News & Announcements

With the rise of populist right-wing groups in Europe, gender politics are in play. Increasingly and in what may be viewed as a counter-intuitive move, gender equality, has been taken up as a rallying cause by conservative groups, opening up new questions about the definition of gender and putting gender studies under attack. Kathrin Zippel and Myra Marx Ferree raised these issues in a recent workshop "Troubling Times for Gender Equality Politics."

It is with great sadness that we share the news of the passing of Judy Vichniac on October 22. Judy was a friend and a vital member of our CES community since 1972. One of her enduring legacies at CES is the “Visiting Scholars Seminar: New Research on Europe,” which she started in the early 1990s during her tenure as acting director of the Center.

Recently, CES Director Grzegorz Ekiert gave a lecture, entitled "Civil Society & Democracy – A Reconsideration," to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the election of Tadeusz Mazowiecki, Poland's first non-Communist prime minister.

When Sergey Lagodinsky, HKS ’03, recently gave the Guido Goldman Lecture on Germany at CES, the newly elected member of the European Parliament broached topics far beyond those of his adopted country to encompass Europe and the world at large. “I wanted to be part of German politics,” he said. “German society and German politics are still not sure what role they want to play in the world.” By running for office, he saw “a chance to be part of it, to join forces in looking for those new roles.”

With the German economy close to recession, European Central Bank President Mario Draghi has rightly urged eurozone governments to provide more fiscal stimulus. And acknowledging the interaction between fiscal and monetary policy would leave critics much less room for ECB-bashing, argues Hans-Helmut Kotz in recent piece in Project Syndicate. "In influencing economic activity, fiscal and monetary policy interact inexorably. Their joint impact is mediated through what the great economist James Tobin called a “common funnel”. In the eurozone, however, the policy debate regularly ignores this interaction between one monetary policy and 19 fiscal policies. Acknowledging it, however, would leave critics with much less room for ECB-bashing."

Argyro Nicolaou speaks about the treatment of migration in the Mediterranean Sea and her native Cyprus in film, art and literature, and how this research fits with her work for an upcoming exhibit at the MOMA in New York City. "I consider my work one way of using the humanities to respond to politics," says Nicolaou who received a CES Dissertation Research Grant and completed her Ph.D. in comparative literature in 2019.

Peter Gordon, Amabel B. James Professor of History and CES resident faculty, co-chairs the Harvard Colloquium for Intellectual History. CES spoke to him about the colloquium, his discipline, and the enduring legacy of Theodor Adorno. (Photo Credit: Jürgen Bauer, 2019.)

Charles Maier the Leverett Saltonstall Research Professor and CES resident faculty, retired in May, bringing to a close more than 50 years of teaching at Harvard. We spoke to him about his career at a changing university, what he’ll miss, what he won’t, and what he’s doing next.

At Commencement, German chancellor Angela Merkel urges students ‘to embrace new beginnings.’