Jula Wildberger in Florence

View from the office window of my host, professoressa Rita Degl'Innocenti Pierini

As part of her ongoing search for lost Stoic treatises on ethics and the emotions, Jula Wildberger gave an invited talk “Copia-e-incolla e la struttura del compendio di etica stoica attribuito ad Ario Didimo” at the Facoltà di lettere of the Università degli studi in Florence.

More photographs after the jump:

Professor Medin’s Kafka class travels to Prague

Professor Medin's students in the Café Louvre, which Kafka used to frequent (no doubt for its exceptionally decadent hot chocolate), along with Albert Einstein and other notable early-twentieth-century intellectuals.

Last week, Professor Medin and students from the CL4000 Kafka and World Literature class traveled to Prague. Lucile Culver took these photographs  (more after the jump):

Cary Hollinshead Strick talks about toys, 21 March at 19:00

AUP and the Eugene Lang Partnership invite the community to a Communicative Objects Seminar Series lecture with Cary Hollinshead-Strick (Department of Comparative Literature and English, AUP) and Kate Eichhorn (Media & Culture, Eugene Lang).

On Wednesday, March 21, at 19:00 in C31.

Cary Hollinshead-Strick will speak on “Buying Time: Beyblades, Inception, and Tops as Communicative Objects.”  If, as Walter Benjamin says, “children’s toys… are the silent signifying dialog between them and their nation,” what are we to make of the spinning tops that were suddenly central to both the French toy market and one of the year’s more successful films in 2010? This talk speculates about what these particular toys were being used to conjure a year or two ago.  It suggests that their recent collectability has as much to do with controlling their surroundings as with the lasting appeal of launching a top.

Kate Eichhorn will speak on “A Lock of Hair in the Archive: Abject Objects and Liminal Accumulations.”  Much has been written about the history of collecting and collections, but what about those objects we are not supposed to collect? What makes a thing uncollectable? And what is the status of such objects in collections and archives? This paper examines the place of abject objects in and on the edges of collections, paying specific attention to what the exclusion of liminal objects reveals about collecting and about the archive as a regulatory space and practice.

This is the first seminar when AUP will be connecting live with Eugene Lang in New York through the new video conferencing system recently installed in C31.

For more information please contact Professor Irina D. Mihalache (imihalache@aup.edu).  For more information on the AUP/Eugene Lang partnership, please visit:  http://www.aup.edu/newyork

Young AUP writers and translators reading at AUP, March 22, 18:00 in C12

Please join us for a very special evening hosted by the Department of Comparative Literature & English and the Masters in Cultural Translation.

Young Writers and Translators at the American University of Paris, reading

Chloe Rash will be introducing the following readers: Olivia Baes, Jennifer Carr, Maximiliane Donicht, Will Inrig, and Jesse T Lichtenstein 

Thursday, March 22 at 6:00 PM

American University of Paris

6, rue du Colonel Combes, Room C12

Brian Kennedy performs Catullus, 21 March at 17:30

AUP student Brian Kennedy, who majors both in literary studies and in Information Technology, and acts with a bilingual Paris Theatre company, will be performing a range of poems by Catullus, in Latin, next Wednesday, 21 March, in C13, at 17:30.

This is not the kind of show you will have many other opportunities to catch.

Fanon conference at AUP, 30-31 March 2012

At the end of the month, AUP hosts a 2-day conference which asks about the importance of Franz Fanon for our own political, aesthetic, and psychic moment. The conference is organized by Lisa Damon, research assistant in the MA in Cultural Translation, and Sousan Hammad, a student in the same program.

You can see more information about the conference at the cultural translators blogsite -

If you have questions, or want to register to attend the conference, write to fanon.at.aup@gmail.com

more details – in English and in French – after the jump

Paris Through its Books Projects

Students in last semester’s Paris Through its Books class created final projects ranging from academic papers on Flaubert and Charef to paintings inspired by Nadja, from a poem cycle about the Lost Generation to reflections on hunger in Paris.  For excerpts from their work, organized according to the authors to whom the projects responded, click here. For a stroll through Hemingway’s Paris as seen in Lucile Culver’s photographs, see nelsondharris.com/hemingway. The projects, most of which included a creative and an analytical component (not always included in the snippets given here,) engaged actively with questions of what and how Paris is made to represent.

Dan Gunn and George Craig in Cambridge and at the LRB bookshop

Dan Gunn and his co-editor George Craig will be reading from The Letters of Samuel Beckett Volume II at the Cambridge University Bookshop in Cambridge on 1 February (6p.m.-8p.m.) and at the London Review of Books bookshop in London the following evening.

Dan will be glad to meet any alums who are able to make it.

Bernard Turle talks about translation at AUP on Thursday 26 January, 18:00

The talk will be held in the Bosquet building, B31; visitors are welcome, and should contact Geoff Gilbert (ggilbert@aup.edu) to be placed on the guest list. Refreshments will be served.

Comment on the AUP Seneca conference

In May, Jula Wildberger organised a successful international conference on the work of Seneca  at AUP.

A long and thorough report on the conference has been published in Bolletino di Studi Latini, a major Italian journal of Latin studies. You can read the report here.