Is the Eurozone crisis undermining European democratic socialism? Why the current economic and fiscal crisis is cause for concern and opportunity, not alarm nor decline, for the future of the European Left.

This is part of the Europe Center's series on the "European and Global Economic Crisis". 

Pia Olsen Dyhr was appointed Minister for Trade and Investment in  October 2011. Pia Olsen Dyhr became member of the Danish Parliament (Folketing) for The Socialist People’s Party in 2007. Before joining Parliament, she worked with policy, international relations, trade, and environmental issues at the non-governmental organizations CARE Denmark and the Danish Society for the Conservation of Nature. She carries a MA in Political Science from University of Copenhagen.

Professor Marci Shore will discuss her project that focuses on Husserl's phenomenology, and later Heidegger's (and Sartre's) existentialism as these philosophical currents took shape in Eastern Europe, primarily but not only Czechoslovakia and Poland.  The project is structured around philosophical personalities, exploring their encounters and their dialogues and relationships with one another.  It's also a project about how the stakes of the questions they pose change, how epistemological questions become ontological questions and later explicitly ethical questions.

Marci Shore is associate professor of history at Yale University.  She is the translator of Michał Głowiński's The Black Seasons and the author of Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation's Life and Death in Marxism, 1918-1968.  Currently she is at work on a book project titled “Phenomenological Encounters: Scenes from Central Europe,” an examination of the history of phenomenology and existentialism in East-Central Europe.

Co-sponsored by the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies, Department of History, and the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages

* NOTE:  The venue has been changed to the Barnes/McDowell Rooms at the Fisher Conference Center in the Arrillaga Alumni Center.

Professor Marci Shore will be speaking on the topic of her recent book, The Taste of Ashes: The Afterlife of Totalitarianism in Easten Europe.  The collapse of communism opened the archives, illuminating the tragedy of twentieth-century Eastern Europe: there were moments in which no decisions were innocent, in which all possible choices caused suffering.  The Taste of Ashes is an account of the darker side of the revolutions of 1989, when the ghost of communism--no longer Marx’s “specter to come"--became a haunting presence of the past.

Marci Shore is associate professor of history at Yale University.  She is the translator of Michał Głowiński's The Black Seasons and the author of Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation's Life and Death in Marxism, 1918-1968.  Currently she is at work on a book project titled “Phenomenological Encounters: Scenes from Central Europe,” an examination of the history of phenomenology and existentialism in East-Central Europe.

Co-sponsored by the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies, Taube Center for Jewish Studies and the Department of History.

Carla Ferstman is Director of REDRESS. She is currently on sabbatical leave and is a Jennings Randolph Senior Fellow 2012-2013 at the United States Institute of Peace. She joined REDRESS in 2001 as its Legal Director and became its Director in 2005. She was called to the Bar in British Columbia, Canada where she practiced as a criminal law barrister. She has also worked with the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights on legal reform and capacity building in post-genocide Rwanda, with Amnesty International's International Secretariat as a legal researcher on trials in Central Africa and as Executive Legal Advisor to Bosnia and Herzegovina's Commission for Real Property Claims of Displaced Persons and Refugees (CRPC). She has an LL.B. from the University of British Columbia, an LL.M. from New York University and is a doctoral candidate at the University of Oxford. Ms. Ferstman has published and is a regular commentator on victims' rights, the International Criminal Court and the prohibition against torture.