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The
Director’s Seminars
The Director’s Seminars series was instituted in
the fall of 2001. The aftermaths of the tragic events on September 11
the same year underscored the importance of regional studies and sparked
a realization that the
United States
suffers from a strategically dangerous shortage of regional specialists.
Still, long-term, enduring support from the government or from those in
charge of finances in the academy has not been forthcoming.
The series seeks to bring together some of the leading scholars in
our fields to tackle hard questions about the role of regional studies:
Can area studies transcend its origins in the Cold War? What gives our
region coherence now that their shared experience of the communist
experiment is arguably no longer definitive in the identification of
boundaries and allegiances? Can we still talk to one another across
disciplinary boundaries, and even across the great divide between the
humanities and the social sciences, between scholarship and practice on
the basis of our shared regional focus? What are the boundaries of our
region today? Where does regionalism fit in globalization?
It is our hope that the Director’s Seminars will
serve the inextricably linked purposes of helping us to redefine
regional studies at the same time as we reaffirm its value for
educators, academic administrators, and policy makers.
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| Upcoming Seminars
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Past Lectures:
2003:
September 30: Affecting Global Change Through Regional Studies: Roundtable. Participants: Jeffrey Sachs (Director, Earth Institute & Quetelet Professor of Economics and International Affairs), Alexander Pfaff (Associate Professor of Economics), and Katharina Pistor (Associate Professor, School of Law ).
February 24: Regional Studies in the 21st Century: Roundtable. Participants: Katherine Verdery (Director, Center for Russian and East European Studies, University of Michigan); Klaus Segbers (Director, Osteuropa-Institut, Free University of Berlin); Alex Motyl (Director, Center for Global Change and Governance, Rutgers University, New Jersey).
2002:
February 22: The Future of Regional Studies After September 11th Scheduled Speakers include: Volker Berghahn, (Director, Institute for the Study of Europe); Timothy Colton, (Morris and Anna Feldberg Professor of Government and Russian Studies & Director, Davis Center for Russian Studies, Harvard University); Karen Dawisha (Havighurst Professor at the Department of Political Science & Director, Havighurst Center for Russian and Post-Soviet Studies, Miami University at Ohio); ); Catharine Nepomnyashchy, (Director The Harriman Institute).
2001:
October 8: Exploring the Boundaries of Area Studies: Mark von Hagen (History, Columbia University ), “Teaching and Confronting the Postcolonial in Minsk .” Respondent: Gayatri Spivak (Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities, Columbia University )
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