Public Lecture Prof. Dr. Jonathan Wolff (Alfred Landecker Professor of Values and Public Policy and Governing Body Fellow at Wolfson College, University of Oxford) Nationalism has been described as an affront to civilized values but now we see it on the rise, once more, around the globe. Drawing on an account of my father's early […]
Satyajit Ray occupies a central position in research on Indian cinema. His films are usually read in terms of humanism and realism. DEVI and MONIHARA (The Lost Jewels), the centerpiece of the episodic film The Three Daughters and Ray's only horror film, offer an opportunity to reflect on the uncanny and the non-human in his […]
Meheli Sen (Rutgers University, New Jersey) This talk looks at genre cinema particularly the horror film-to situate it within India's contemporary media cultures. In the face of totalitarian discourses that detine the nation-state, Meheli Sen suggests that regional-language horror offers a salubrious environment to register difference and dissent in potent and unexpected ways.
ConTrust Research seminar "India as Method: Challenges and Perspectives in the Study of Media and Politics in Contemporary South Asia" With Meheli Sen From its very inception, questions of realism and melodrama-broadly understood-have informed studies of Indian cinema. With a few exceptions, critics and scholars have seen these aesthetic and analytical frameworks as hermetically sealed […]
Goethe Lectures Offenbach Prof. Dr. Rainer Forst (Professor of Political Theory and Philosophy and Director of the Research Centre "Normative Orders" at Goethe University Frankfurt) In current analyses of the crisis of democracy, the concept of democratic or anti-democratic regression is used in connection with the rise of authoritarian populisms. In his lecture, Rainer Forst […]
Book lɔ:ntʃ With: Prof. em. Dr. Karl-Heinz Kohl (Emeritus Professor of Ethnology at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, member of the "Normative Orders" research center) C. H. Beck 2024 What do Montaigne's cultural criticism and American democracy, Freud's totemism theory and Lévi-Strauss' structuralism, bridge painters and surrealists, hippies and the sexual revolution have in common? […]
ConTrust Speaker Series Lecture by Adam Kelly (Associate Professor of English at University College Dublin) In the famous 2008 paper announcing the invention of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto justified the new currency on the basis of a need for Internet commerce to eliminate the problem of trust. "What is needed is an electronic payment system based […]
Four tourists from the city travel to the Bengal countryside and experience the ecology of the forests, the tribal life of the indigenous people and their village festivals. The journey away from the city becomes an exploratory journey into the life of the soul, in which the travelers' self-image is at stake and which leads […]
Ranjani Mazumdar (Jamaharlal Nehru University, Delhi) The complicated workings of various kinds of production infrastructures typically shape cinema's topographical motivations and sense of scale. Through a comparative analysis of a set of films shot in and around Bombay with films shot in iconic locations outside India, I will establish how the aesthetic drives of vertical, […]