Global Studies Forum

“Orientalizing Auschwitz: Muselmänner
and Multidirectional Memory”

 

Room A607, Wells Hall
5:15-6:30 pm, December 2

Dr. David D. Kim
Assistant Professor of German
Department of Linguistics and Germanic, Slavic,
Asian and African Languages;
Core Teaching Faculty, Global Studies in the Arts and Humanities

 

In Auschwitz and elsewhere, the term Muselmänner was used to name camp inmates whose rate of survival was nil. They were the living dead of Nazi concentration camps. Yet, howdid this German word referring to Muslim men emerge in this horrific context? What relationship did it strike between Nazism and colonialism in its untranslated form? In a
globalizing world that is as postcolonial as postwar, giving witness to Muselmänner poses a unique opportunity for remembering the past in its modern multiplicity.

 

The Academic Shock Doctrine: Restructuring the Humanities and the Arts in a Time of Crisis

 

Wednesday, October 21, 4-6pm, English Conference Room, 213 Morrill Hall

 

A Public Lecture by Tavia Nyong'o, Associate Professor of Performance Studies, New York University and Eng-Beng Lim, Assistant Professor of English, Michigan State University.

From students and faculty in revolt on the West Coast, to a university president named to an annual list of "villains" who are
"destroying" their city on the East, the crisis in higher education is back in the news. In this reading workshop, Professors Lim
and Nyong'o address the epistemic shifts or intellectual costs of the ongoing upheavals. Using performance as a way to navigate
the administrative and economic logics of crisis management, they ask what opportunities or opportunisms are being
imagined at present for humanistic and artistic work? How are neoliberal priorities being incorporated into educative empires,
as epitomized by academic outposts in Abu Dhabi and Dubai? What role do the performing arts play in these global projects?
And is there an intellectual counterpoint to the concomitant cutbacks announced in the name of institutional survival?
In this cross-institutional collaboration between Michigan State University-Lim and New York University-Nyong'o, we invite
participants to read the materials provided, and to share pointed responses to these questions as we imagine alternatives to
the hegemonic prescriptions for higher education.

Please join us!
Copies of the pre-lecture reading papers are available in 201 Morrill Hall.

 

Dr. Danny Mendez receives Teaching Award

 

Dr. Danny Mendez, core faculty member of Global Studies has been awarded a prestigious teaching award, Dominican Educators of Excellence in Higher Education for 2009 by the Universidad UNAPEC (Dominican Republic)/Dominican Studies Association/Asociacion de Estudios Dominicanos. This is in recognition of his dedication to the study, teaching and dissemination of Dominican Studies.

 

Global Studies Forum Speaker

Global Citizen or "Oriental Other"? Lin Yutang as a Translator of Chinese and American Cultures

 

A Public Lecture by

Dr. Quian Jun

Room 204, Snyder Hall, October 6, 4:00 - 5:30pm

Dr. Jun Qian of City University of Hong Kong, currently a Fulbright Scholar in the Department of Comparative Literature at Harvard University, is scheduled to give a lecture in Snyder Hall, 4:00 - 5:30 pm, on October 6. Dr. Qian's lecture is sponsored by the Global Studies Program in the Arts & Humanities with support from the Department of Linguistics and Germanic, Slavi, Asian and African Languages and the Department of English. The lecture is open to the general public.

 

"Multilingual Literature and the Globalization of American Studies"

Werner Sollors
Harvard University

 

April 2009
MSU Union Gold Room

The recipient of a Ph.D. from the Freie Universität Berlin, Werner Sollors is currently Henry B. & Anne M. Cabot Professor of English Literature and Professor of African & African American Studies at Harvard University. His main interests lie in the areas of race, ethnicity, migration, interracialism, multilingualism, transnationalism, and themes/motifs in literature of the United States and of Europe. Among his book publications are Ethnic Modernism (Harvard, 2008), Neither Black Nor White Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature (Harvard, 1997), Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (Oxford, 1986), etc. He is also the editor of An Anthology of Interracial Literature: Black-White Contacts in the Old World and the New (Harvard, 2003), Multilingual America: Transnationalism, Ethnicity, and the Languages of America (NYU, 1998), Theories of Ethnicity (Oxford, 1996), and many other books. His lectures “Americans All?" http://www.nyupress.org/americansall/ and "Goodbye Germany" http://german.berkeley.edu/transit/2005/curr.toc.html#1 have been posted on the web.

Partnership with Russian Institution

April 2009

Global Studies Steering Committee meets with Dr. Constantine Miniar-Beloroutchev of the School of Global Studies, Lomonosov Moscow State University in Moscow, Russia, to explore possibilities of cooperative programs between the two Global Studies programs.

Networks with Brazilian Institution

April 2009

Global Studies is invited to participate in meetings with the Federal University of Bahia (Brazil) delegation to discuss FUB's Liberal Arts Initiatives with MSU.

Networks with Chinese Universities

May/June 2009

Supported by a China Program Grant, Global Studies Steering Committee members visted China (May 27 - June 7) to develop cooperative programs with partners in the following Chinese institutions: Shenzhen University, Beijing Foreign Studies University, Southeast University (Nanjing), Nanjing University, East China University of Political Science and Law (Shanghai), and Shanghai Institute of Foreign Trade.

In each of the institutions, we met with key faculty members and ranking administrators to discuss possibilities for establishing joint programs in global studies and to explore opportunities for GSAH students to teach English and American culture in China. We also visited an automobile plant in Nanjing, jointly established by Ford/Mazda with a leading Chinese auto maker.