We hope you enjoyed the break and could recharge your batteries, now looking with excitement and curiosity to the upcoming weeks. For us at GESI, summer is always special as we are not only looking forward to welcoming back those, whom we had the pleasure to get to know during the winter, but to embrace new students who will join us from April onwards. These are this summer not only students in the Arqus Joint Master in European Studies, who will spend their second term in Leipzig, but also the first-year students in the Joint Master Global Studies with a Special Emphasis on Peace and Security in Africa, who travel to us from Addis Ababa. After we have worked together online, it is a great pleasure to receive you now on site at the venues of GESI at Emil-Fuchs-Straße as well as at the Campus downtown. I trust that there will plenty of opportunities to make and celebrate these new acquaintances.
Besides a multifaceted course catalogue, which we have designed to help you further develop your expertise in Global and European Studies in an interdisciplinary context, we are organizing several events and opportunities to meet and engage in the academic community.
We will open the summer term on 11 April with a GESI roundtable on “Teaching and the Multi-Crisis”. Prof. Herzberg, Prof. Engel, JProf. Maruschke, Dr. Ben-Nun and I will discuss, how the entangled and overlapping challenges in many societies of the world during the past years – including military conflicts, rising populism, a global pandemic, a “refugee crisis”, or climate change – have affected our work and our conversations in the classroom and in our research, as teachers, scholars, and as humans.
On 16 April, we are looking forward to another edition of “Druckfrisch”, a book launch event with Pierre Hazan and his “Negotiating with the Devil”. Pierre Hazan, who is senior advisor with the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue, will reflect on his experiences as an advisor and expert e.g. for the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the UN, or the International Contact Group on the Basque Conflict, having worked in many regions of the world.
The next edition of the Druckfrisch-series on 12 June brings Frederick Cooper and Jane Burbank (both New York) to Leipzig, outstanding scholars in their fields of African and Russian history. In their latest book “Post-Imperial Possibilities” they bring their expertise into an exciting conversation to grasp the different transnational ways out of empire in Eurasia, Eurafrica and Afroasia.
From 18 to 19 April the Annual Conference of the Leipzig Research Centre Global Dynamics (ReCentGlobe) is devoted to the theme “Technology, Resources and New Global Dynamics”. Co-Organized by our colleague JProf. Daniela Ruß, the panels and events are of course again public and open for students, too.
With the upcoming European elections in June, we furthermore plan and will inform you soon about a number of events which address the challenges related to recent dynamics and transformations in Europe and how this can be reflected in the context of European and Global Studies.
These are just a few of the activities and events you can expect coming up in Leipzig. In addition, we are arranging several excursions, which you are invited to join. Two of them will bring you to Dresden, the nearby capital of Saxony. First, students can visit the Museum for Military History, which is an outstanding venue to critically reflect on the cultural history of violence, of war and peace in global contexts, and on the military and technological dimensions of the Cold War (https://www.mhmbw.de/#ausstellungen). For those interested to join please contact Janine Kläge (janine.klaege(at)uni-leipzig.de), as places are limited. Secondly, in the context of the seminar “Global East – Global South” students have the opportunity to visit the art exhibition “Revolutionary Romances" at the Albertinum in Dresden (https://albertinum.skd.museum/en/ausstellungen/revolutionary-romances/). Places are limited here as well. If you are interested, get in touch with me (marung(at)uni-leipzig.de).
Finally, the Global Studies Summerschool brings together EMGS students from all study places at the end of the term (4 – 8 July), this time at the heart of Germany, close to the former inner-German border in Bad Hersfeld. In addition to the academic program, we will visit Point Alpha (https://www.pointalpha.com), a museum at the former NATO observation post during the Cold War. We are particularly excited, that this year we can organize the summer school as a joint GESI forum. Not only students from the MA Global Studies with a Special Emphasis in Peace and Security will join and be offered a specialized program, but we can also provide places for a limited number of students in the MA European Studies, who can in this way get to know colleagues and other students from across the consortium as well receive the opportunity to discuss their upcoming work on the Master thesis.
To stay up to date on these diverse activities and further events, to profit from the vibrant community of lecturers and scholars in Leipzig devoted to transregional, global, and European research agendas, we’d recommend to check regularly our institute’s website as well as to subscribe to the Bulletin of ReCentGlobe or to follow it on twitter (@ReCentGlobe), check out GESI Twitter (@GESIUniLeipzig) as well as RISC (@fgz_risc).
We wish everybody a great start into the new term and are looking forward to meeting you soon again.
Best wishes
Steffi Marung
Director of The Global and European Studies Institute