund Burke definitively distinguished the sublime from the beautiful, inaugurating an epoch in which the former, typified by Romanticism, would become a central concern in the arts. Later, these categories seemed increasingly dubious and, at times, threatened to disappear. In the twentieth century, however, they re-emerge ever more forcefully in the writings of artists, psychoanalysts, and philosophers as if they were still necessary and pertinent to aesthetic experience. 

In this talk, artist and writer John Miller will discuss contemporary ideologies of beauty and the sublime with Laura López Paniagua. Miller has considered these questions in his text “The Weather is Here: Wish You Were Beautiful” (1990) and in the video works “Mannequin Death” (2015) and “What Is a Subject? (2020), which will be screened during the discussion. In response to the critique embodied in Miller’s art and writing, Mike Kelley once described him as “a utopian, (whose) basic worldview is Marxist and has a black sense of humor - generally delivered with a straight face.”

John Miller is an artist, writer and musician based in New York and Berlin. In 2011 he received the Wolfgang Hahn Prize from the Society for Contemporary Art at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne. Miller’s books include Mike Kelley: Educational Complex published by Afterall Books, in addition to The Ruin of Exchange: Selected Writings and The Price Club: Selected Writings (1977-1998), both published by JRP-Ringier and the Consortium as part of their Positions series. La Magasin in Grenoble, the Kunstverein in Hamburg and the Kunsthalle Zurich have held solo exhibitions of his artwork. In 2016 the ICA Miami featured “I Stand, I Fall,” his first comprehensive survey in the United States. The Schinkel Pavillon is currently holding his first major retrospective in Berlin. Miller is a Professor of Professional Practice in Barnard College’s Art History Department.

Date & time: Tuesday, March 17, 2020, 5:30-6:30pm
The event takes place remotely; link to join (Google Hangouts)>>
Open to everyone interested

Image on poster by John Miller

A talk by Wendy Ewald
 
Bard College Berlin Cafeteria, Waldstr. 70, Berlin - Pankow  12:30 pm – 1:30 pm EST/GMT-5
In this talk, Wendy Ewald will focus on her use of photography in education in Tanzania and her aim to expand the role of esthetic discourse in pedagogy and learning. Her projects with students and teachers are designed as interventions as well as artistic projects while the work challenges the concept of who actually makes the image – who is the photographer, who is the subject. 

Wendy Ewald has collaborated on photography projects with students from elementary school through college, created art with children, families, women, workers and teachers, and worked in the United States, Labrador, Colombia, India, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, Holland, Mexico and Tanzania.

© photo: Wendy Ewald

Date & time: Friday, March 6, 2020, from 12:30 to 1:30pm
Venue: Bard College Berlin Cafeteria
Waldstr. 70, Berlin - Pankow

NOTICE: Please be aware that photos / videos might be recorded during BCB events for use on websites, social media and in publications. As a participant in the event, you are presumed to consent to the recording.

Spring Semester Lecture Series
Various venues  In conjunction with the courses:
Agata Lisiak - A Lexicon of Migration
Hanan Toukan - Culture and Resistance; Ways of Seeing: Visual Politics and the Middle East

This lecture series queries the border as an idea and as praxis. Perpetually being made and unmade by geographies of power, the border is a dynamic process shaped by violent regimes of securitization and racialization as well as informal infrastructures, horizontal processes of inclusion, and cultural and political imaginaries of resistance.  By addressing a wide array of topics, histories, and geographies, over the course of the Spring 2020 semester we will discuss with scholars, artists, and activists how music and technology, humanitarianism, walls and murals, the poetics of displacement, literature, archival practices, and decoloniality can intercept the intended cruel effects of barbed wire fences, interment camps, displacement, deportations, and detentions.

Schedule

February 27, 12:30pm, Bard College Berlin Lecture Hall, Platanenstr. 98a, 13156 Berlin
Diana Abbani
Recorded Sounds Crossing the Borders: Circulation, Encounters and Imaginaries in the Levant during the French Mandate Period (1920-1943)

March 5, 12:30pm, Bard College Berlin Lecture Hall, Platanenstr. 98a, 13156 Berlin
Najat Abdulhaq
Rethinking Borders and Identities: The Emergence of the Arab Jew in Contemporary Novels

March 16, 10:45am
Lyndsey Stonebridge
Refugees ask Refugees: The Poetics of Displacement
Bard Network Event
This event takes place remotely. LINK TO JOIN>>

CANCELED: March 26, 10:45am, Seminar Room 11, Kuckhoffstrasse 24, 13156 Berlin
Ana Maria Alvarez Monge
What It Really Means to Work in Humanitarianism
In the frame of the Berlin Internship Seminar

CANCELED: April 2, 12:30pm, Bard College Berlin Lecture Hall, Platanenstr. 98a, 13156 Berlin
Himmat Zoubi & Mohammad Jabali
Reclaiming Spaces/Places: On Arab Cultural Production between Jaffa, Haifa and Berlin

CANCELED: April 16, 7:00pm, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, John-Foster-Dulles-Allee 10, 10557 Berlin 
Heba Amin
The General’s Stork
Book Launch

CANCELED: April 30, 12:30pm, Bard College Berlin Lecture Hall, Platanenstr. 98a, 13156 Berlin
Amal Eqeiq
Muralism, Solidarity and Visual Crossing from Mexico to Palestine 

With support from the Mellon-funded Consortium on Forced Migration, Displacement, and Education

BCB’s The Factory, Eichenstr. 43, 13156 Berlin-Pankow  4:00 pm – 5:30 pm EST/GMT-5

"If Joan Didion had written about the BDSM community in LA it may have felt a bit like Permission." -Lit Hub

Saskia Vogel will read from her novel Permission on February 26, 16:00-17:30, in the Factory Theater Space. The reading will be followed by an informal discussion and Q&A, moderated by BCB Creative Writing instructor Rebecca Rukeyser. 

Saskia Vogel is from Los Angeles and lives in Berlin, where she works as a writer and Swedish-to-English literary translator. Her 2019 debut novel, Permission, has been translated into four languages. She has written on themes of gender, power and the art of translation for publications such as Granta, The White Review, The Offing, and The Paris Review Daily. Her translations include work by Johannes Anyuru, Katrine Marçal, Karolina Ramqvist, Lina Wolff,  and the modernist eroticist Rut Hillarp.

Photo credit: Fette Sans

Date & time: Wednesday, February 26, from 4:00 to 5:30pm
Venue: BCB’s The Factory (Theater Space)
Eichenstr. 43, 13156 Berlin-Pankow
Admission free

BVG Directions: Bard College Berlin's Factory is in Niederschönhausen, a 12-minute tram ride from the “Pankow” S/U-Bahn station. Take the M1 tram towards the destination “Rosenthal Nord” (not "Schillerstrasse") and exit at “Friedrich-Engels-Str. / Eichenstrasse”. Bard College Berlin’s Factory is 2 blocks away on the right side with a large red banner in front.

NOTICE: Please be aware that photos / videos might be recorded during BCB events for use on websites, social media and in publications. As a participant in the event, you are presumed to consent to the recording. 

A talk by The Asfari Foundation
Bard College Berlin Cafeteria, Waldstr. 70, Berlin - Pankow  12:30 pm – 1:30 pm EST/GMT-5
“Our vision is for a just world where people have equal opportunities to transform their lives, invest in their communities, and shape the future of their countries.”

The talk will focus on active youth engagement and innovative social entrepreneurship as ways for a resilient and empowered civil society in the Middle East to lead a transformational positive change in their communities and countries. The Asfari Foundation will introduce current programs and their work and vision to support the civil society and youth as change agents.

The Asfari Foundation was established by Ayman and Sawsan Asfari in 2006 with the aim of creating a long-term impact that focuses on the issues of education and the public building of a strong civil society which is the foundation for any fair, resilient, sustainable and productive society.

Date & time: Wednesday, February 26, 2020, from 12:30 to 1:30pm
Venue: Bard College Berlin Cafeteria
Waldstr. 70, Berlin - Pankow

NOTICE: Please be aware that photos / videos might be recorded during BCB events for use on websites, social media and in publications. As a participant in the event, you are presumed to consent to the recording.

A talk by Mira Seo (Yale-NUS College)
Bard College Berlin Cafeteria, Waldstr. 70, Berlin - Pankow  12:15 pm – 1:15 pm EST/GMT-5
This talk explores two portrayals of trans-species friendship in Valmiki’s Ramayana and the Odyssey.  How does each epic represent “friendship” between individuals of different species, and what do these relationships indicate about the boundaries between humans and other beings? Mira Seo considers the explanations each poem provides for trans-species friendship, and how reading them together reveals how the epics problematize these bonds across speech, bodies, and narrative.  What might these ambiguous friendships in poetry reveal about the imaginative and lived experiences of human-animal encounters in antiquity and today?  These readings emerge from Literature and Humanities, a foundational Common Curriculum course at Yale-NUS in Singapore, and will be part of a co-authored book project on comparative readings in ancient literatures.

A specialist in Roman poetry, Mira Seo has been deeply engaged with liberal arts education, core curriculum development, and globalizing the Humanities throughout her career. In 2004, she received her PhD in Classics from Princeton University. Mira began her career at Swarthmore College followed by the University of Michigan, where she was promoted to Associate Professor in the Departments of Classical Studies and Comparative Literature. In 2012 she was recruited to the inaugural faculty of Yale-NUS College, a collaboration between Yale University and the National University of Singapore. She was a member of the Teagle Foundation’s National Forum for Liberal Education, and has held fellowships at the W.E.B. Du Bois Research Institute at Harvard; she has been an invited speaker and consultant at numerous institutions, including Stanford University, University of Pennsylvania, NYU Abu Dhabi, NYU Shanghai, Duke-Kunshan University, and Fulbright University in Vietnam.

At Yale-NUS, Mira led a collaborative faculty teaching team to design a new Common Curriculum, served as Head of the Literature major, and co-founded an innovative minor in Global Antiquity.  She has chaired a number of governance committees and task forces for the college, including on Peer Observation and Sexual Misconduct. In the academic year 2020-21 she will join the college cabinet as Director of the Common Curriculum.  She has published on Roman poetry of the first century CE, the neo-Latin poetry of Juan Latino, an African Latinist in 16th century Granada, and diversifying Classics (Exemplary Traits: Reading Characterization in Roman Poetry, Oxford 2013; “Classics for All” AJP 140.4, 2019).  In addition to her scholarly publications, she is the founder of the Open Classroom project, for which she received a competitive grant to develop a scheduling app for informal peer observations.  She is currently writing on comparative readings in ancient literature, and leading Vitis Vinifera Antiqua, an interdisciplinary digital humanities collaboration on ancient wine.

Date & time: Friday, February 21, 2020, from 12:15 to 1:15pm
Venue: Bard College Berlin Cafeteria
Waldstr. 70, Berlin - Pankow

NOTICE: Please be aware that photos / videos might be recorded during BCB events for use on websites, social media and in publications. As a participant in the event, you are presumed to consent to the recording.

Lecture and Workshop
 
BCB’s The Factory, Eichenstr. 43, 13156 Berlin-Pankow  9:00 am – 12:15 pm EST/GMT-5
As part of the course Making A Performance. Devising Theater as Artistic Research (Nina Tecklenburg), the performance artist and theorist Siegmar Zacharias will give an introduction into alternative ways of knowledge production and embodied research.

No artistic experience is required.
Students and scholars from all branches of research are warmly invited!

The lecture will give an introduction to what Donna Haraway and Karen Barad have called diffractive methods:

“[F]eminist theorist Trinh Minh-ha [...] was looking for a way to figure ‘difference’ as a ‘critical difference within,’ and not as special taxonomic marks grounding difference as apartheid. [...]. Diffraction does not produce ‘the same’ displaced, as reflection and refraction do. Diffraction is a mapping of interference, not of replication, reflection, or reproduction. A diffraction pattern does not map where differences appear, but rather maps where the effects of differences appear.” Haraway (1997)

The physical model of diffraction will be discussed through examples from Siegmar Zacharias's own and others artistic research practices in the contemporary dance and performance field (Meg Stuart Tanzkongress, Valentina Desideri, Alice Chauchat). We will address the question of what kind of knowledge it produces, and how it can be employed as an analytical tool to engage in embedded and embodied research in all fields. The workshop invites participants to experience by way of doing diverse modes of diffractive artistic practice.

Siegmar Zacharias is a performance artist and theorist. Her works produce situations of embodied dirty thinking together through matters and matter. She develops formats of performances, installations, discursive encounters and curation/invitation dealing with questions of agency, liquefaction, modes of knowledge production as collaboration, ecology of artistic practice. She collaborates with human and non-humans, uncontrollable material, such as smoke, slime, the nervous system and death. Recent works include: Training for political imaginaries / The Other Thing (a series of durational immersive symposia with artists, activists, theorists), Drooling Lecture Series (a series of performance lectures researching fluid ways of thinking in collaboration with slime, saliva and a voice box); Slime Dynamics; The Cloud: a cosmo-choreography made by animals, vegetables, minerals, humans, concepts and emotions.; Dirty thinking; invasive hospitality.

Siegmar studied philosophy und comparative literature in Berlin (FU) and London (UCL) und Performance Art at DasArts Amsterdam. In 2018 she received a TECHNE scholarship for excellency and innovative research to pursue her PhD project: Intimacy & Alienation – learning from uncontrollable materials. Towards a posthuman feminist poET(H)ICS.

Date & time: Wednesday, February 12, 2020
Lecture: 9-10:30am
Workshop: 10:45am-12:15pm
Venue: BCB’s The Factory (Performance Space)
Eichenstr. 43, 13156 Berlin-Pankow

NOTICE: Please be aware that photos / videos might be recorded during BCB events for use on websites, social media and in publications. As a participant in the event, you are presumed to consent to the recording. 

BVG Directions: Bard College Berlin's Factory is in Niederschönhausen, a 12-minute tram ride from the “Pankow” S/U-Bahn station. Take the M1 tram towards the destination “Rosenthal Nord” (not "Schillerstrasse") and exit at “Friedrich-Engels-Str. / Eichenstrasse”. Bard College Berlin’s Factory is 2 blocks away on the right side with a large red banner in front.

Photos copyright: Siegmar Zacharias

Grüner Salon, Volksbühne, Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, Berlin  8:00 pm – 10:00 pm EST/GMT-5

I come from
no mother's womb.
I come from
no motherland.

My tongue knows
no mother language.
Motherless, haven't
a cause for to strive.

I have a thousand worlds
and one. I yearn for yet
one more.
I want the one that lays
between your golden ears.

(„Integration“, by Sam Zamrik)

This is an event focusing on the theme of liminal existence, loss of identity and language, the active pursuits of expression in their spite, and poetry as a facilitator for that. 

Alienation, whether social, legal, or literary, is a phenomena that has been prevalent throughout the modern era, and is becoming increasingly visible in a variety of circumstances that have demonstrable effects on the global population. The explosion of revolutions around the world, the modern refugee crises, and the destabilization of global politics all reflect their weight on everyday people. Sociopolitical marginalization and exclusionary politics have, since WWII, increasingly generated new populations for a class of outcasts and social dissidents. Such outcasts want a vessel to express their being at odds with the status quo and society. 

The theme was inspired by several interdisciplinary discussions that took place in Bard College Berlin classes which allowed its diverse student body to reexamine its place in history and community. A student at Bard College Berlin, Sam Zamrik took to the poetry of Gibran Khalil Gibran, Christina Rossetti, Erich Fried, the German Romantic, and English Decadent movements to isolate a thread of alienation and modes of idealistic strife against it. His upcoming collection of poems, titled "Sophistry of Survival," deals with the same thematic elements in an attempt to reconcile marginalization with the need for identity. 

"Sophistry of Survival" (SOS for short) covers a range of topics including religion, social alienation, mental illness, diaspora, and "integration" in the form of limerick-like lyric poetry. Sam's reading will be followed by a panel discussion of Bard College Berlin faculty and students about transnational, transhistorical reading and production of poetry, and "tonguelessness," at the intersection of discipline and experience.

Program
20.00 Welcome Marion Detjen 
20.05 Sam Zamrik reading from "Sophistry of Survival"
20.25 Conversation Sam Zamrik and Ariane Simard
21.20 Panel Discussion on Poetry in Exile, Writing without "Mother Tongue", and the Condition of the Alienated - Ariane Simard, Francesco Giusti, Jeffrey Champlin, Patty Nash, Sam Zamrik

Photo: Ghaith Zamrik

Date & time: Tuesday, February 4, 2020; from 8:00pm (doors open 7:30pm)
Venue: Grüner Salon, Volksbühne
Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, Berlin

Tickets: EUR 5 / 3; link to purchase>>

More information>>

A cooperation between Bard College Berlin, the Volksbühne Berlin and the German Council on Foreign Relations

Real Talk is a new series at Grüner Salon that renders visible the political discourse of the young, resistance-oriented, democratic and activist Middle-Eastern diaspora in Berlin and provides space for its debates. This series aims to make evident the transnational realities and struggles between ‘here’ and ‘there’; ‘then’ and ‘now’, differences which Nationalism seeks to deny and erase, and which reveal themselves in the Diasporas. The talks serve as a platform to explore the diaspora’s own thoughts and reactions to these realities. The series in the Grüner Salon aims to create a space where Syrian, Afghan, Yemen, Iraqi and other experts in various discursive and artistic discipline can discuss and perform their work.

The series is a cooperation between Bard College Berlin, the Volksbühne Berlin and the German Council on Foreign Relations. It offers a mix of lectures, short-films, panel discussions and performances discussing themes such as the struggle for survival of the civil society in the Middle East; the re-claiming of political agency; disappeared and missing prisoners; the fate of women in the revolution; the political dimension of the (post-)traumatic; the experience of statelessness; and other topics related to the diaspora.

Past events in this series:

December 10, 2019, Volksbühne
Real Talk: Couldn't They Be Allies? Political Diasporas and German Foreign/Cultural Policy

November 11, 2019, Volksbühne
Real Talk: Justice for Syria and Universal Jurisdiction in Germany - What Can be Done?

September 23, 2019, Volksbühne
Real Talk: On Changing Gender Relations in Yemen and Its European Diaspora

May 10, 2019, Volksbühne
Real Talk: On New Beginnings and Berlin’s Arab Exile Body

April 9, 2019, Volksbühne
Real Talk: Accommodating the Devil. The Syrian Civil Society’s Struggle for Survival

NOTICE: Please be aware that photos / videos might be recorded during BCB events for use on websites, social media and in publications. As a participant in the event, you are presumed to consent to the recording.

Guest talk by Ian Kalman (Fulbright University Vietnam)
Bard College Berlin Cafeteria, Waldstr. 70, Berlin - Pankow  12:30 pm – 1:30 pm EST/GMT-5
On Monday, February 3, Bard College Berlin is delighted to host a talk by Ian Kalman, a visiting faculty member from Fulbright University Vietnam, on "Knowledge Production as Legal Production: An Auto-ethnography of a Vietnamese Startup University."

Date & time: Monday, February 3rd, 2020, from 12:30pm
Venue: Bard College Berlin Cafeteria
Waldstr. 70, Berlin - Pankow

NOTICE: Please be aware that photos / videos might be recorded during BCB events for use on websites, social media and in publications. As a participant in the event, you are presumed to consent to the recording.

A talk by Dieter Grimm (Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin)
 
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Juristische Fakultät, Unter den Linden 9, 10117 Berlin, Raum 213  6:15 pm – 7:45 pm EST/GMT-5
"Popular sovereignty" deals with the bearer of sovereignty: it is the people (as opposed to, e.g., a monarch). Yet, unlike a monarch, the people is not able to govern itself. For this, it needs representatives who govern on its behalf and according to the conditions set by it, usually in the constitution. Therefore, popular sovereignty retreats into the constituent power that is ascribed to the people. Once the constitution is in force, there are only constituted powers, no sovereign. Within the constitutional state, sovereignty is "dormant" and revives only when the existing constitution is abolished and replaced by a new one. During the existence of the constitution, it mutates to the legitimating principle of the political entity and, as such, guides the organization and exercise of political power.

Prof. em. Dr. Dr. h.c. mult. Dieter Grimm, LL.M. (Harvard) is a permanent fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin and Professor emeritus for Public Law at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. From 1987 to 1999 he served as justice at the Federal Constitutional Court, from 2001 to 2007 he was Rector of Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. His research deals with questions surrounding the achievement of constitutionalism: the history of modern constitutionalism, constitutional theory, constitutional law - German and comparative, and constitutional adjudication, constitutionalism beyond the state (especially in the European Union, but also on the global level). He is currently writing a book on the place of Germany's constitution and of the Federal Constitutional Court and its jurisprudence in recent books on the history of the Federal Republic from the end of World War II to (and sometimes beyond) German unification.

Part of the Lecture Series on Popular Sovereignty organized by Bard College Berlin and the Law and Society Institute at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin with the support of the American Social Science Research Council

Facebook page for the event series>>

Date & time: Tuesday, January 21, from 6:15pm
Venue: Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Juristische Fakultät, Unter den Linden 9, 10117 Berlin, Raum 213
Admission free

Bard College Berlin / Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin  Modern constitutional democracies rest on the principle of popular sovereignty. The idea that ultimate authority is vested in the people has served to ground constitutional orders and legitimize political power in the modern world. With the recent rise of authoritarian parties and governments that assert popular legitimacy to question constitutional principles as necessary buttresses of democratic regimes, the viability and soundness of “rule of the people” has come under intense scrutiny.

Co-hosted by Bard College Berlin and the Law and Society Institute at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, the Lecture Series on Popular Sovereignty convenes distinguished scholars, political analysts, and civil society activists to probe contemporary dilemmas of democratic government and examine the challenges confronting the concept and practice of popular sovereignty today.

Organized by Bard College Berlin and the Law and Society Institute at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
With the support of the American Social Science Research Council

Program
October 10, 2019 | 19:30 | Bard College Berlin, Lecture Hall, Platanenstr. 98a, 13156 Berlin
Geoffrey Harpham (Kenan Institute for Ethics, Duke University) 
The Nation in The Birth of a Nation

October 31, 2019 | 18:15 | Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
David Dyzenhaus (Faculty of Law, University of Toronto) 
Brexit and the Legal Idea of Sovereignty

November 20, 2019 | 18:15 | Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Ivan Krastev (Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen)
Making Sense of the Long 1989

November 21, 2019 | 19:30 | Bard College Berlin, Lecture Hall, Platanenstr. 98a, 13156 Berlin
Adam Davis (Oregon Humanities)
The Voices of the People: From Dreams of Self-Rule to Practices of Mutual Understanding

December 10, 2019 | 18:15 | Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Daniel Ziblatt (Department of Government, Harvard University; Axel Springer Fellow, American Academy in Berlin)
The Rise and Fall of Democracy: Lessons From the Past for Today  

January 21, 2020 | 18:15 | Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Dieter Grimm (Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin)
Popular Sovereignty as Dormant Sovereignty

All Humboldt events will take place in: Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Juristische Fakultät, Unter den Linden 9, 10117 Berlin, Raum 213

Admission free