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European Studies Consortium
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European Studies Studies Consortium.

The European Studies Consortium (ESC) promotes and supports inquiry into Europe related issues that engage scholars across disciplinary and collegiate borders.

Latest News

  • Bearing Witness 70 Years after the Liberation of Auschwitz

    Bearing Witness 70 Years after the Liberation of Auschwitz

    Date: 01/26/2015

    Time: 5:00 PM - 8:00 PM

    Location: Riverview Gallery Weisman Art Museum

    Cost: Free

    Description:

    The Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies and its campus and community partners invite you to a special evening of events to mark the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. CHGS will unveil the eight Minnesotan portraits of the forty overall paintings done for the "Portraits & Conversations with Survivors of the Shoah" project we coordinated with Spanish artist Felix de la Concha. The evening will also include a reception, a talk from Auschwitz survivor Dora Zaidenweber, and an interview and Q&A with Felix de la Concha.

    "Portraits & Conversations" was conceived by de la Concha in 2007 when he began to paint portraits of Holocaust survivors from all over the world. While posing, the survivors talked about their lives and shared their testimonies of survival. These intimate sessions were recorded so that we could see the transformation from a blank canvas to a finished piece. In February of 2013 eight Holocaust survivors who reside in Minnesota participated in the project. There are now 40 completed portraits available to view in the virtual museum on the CHGS website. In addition to the paintings, CHGS also has the video and audio recordings of the sessions, which are on our YouTube channel.

    The event is free and open to the public; however, reservations are required. Click here to reserve tickets, follow this link http://z.umn.edu/r5l or call the reservation line after December 20, 2014 at 612-424-3624.

    This project was made possible in part with the support of Rimon: The Minnesota Jewish Arts Council, an initiative of the Minneapolis Federation, as well as the sponsors below.


     (Continue Reading)January 9th, 2015

  • Politics of Nationalism and Violence Challenging Europe

    A talk by Matthias Falter
    Saturday, May 17
    2:00p.m.
    CSPS SOKOL Hall
    383 Michigan St., St. Paul

    Matthias Falter-1.jpg

     (Continue Reading)May 7th, 2014

  • Exhumations, Memory, and the Return of Civil War Ghosts in Spain

    Francisco Ferrandiz, Spanish National Research Council (CSIC)
    Reframing Mass Violence: Human Rights and Social Memory in Latin America and Southern Europe.
    Thursday, May 8
    3:00 PM - 4:30 PM
    1-109 Herbert M Hanson, Jr Hall

    Since 2000, the exhumation of mass graves from the Spanish Civil War and the Post-War years, mostly involving the largely abandoned graves of civilians killed in the Francoist rearguard by paramilitary groups, has become a central element in contemporary social and political debates in the country about the nature of the armed conflict and the dictatorial regime following it. Although exhumations have become a crucial tool for symbolic reparation and have triggered claims for justice for the crimes committed and now unearthed, the social process unleashed by their opening is way larger, and relates to the emergence of a fragmented and heterogeneous political culture focused on the memory of the defeated in the war.

    In this talk, the complexity and dynamism of this process is analyzed, including from political and legal initiatives of great social and media impact to local actions on the ground, at times failed, ephemeral or almost imperceptible, but no less crucial. Regional differences, associated to uneven public memory policies, will also be considered.
    Organized by the IAS Reframing Mass Violence Research Collaborative. Cosponsored by the Human Rights Program,the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and the European Studies Consortium.

     (Continue Reading)May 5th, 2014