APUR SANSAR (1959), the third film in the Apu trilogy, paints a picture of domestic happiness in the midst of economic hardship. At the same time, the richness of nature from the first two films is transformed here into a feeling of wasteland. This double tension can also be understood against the backdrop of the […]
ConTrust Research seminar "India as Method: Challenges and Perspectives in the Study of Media and Politics in Contemporary South Asia" With Moinak Biswas It was commonly believed that with the development of modern forms, Indian cinema will present a fuller notion of the individual. We have had reasons to question that equation between modernity and […]
Public Lecture within the Political Theory Colloquium Prof. Dr. Jonathan Wolff (Alfred Landecker Professor of Values and Public Policy and Governing Body Fellow at Wolfson College, University of Oxford) Prof. Dr. Jonathan Wolff, Fellow of the British Academy, is the Alfred Landecker Professor of Values and Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government, University […]
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? […]