York University is pleased to announce the appointment of Dr. Klaus Rupprecht to the position of Director at The Canadian Centre for German and European Studies.

Until recently Dr. Rupprecht was the consul general of the Federal Republic of Germany in Toronto, his final posting in a diplomatic career spanning more than thirty years. Prior to being appointed consul general in 2002, he was a fellow at Harvard University’s Weatherhead Centre for International Affairs and then director general of the German Institute Taipei in Taiwan.

Dr. Rupprecht succeeds Professor Mark Webber, the centre’s founding director, who will remain active within CCGES as a resident scholar and executive committee member.

“Although comparatively young, the centre is thriving thanks to the strong internal leadership and research of its faculty,” says Webber. “To grow, we need an administrator with expertise in the diplomatic, fundraising and public visibility portfolios. Dr. Rupprecht’s time at Harvard gave him a good sense of how research centres operate, and he is familiar with both York and the wider community that the University and centre serve. All of us at CCGES support this outstanding appointment.”

For the full text of the announcement, please click here

CCGES is pleased to host this workshop which will bring together early career researchers from Austria and York. In addition to a number of panels, this event will also feature a screening of the late Canadian-Austrian filmmaker John Cook’s highly regarded 1974 feature Langsamer Sommer.

_For more information on the workshop as well as access to the event program, please visit: http://www.yorku.ca/mrln/UV/Visibility_workshop.html

This paper will look at the internationalization of modern architecture in the interwar period (1919-1939) with a particular focus on the role played here by the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM), the branch’s most important professional organization. Using Poland and some of its Central European neighbours as examples, the paper will demonstrate the profound effects which CIAM, in its self-understood role as a platform for expert collaboration for finding solutions to the most pressing social, economic and even political problems of the time, had in supporting the emergence of a transnational discourse in built form.

This talk is part of the CCGES lecture series “Germany in the World: The Nation Transcended in the Age of Globalization,” which offers North American and European scholars from a variety of academic fields a platform to contribute to the ongoing discussions regarding transnationalism and globalization by presenting their current research on related topics.

Dr. Martin Kohlrausch is a Research Fellow at the German Historical Institute Warsaw. Prior to this, he was Assistant Professor at the TU Berlin’s History Department from 2003 to 2005. Among his publications are: “Doppelte Avantgarde. Urbanistische Innovation und internationale Vernetzung. Polen im europäischen Kontext (ca. 1916-1948),” in: Kulturgeschichtliches Jahrbuch Moderne 2 (2006) and Der Monarch im Skandal. Die Logik der Massenmedien und die Transformation der wilhelminischen Monarchie, Berlin 2005.

Time: 12:30 to 2:00 pm
Location: 230 York Lanes

The conference program can be accessed by clicking here.

This event is co-sponsored by CCGES. For more information, please contact: Prof. Jim Vernon at jvernon@yorku.ca

Location: Harry Crowe Room, 109 Atkinson College

For this talk, Prof. Robert Gould (Carleton University, Ottawa) will analyze some of the most prominent legal and political discourses which have surrounded the Head Scarf debate in Germany. In the German context, this issue achieved prominence with the September 2003 decision of the Federal Constitutional Court in the case of Fereshta Ludin, a German of Afghan origin, who appealed the administrative decision in Baden-Württemberg to deny her a permanent teaching position because of her insistence on wearing a headscarf while in the classroom. Using significant representative examples of overlapping discourses arising from the case, Prof. Gould will argue that these discourses demonstrate the nature of the struggle among those charged by society with defining the nation and the state in a time of change: on the one hand a liberal constitution interpreted by the majority justices as neutral and inclusive of all religions; but on the other hand an exclusionary discourse employed by the dissenting justices, based on the mutually exclusive and hostile categories of “Native” and “Alien”, which have become more potent in the post 9/11 world.

This talk is part of “Germany in the World: The Nation Transcended in the Age of Globalization”, a CCGES lecture series which gives North American and European scholars from a variety of academic fields a platform to contribute to the ongoing discussions regarding trans-nationalism and globalization by presenting their current research, most of which, but not all, will be related to Germany. Financial support for the series has been generously provided by the Standing Committee for German as a Foreign Language (StADaF).

Robert Gould is the Associate Director of the Centre for European Studies and an Adjunct Research Professor in the Institute of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies at Carleton University, Ottawa. His current investigations of the discourses of immigration and identity in election manifestos, parties’ official position papers, and statements to legislatures emerged from teaching on the language of politics and nationalism in the German-speaking area of Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Time: 1:30 to 3:00 pm
Location: 230 York Lanes