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We will be discussing new projects and books with a number of scholars from across UCL. If you are interested in contributing to the series please get in touch.
Making Italian Jews. Family, Gender, Religion and the Nation, 1861–1918
July 2019
Dr Carlotta Ferrara Degli Uberti (UCL Italian) and Dr Uta Staiger discuss the role and cultural imagination of the Jewish minority in Italy – from the unification of the country into a new nation-state until the end of the First World War. Dr Ferrara’s book investigates key concepts such as family, religion, nation, assimilation and Zionism, as well as the interaction between public and private spheres, as they shift and change over time.
The Will of the People: A Modern Myth
October 2018
In conversation with Dr Uta Staiger, Director of the UCL European Institute, Albert Weale, Emeritus Professor of Political Theory and Public Policy at UCL, discusses the origins and uses of the notion of the 'will of the people', arguing that healthy democracies require that choices be challenged, parliaments strengthened, and political leaders called to account.
Talking Walking with Rachel Bowlby
September 2018
In conversation with the European Institute’s Dr Uta Staiger, Rachel Bowlby, Professor of Comparative Literature at UCL, takes us through some of the thoughts and themes of her new book, Talking Walking: Essays in Cultural Criticism. This podcast explores diverse topics ranging from Greek tragedy to modern family forms, and from translating Derrida to the history of consumer culture.
The book is available here.
The Greco-German Affair in the Euro Crisis
July 2018
This conversation explores the highly charged relationship between Greece and Germany at the height of the Eurozone Crisis, 2009-15. Claudia Sternberg (UCL), Kalypso Nicolaïdis (Oxford) and Kira Gartzou-Katsouyanni (LSE) are in conversation with the European Institute’s Uta Staiger to discuss the many ways in which Greeks and Germans represented and often insulted one another in the media, how their self-understanding shifted in the process, and how this in turn affected their respective appraisal of the EU - and that which divides us or keeps us together as Europeans.
The conversation takes its departure from the eponymous book, which the three authors brought out with Palgrave in early 2018.
Hannah Arendt and the Ancients
Miriam Leonard, Professor of Greek Literature and its Reception, UCL Classics
June 2018
The podcast focuses on Hannah Arendt's engagement with classical antiquity and the thinkers of Ancient Greece, and is placed in the broader context of modern philosophical engagement with antiquity more generally.
The discussion is based on a Special Issue on Hannah Arendt and the Ancients in the Journal of Classical Philology, which was edited by Prof. Leonard and published in January 2018.
West German anti-authoritarian protest movements in the 1960s
Dr Mererid Puw Davies, Senior Lecturer in German, UCL SELCS
August 2017
Focusing on the protests of 1967 and 1968 - nearly fifty years on from that pivotal year - the podcast delves in to the novel and creative forms and methods of protest adopted by the movement, from graffiti to agit-prop poetry, and what it tells us about similar social movements today.
Mererid Puw Davies's book, 'Writing and the West German Protest Movements: Textual Liberation' is available here.
Performing Femininity
Dr Rachel Morley, Lecturer in Russian Cinema and Culture, UCL SSEES
April 2017
In the third episode of our Talking Europe podcast series, Dr Rachel Morley, in conversation Dr Tim Beasley-Murray, charts the changing representations of femininity in pre-revolutionary Russian cinema.
East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity
Philippe Sands, Professor of Law, UCL
April 2017
In the second Talking Europe podcast, Dr Tim Beasley-Murray interviews Philippe Sands about his award-winning book, East West Street. Professor Sands narrates the development of international criminal law through the experiences of the Nuremberg prosecutors and his own family members, weaving together intellectual history and personal biography. The book has been awarded the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction and the JQ Wingate Literary Prize, and it was the Waterstones 'Book of the Month' for April 2017.
Terror and Terroir: The winegrowers of the Languedoc and modern France
Dr Andrew Smith
February 2017
Dr Tim Beasley-Murray talks wine and politics with Dr Andrew Smith, in the first of the European Institute's Talking Europe podcast series.