Citizenship and Community: Moscow, Paris, London, Berlin and St. Petersburg

An interdisciplinary comparative seminar

 

 

Rationale

Even though they often seem to be little more than accidental historical formations, cities serve as aesthetic manifestos, as finely calibrated statements about a nation’s self-image, as projections of its relationship to its past and vision of its future, indeed as materialized and at once idealized embodiment of its public organization. Cities are built to be seen and to convey meaning. The messages they broadcast about themselves are hardly trivial, for in turn they affect the lives of their inhabitants. Just like people, cities are involved in self-fashioning, imagining and projecting a self they hope to convert into a reality. If cities intend to be read, they mobilize vastly eclectic means. Their vocabulary is visual as much as verbal and their syntax is more dynamic than structural. Most crucially, they communicate unceasingly, even when no one seems to be listening, thus affecting the unwitting audience in often unnoticed ways.

This seminar intends to explore on an interdisciplinary and comparative basis the ways in which cities have represented themselves and have been perceived and represented in various media.

For further information, please contact Prof. Andreas Schonle (a.schonle@qmul.ac.uk) or Catherine Merridale (c.merridale@qmul.ac.uk).

 

Previous sessions:

27 May 2008, 5:30
Lock Keeper’s Cottage

Prof. Catriona Kelly (Russian, Oxford U), “St. Petersburg: Shadows of the Past”

* * * *

1 May 2008, 5:30 pm
Physics, rm 602

Prof. Alfred Thomas (Slavic, U of Illinois at Chicago), “A Stranger in Prague: Writing and the Politics of Identity in Apollinaire, Kafka, and Camus”

Organized jointly with the French Department seminar.

* * * *

Dr. Tristram Hunt (History, QM), “Friedrich Engels's London”

Dr. Alastair Owens (Geography, QM), “Living in Victorian London: Materiality and Everyday Life in the Mid-Nineteenth-Century Metropolis”

6 March 2008, 5:30 pm
City Centre Seminar Room

* * * *

Dr. Astrid Kohler (German, QM), “The Quest for Cultural Supremacy: Berlin and Weimar around the 1800s”

Dr. Paul Betts (History, U of Sussex), "A World Apart: Privacy, Law and Citizenship in the GDR"

5 February 2008
Lock Keeper’s Cottage

* * * *

Prof. Michael Moriarty (QM, French): Cities of Satire: Boileau's Paris, Johnson's London

Prof. Colin Jones (QM, History): A Tale of Two Cities before A Tale of Two Cities

13 November 2007
Lock Keeper's Cottage