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Voltaire Between the Rhine and the Danube (18th-19th Centuries)

Voltaire Days

Partners: CELLF, CEFRES, Voltaire Foundation (Oxford), Balassi Institute in Paris, Université d’Amiens Picardie
Venue: Amphithéâtre Michelet, 1 rue Victor Cousin, Paris
Dates: 22-23 juin 2018
Organizer: Guillaume MÉTAYER (CELLF)
Language: French

Program

Friday 22 June

9:00
Christophe MARTIN (director of CELLF) and Guillaume MÉTAYER (CELLF): Welcome

Panel I: Voltaire and the German Lands
Chair: Sylvain MENANT (CELLF)

9:15
Gérard LAUDIN (Sorbonne Université) : Les Annales de l’Empire

9:45
Myrtille MÉRICAM-BOURDET (Université Lyon II): Voltaire historien de l’Empire : sur quelques aspects de la question religieuse

10:15
Renaud BRET-VITOZ (Université de Toulouse Jean-Jaurès): L’expérience théâtrale de Voltaire à Berlin et Potsdam entre 1750 et 1753, autour du Duc d’Alençon ou les frères ennemis

10:45 Break

Panel II: Round table on the Manuscripts of Frederic II
Chair: Natalia SPERANSKAYA (Saint Petersburg)
  • Natalia SPERANSKAYA (Bibliothèque nationale de Russie, Saint Petersburg): Un manuscrit de La Poloniade de Frédéric II dans la bibliothèque de Voltaire
  • Vanessa de SENARCLENS (Alfried Krupp Wissenschaftskolleg, Greifswald): L’Art de la guerre de Frédéric annoté par Voltaire
  • Gillian PINK (Voltaire Foundation, Oxford): Les Œuvres du philosophe de Sans Souci annotées par Voltaire

12:00 Break

Panel III: Presence and Circulation of Voltaire’s Work in the Empires
Chair: Gérard LAUDIN

12:15
Daniele MAIRA (Université de Göttingen): La Henriade en Allemagne: traductions et réception XVIIIe-XIXe siècles

14:30
Jean BOUTAN (Sorbonne Université, Paris) : De La Pucelle à La Guerre des Femmes, la “Jungfrau in Waffen” dans la culture tchèque

15:00
Emese EGYED (Université de Cluj-Napoca) : Le double message du comte János Fekete: La Pucelle en hongrois (1799)

15:30
Olga PENKE (Université de Szeged) : L’écho hongrois des contes et des dialogues philosophiques de Voltaire

16:00 Break

Panel IV: Spreading and Publishing Voltaire’s Works
Chair: Nicholas CRONK

16:30
Linda GIL (Université de Montpellier III): Imprimer et diffuser Voltaire en Allemagne : l’édition Kehl des Œuvres complètes de Voltaire par la Société Littéraire Typographique

17:00
Claire MADL (CEFRES, Prague): Voltaire produit de librairie dans la monarchie des Habsbourg

7 pm : Lectures à haute voix par la Sorbonne sonore (Félix Libris)
Saturday 23 June
Panel V: Debating and Rewriting Voltaire
Chair: Ludolf PELIZEUS (Université de Picardie Amiens, CERCLL)

9:30
Nicholas CRONK (Voltaire Foundation, Oxford): Autour des Lettres philosophiques : la réponse de Johann Gustav Reinbeck à la lettre sur Locke

10:00
Sylvie LE MOËL (Sorbonne Université): Fécondité et apories du tropisme voltairien chez Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi

10:30 Break

11:00
Ritchie ROBERTSON (Université d’Oxford) : Wieland, the German Voltaire

11:30
András KÁNYÁDI (INALCO, Paris): Casanova et Fréderic le Grand dans les lettres hongroises inconnues de Voltaire

12:00 — Final Conclusions by Christiane MERVAUD (Honorary President of the SEV)

Holocaust Memory, Jewish Life, and Generational Dimensions. Czechoslovakia in the 1980s

A lecture by Peter Hallama (EHESS, Paris) in the frame of the seminar on Modern Jewish History of the Institute of Contemporary History (AV ČR) and CEFRES in partnership with the Masaryk Institute (AV ČR).

Where: CEFRES library, Na Florenci 3, 110 00 Prague 1
When: from 5 pm to 6:30 pm
Language: English

Abstract

This lecture will reconsider the growing interest in Jewish culture, religion, and history in the last decade of State Socialism in Czechoslovakia. It will focus on three aspects: generational conflicts within the Jewish community and the younger generation’s questioning of their families’ pasts and religiousness; the dissident appropriations of Jewish history and culture; and the beginning of nostalgia for “Mitteleuropa”, as opposed to the homogenizing tendencies of the Communist régime to an ideal of cultural, national, and religious heterogeneity. This lecture will therefore discuss some of the principal ways that Czech Jews and non-Jews re-defined Jewishness, and will seek to avoid a normative assessment of “virtual” Jewish identity as opposed to “authentic.”

Nationalism, Religion and Violence

Summer Seminar 

Where & When: Prague, 18-29 June 2018
Organizers: Charles University  and  Aristote University of Thessaloniki
Partners: CEFRES–French Research Center in Humanities and Social Sciences, School of Slavonic and East European Studies (UCL),  University of Birmingham and Humboldt University of Berlin

See the program below

The Summer Seminar on Nationalism, Religion and Violence is ready to launch its sixth year with a special focus on the topics of ethnic and religious diversity, migration and transformation. A key goal of the Summer Seminar is to contribute to the study of violence in a substantial way and to catalyze the growth of the study of violence as a field.

The seminar targets highly motivated students, particularly graduate students, as well as post-docs and professional activists. It is led by international researchers from universities with an excellent reputation, such as the Humboldt University of Berlin, Central European University (Budapest), the University of Birmingham, the University of Manchester, the University of Pennsylvania, Eötvös Loránd University (Budapest) and the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. The program involves fieldwork designed in cooperation with research centers and international institutions in Prague and beyond.

For more details please  visit the website of the Nationalism, Religion and Violence Summer Seminar. 

Continue reading Nationalism, Religion and Violence →

CEFRES Review of Books – June 2018

The new edition of CEFRES Review of Books will take place on Thursday 14 June at 5 pm at CEFRES library.
Join us for a discussion around the latest publications in humanities and social sciences from France.

This informal meeting gathers CEFRES team, the library readers, and professionals from libraries and publishing. The aim of our Review of Books is to make better known the publishing landscape in humanities and social sciences. Each book is presented in no more than 10 minutes, so to stress its originality and stakes.

So far, the following presentations are announced: Continue reading CEFRES Review of Books – June 2018 →

Normalizing Uncertainty

Normalizing Uncertainty. Tracing Brexit-Effects in the Lives of Slovak and Czech Roma Migrants in Britain (and Beyond)
A lecture by Jan Grill (University of Valle, Colombia)

Time & Venue: 5 pm, CEFRES Library (Na Florenci 3, Prague 1)
Organizer: CEFRES, Prague Forum for Romani Histories at the Institute of Contemporary History AV CR
Language: English

Abstract

This paper explores the effects of Brexit on the lives of Slovak and Czech Roma migrants in Great Britain through what can be called ‘normalizing uncertainty’. Coming alongside other East European migrants, some Roma networks started to move in search of more viable lives following the EU enlargement in 2004. Various studies have documented negative impacts the Brexit debates had on the lives of migrants, ranging from increased sense of uncertainty and rupture to the intensified modes of racialisation and xenophobic discrimination. Drawing on a long-term ethnographic research in the UK and in Slovakia, the present paper focuses not just on the level of discourses and narratives recorded in the aftermath of Brexit vote (elicited by researchers’ efforts and interviews) but rather tries to situate these within a long-term practices and relations vis-a-vis dominant societies and forms of being exposed to oppressive social forces and forms of violence and stigmatization. Drawing on relational sociological and anthropological perspectives, this paper examines different ways of coping with and responding to the pre/post-Brexit depending on social positions various migrants’ occupy within different social fields and the durable dispositions acquired against the backdrop of different modes of domination experienced in Central Eastern Europe and in Great Britain.

Jan Grill is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Valle, Colombia. He is also Research Associate at the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. He has conducted extensive ethnographic research among Slovak, Czech, and Hungarian Roma/Gypsy groups, exploring issues related to different forms of migration from Central Eastern Europe to the United Kingdom and Canada. He has also carried out research on uneven mobilities in the city of Cali, Colombia. His central research interests are migration, ethnicity, racialization, marginality, labour, and the ethnography of the state. His recent publications include ‘Re‐learning to labour? ‘Activation Works’ and new politics of social assistance in the case of Slovak Roma’, Journal of Royal Anthropological Institute (2018); ‘“In England, they don’t call you black!” Migrating racialisations and the production of Roma difference across Europe’, Journal of Ethic and Migration Studies (2017); and ‘Struggles for the folk: politics of culture in Czechoslovak ethnography, 1940s-1950s’, History and Anthropology (2015).

The Wording of Thoughts. Philosophy from the Standpoint of its Manuscripts and Archives

International Conference

Organizers: Benedetta Zaccarello (CNRS-CEFRES) and Thomas C. Mercier (CEFRES / FHS UK)
When & Where: 7-9 June 2018 at the French Institute of Prague, 5th Floor, Štěpánská 35, 110 00 Prague 1
Partners: FHS UK, The Jan Patočka Archive, FLÚ AV ČR, ITEM (CNRS-ENS), Bibliothèque Nationale de France, The Wittgenstein Archives at Bergen University, with the support of the French Institute in Prague and the program PARCECO of the MENESR

The conference will comprise four sections:

  1. Archive (Hi)stories: Thinking Theory through Authors’ Manuscripts.
  2. Archives in the digital age.
  3. What archives do to philosophy: methodologies in editing and interpreting.
  4. The Political Implications of Archives and their Conservation.

The afternoon session of the first day (7th June) will be dedicated to Jan Patočka and his archives.

See the program below
Abstract

The international conference “The Wording of Thoughts: Philosophy from the Standpoint of its Manuscripts and Archives” aims to establish a dialogue between experts of different archival corpuses coming from various countries and continents, so as to sketch methodological lines and to build a pioneer network focused on philosophical archives. Philosophy is written, practiced, lived through: it is the translation of the experience of a thinking subjectivity in a conceptual alphabet and a verbal fabric. The “making of a philosophical text”, including its cultural features and societal contingencies, challenges the representation of the discipline’s history as a series of abstract findings and innovative intuitions that constitute the landmarks of our paradigms. The philosopher who writes is the first inclined to erase the complex intricacies of the negotiations between existence and theory, between conceptual inventiveness and shared vocabulary inherited from a centuries-old tradition. Yet it is obvious that the dynamics of philosophy production and reception are a complex phenomenon whose writing nature is a crucial stake.

For all these reasons, the philosophical manuscript is an odd object that has only recently started to receive proper appraisal. In Europe, nevertheless, the creation of archive centres gathering major philosophical data has sustained the memory of philosophical writing and enabled such “arches” to cross time. It is beyond doubt that accessing these archives often enables to better understand the appearance, the method, the approach and even the sources, along with the polemical targets and the hints that published books tend to excise or dim. Moreover, in exploring the history of several philosophical archives and their rooting in specific social and cultural contexts, we aim to appreciate the role of such archival materials and their importance so as to develop new approaches to philosophical studies, including the history of philosophy and the exegesis of theoretical thought.

 

Continue reading The Wording of Thoughts. Philosophy from the Standpoint of its Manuscripts and Archives →