Henry Mead will present a paper on ‘Modernism, Heresy and Temporalities’ at Tartu University, Jacobi 2-336, on Monday 9 November at 16.15.
Author Archives: Jorge Varela
On Progress and Coronavirus
Revolution in the 20th century podcast
Between the Times researchers Tommaso Giordani and Ksenia Shmydkaya spoke to Enriko Mäsak for the podcast Filotsoon. The topic of conversation was revolution and violence in the 20th century, and the discussion focussed on Georges Sorel, Stanislawa Przybyszewska, and their relation to the memory and heritage of 1789.
The podcast is available here:
Event – Global Intellectual History Seminar
The Between the Times project is hosting an event on 14 of February: Vasileios Syros talking about ‘Global intellectual history’.
Vasileios Syros is a senior university lecturer at the University of Jyväskylä, and his scholarship focuses on the interaction among the Christian, Islamic, and Jewish traditions of political thought as well as on cross-cultural encounters in the early modern period. He is the author of Marsilius of Padua at the Intersection of Ancient and Medieval Traditions of Political Thought: University of Toronto Press (2012).
The seminar takes place on Friday, 14.02, at 16.15, room M 328.
Piret Peiker and Estonian Semiotics
Piret Peiker participated in the international workshop The Global Reception of Estonian Semiotics, Tallinn University on 20.12.2019 , organised by the Estonian Research Council supported research project “Around the World and Back Again: A Global Typology of the Reception of Estonian Semiotics“. Peiker’s presentation was titled “Lotman and the Tartu-Moscow School in Modern Higher Education“. It included examples of her own teaching practice using Lotman’s conceptualisation of time/space as a practical toolkit for close reading and analysis of texts from widely varying historical contexts.
Piret Peiker @ ASEEES
Piret Peiker participated in the international ASEEES (Association of Slavic, Eastern European and Eurasian Studies) Annual Convention, held in San Francisco, 23.11.– 26.11. 2019, with “Belief“ the convention topic of the year.
Peiker gave a presentation titled “If You Believe in Yourself, Then You (Will) Believe In the People“, and a talk as part of the round table discussion “A Nation Adrift: The 1944-1945 Wartime Diaries of Miksa Fenyö“ .
The first presentation took as its starting point the lines of one of the most popular songs of the Estonian anti-Soviet “Singing Revoltion“ and the conception of time expressed there, employing it to discuss the intellectual history of collective-individual relationships in Estonia. The round table focused on the edited volume of the same title, comprising the diaries of a Hungarian political and cultural figure of Jewish origins, a leading promoter of literary modernism in Hungary before and during the interwar period.
Discussing the “Conqueror’s Eye”
Piret Peiker discussed the exhibition “The Conqueror’s Eye: Lisa Reihana’s In Pursuit of Venus” (KUMU art museum, Tallinn, Estonia, 20.09.2019-26.01.2010, curators Linda
Kaljundi, Eha Komissarov, Kadi Polli) in her newspaper review “What Characterises the Conqueror’s Eye?“ in the cultural section of the Estonian daily “Postimees”
The exhibition under review comparatively combines the video installation by the New
Zealand artist Reihana and a variety of materials on the Russian and Baltic German
representation of the “peoples of the Empire“ from the Baltic Sea to the Far North. Piret
Peiker’s review analyses the comparison, explicating the work in the field of Postcolonial Studies and highlighting the role of the non-linear depiction of time both in Reihana’s work and in the conception of the exhibition as a whole.
Piret Peiker and Ksenia Shmydkaya also took the students of their Postcolonial Studies
seminar (part of the international MA programme in Literature, Visual Culture and Film at TLU) to see the exhibition, the tour accompanied by one of curators, Dr. Kaljundi.
“A Home in Aardla Street” by Piret Peiker
Piret Peiker’s “A Home in Aardla Street“ („Kodu Aardla tänavas“), is a contribution to the
collection of essayistic memoirs My Childhood Home Was In the Estonian SSR (Minu
lapsepõlvekodu oli Eesti NSV-s, 2019, eds. Epp Annus, Brita Melts) by a group of Estonian humanities scholars.
The contributors of varying age and background describe the material and mental lifeworlds of their early years, highlighting the syncretism and change of the home topoi during the period. Primarily a personal reminiscence, Piret Peiker’s piece contemplates the ruptures and continuities in Estonian history and perception more generally.
The book is of interest both to an academic and to a general audience.
Georges Sorel and Giambattista Vico
Together with Eric Brandom, Tommaso Giordani has just published the first English translation of Georges Sorel’s Étude sur Vico, originally published in 1896 in the pages of the Devenir Social.
Published in full open access by Brill, the book is available here:
https://brill.com/view/title/32626
‘The New World of Karl Barth: Rethinking the Philosophical and Political Legacies of a Theologian
Liisi Keedus has published an article on Karl Barth in The European Legacy. The full publication in Open Access is here. Here is the abstract:
It is only recently that a few histories of interwar European political thought have come to acknowledge that its discursive framing of ethical and social crises was closely interwoven with upheavals in the ways Europeans rethought and debated God. The first aim of the present article is to restore to Karl Barth (1886–1968) a central place in promulgating a thoroughly interdisciplinary approach to twentieth-century European ethical and political thought. Secondly, it seeks to correct the commonplace association of Barth’s theological revolution with radical and authoritarian political ideologies by exploring his early political thought and activities, whilst focusing on several of his most politically and intellectually influential ideas. The article concludes with a discussion of the wider implications of rethinking Barth’s role in intellectual history.