On Monday, April 8, German social activist Freya Klier showed her film We Want to Be Free! East Germans Rise Up, 1953 at Images Cinema. After World War II, Soviet forces remained in East Germany and only slowly transferred power to the Soviet-backed Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED). Soviet forces continued to help the more »

On Sunday, April 14, Iranian-born Hooman Majd illuminated the misconceptions that have formed the basis of U.S.-Iran relations since 1953. Now a journalist for magazines such as The New Yorker and Newsweek, Majd is the son of an Iranian diplomat and grandson of an ayatollah, but attended school in the U.S. and the U.K. He more »

During a talk entitled, “The Silk Road: A New History,” Valerie Hansen, a professor of history at Yale, questioned the accepted idea of the Silk Road as a long-distance trade route between the Roman and Chinese Empires. During her research, Hansen has looked at the history of the Silk Road through an archaeological perspective, in more »

On Wednesday, April 3, Freya Klier, a German activist and documentary film-maker, discussed the recent series of murders committed in the former GDR by a trio of self-proclaimed Neo-Nazis. From 2000 to 2011, two men and one woman committed a series of ten murders targeted at non-Germans in east Germany. After the two men committed more »

Williams Mystic Professor of Biology James Carlton discussed the dangers posed by debris from the March 2011 tsunami in Japan on the western coast of the U.S. during a Log Lunch on Friday, April 12. After thirteen-foot waves hit coastal Japan in the wake of the March 11, 2011 earthquake, much debris was washed off more »

Micaela Díaz-Sanchez presented her work on Puerto Rican bomba dancing in a short lecture on Tuesday, April 2. Diaz-Sanchez is an assistant professor in the Departments of Spanish, Latina/o Studies, and Latin American Studies at Mount Holyoke College. Bomba is a Puerto-Rican musical tradition that integrates percussion, song, and dance. The art form, which originated more »

The Rising Resilience of Emerging Markets and Developing Economies Monday, April 1, 4:00 P.M. CDE Classroom, Center for Development Economics Petia Topalova is a lecturer at the Harvard University Kennedy School of Government. She is taking a leave year this year from the IMF, where she works in the World Economic Studies division of the more »

On Monday, April 1, Petia Topalova, a visiting professor at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and an economist at the IMF, presented her research identifying permanent positive trends in the resilience of emerging market economies. In recent years, almost all of the world growth in GDP per capita was focused in developing economies, said more »

On the anniversary of the March 11, 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, the Asian Studies Department and the Center for Foreign Languages, Literatures, and Cultures showed the 2012 documentary Souls of Zen: Buddhism, Ancestors, and the 2011 Tsunami in Japan. The documentary was filmed and produced by Tim Graf and Jakob Montrasio. Graf, a more »

On Sunday, March 4, Andrew Bacevich discussed trends in American foreign policy in the years after World War II until the present. Bacevich is a retired army officer and professor of international relations at Boston University. Pointing out that discussions of foreign policy often focus too much on the idiosyncrasies of individual administrations, Bacevich addreseds more »