Author Archives: Henry John Mead

Piret Peiker on ‘European Constitutional Imaginaries in Estonia’

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9 December 2021, Dr. Piret Peiker participated in the international seminar “In Search of European Constitutional Imaginaries in Estonia”, held at the University of Tartu. Dr. Peiker’s paper was entitled “Postcolonial Constitutional Thinking in Europe: The Phenomenon of the Law on Cultural Autonomyfor National Minorities in Estonia (1925)”. The seminar was organised at the initiative of the ERC project “IMAGINE. European Constitutional Imaginaries: Utopias, Ideologies and the Other”, based at the University of Copenhagen. The seminar’s purpose was to promote cross-fertilisation between specialists in constitutional law, political theory, intellectual history and cultural analysis, leading to joint publications.

Liisi Keedus on Karl Barth at ‘European Crisis and Reorientation’, Copenhagen 28 October 2021

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On Thursday 28 October 2021, Prof. Liisi Keedus delivered a paper at the ‘European Crisis and Reorientation’ workshop, entitled ‘“A snake biting its own tail”: Karl Barth’s critique of political modernity in its Weimar contexts.’

See link here for details of the paper and the event, an open international workshop on Karl Barth’s Der Römerbrief in the cultural and intellectual context of post-WW1 Europe, held at the University of Copenhagen 27-30 October 2021.

 

Ideas in Revolution / Revolution in Images: film screening of Danton (1983)

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8 October 2021, 18:00

SuperNova Cinema (N-406), Tallinn University

We are happy to invite you to the Open Philosophy Seminar dedicated to representations of the Revolution and its ideas!

The significance of the French Revolution goes far beyond its practical political consequences: ideas of radical change born in that tumultuous decade have gained shape and weight, survived the trials of application – or were disqualified by them – and continue to haunt the imagination of historians, philosophers, politicians, and writers. The (re)conceptualization of the French Revolution is an ongoing practice: new meanings are assigned to it, old ones are contested, and through this process the preoccupations of its many interpreters are revealed.

Stanisława Przybyszewska’s Sprawa Dantona (1929) is one of the most compelling dramatic works on the topic produced in the twentieth century, largely unknown until the seventies; Andrzej Wajda’s film Danton (1983), adapted from the aforementioned play, is considered to be a gripping testament of the political situation in Europe at that moment. Both authors took the revolutionary ideas and shaped them in accordance with their respective visions of history and of the present day.

A film screening of Danton will be followed by a seminar discussion of what we do with ideas of the Revolution and how they are put to work. French revolutionary actors themselves were already adapting the teachings of the Enlightenment; Przybyszewska and Wajda, in their turn, looked back at this process from a historical distance that was both an advantage and an impediment, and used the channels at hand, textual and visual, to convey what they saw there. What do we in 2021, watching a 1983 film about the events of 1794, itself an adaptation of the 1929 play, make of all that? How do we consume the ideas of the French Revolution today and what does that historical event itself mean to us?

The discussants:

Dr hab. Monika Świerkosz (Jagiellonian University)

Dr Diana Popa (Tallinn University)

Ksenia Shmydkaya (Tallinn University)

NB! Registration to the event is obligatory. Please, fill in the form: https://forms.gle/9x7TYrP1tDmLJB6L9

Ksenia Shmydkaya on biofiction

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Ksenia Shmydkaya gave a presentation at the conference Biofiction as World Literature / La biofiction comme littérature mondiale, at KU Leuven, on 15-18 September 2021. Her paper was entitled “Biofiction as Soviet literature? On The Crazy Ship and its passengers.” The full book of abstracts can be found here.

Stanisława Przybyszewska Workshop (1.10.21)

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Revisiting Stanisława Przybyszewska: a 120th Anniversary Workshop 

October 2021 will mark the 120th anniversary of Stanisława Przybyszewska’s birth. One of the most original writers of interwar Poland, she remains on the margins of public consciousness, her works drastically underexplored and little read even in her birth country – and worldwide she is rarely recognised as more than a footnote in discussions of Andrzej Wajda’s film Danton or as the “victim of history” from Hilary Mantel’s 2017 Reith lecture.

The aim of this online-workshop is to initiate the change: to draw the attention of Anglophone academia to Stanisława Przybyszewska’s work. First, we want to put Przybyszewska’s name on the intellectual map of the interwar period by facilitating an international dialogue regarding her legacy. Second, we propose to open a discussion on the relevance of her ideas for the present day.

Speakers and papers:

  • Dr hab. Monika Świerkosz (Jagiellonian University) / “On the edge. Stanisława Przybyszewska and her posthuman metamorphoses”
  • Dr. Dagmara Binkowska (Gdańsk Library of the Polish Academy of Sciences) / “The price of career, the price of being yourself. Women and their life choices in prosaic oeuvre of Stanisława Przybyszewska”
  • Dr hab. Marion Brandt (University of Gdańsk) / “Stanisława Przybyszewska’s inspirations from German literature”
  • Ksenia Shmydkaya (Tallinn University) / “Utopian writing, utopian reading: Stanisława Przybyszewska’s future-from-the-past”

The workshop will take place on Zoom, on 1st October 2021, from 13.00 (CET) / 14.00 (EET) to 17.00 (CET) / 18.00 (EET). In order to get access to the event, we kindly ask you to fill in the form: https://forms.gle/UZDKBK8M9JF7QsDE9