Archives: Events

10th meeting of paleoslavists

GCSEES hosted the 10th meeting of paleoslavists (Altslavistentreffen), a (bi)annual meeting of an informal network of paleoslavists from Belgium, Germany, Italy and Bulgaria.

Programme

 

Encounter with Aleksandar Petrov

Moderated by Rozita Dimova and Beba Moravcevic

Born in Nis (Yugoslavia) 1938, Aleksandar Petrovic received his Ph.D. from the University of Zagreb with the thesis Poetry of Milos Crnjanski in the evolution of Serbian poetry. For many years he was Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Literature and Art in Belgrade and Director of the History of Literature Department. As an outstanding poet and novelist, Aleksandar Petrov is featured in the Dictionary of Literary Biography (v. 181, 242-250 p.p., Washington D.C. and London 1997) and is considered one of the most important Serbian writers of the post World War II period. He has served as President of the Writers’ Association of Serbia and Acting President of the Writers’ Association of the former Yugoslavia. Petrov is a member of the International P.E.N. and several other literary and academic associations. He has taught at over ten universities in the U.S.A. and has lectured extensively in many countries of the world. Since 1993, he is affiliated with The University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, U.S.A.  Petrov has published 8 books of poems in Serbia and translations of his books were published in Britain, France, Spain, Sweden, Romania, Poland, Israel, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan and the U.S.A. His poems were translated into 29 languages and included in anthologies of World, European, Yugoslav and Serbian poetry. He is author of three novels, “Like Gold in Fire”  (“Kao zlato u vatri” 1998),  “Turkish Vienna” (“Turski Be?” 2000 and “The Lion’s Cave” (“Lavlja pe?ina” 2004) and as an Trilogy 2009).
A. Petrov is the recepient of several major Serbian and international literary awards. In 2004 he has received the most outstanding Romanian award for poetry, The Lucian Blaga Great Award for Poetry. In 2008 won an award in Moscow  as the best Russian language poet writing in the Russian Diaspora, Serbian Writer Association for Life Achievement (2009), and the Serbian Krivak  Award 2012 for Culture.

Encounters with the Balkan Trafik! Festival team, Nicolas Wieërs and Tony Vandereecken

Balkan Trafik! is a festival dedicated to exchange between Western and South-Eastern Europe as well as a symbol of European and Brussels’ multiculturalism. In 2003, during one of his trips to Kosovo as a film director, Nicolas Wieërs met students from the University of Pristina who had a profound effect on him and also on the cultural life in Brussels. Touched by their endurance and zest for life, upon returning to Belgium, he decided to produce more than just a single documentary on the Balkan region. His guideline was to “transform the idea of the time bomb of the Balkans into a cultural powder keg,” hence he produced a festival, the first of its kind in Belgium, to put to the fore traditional and electronic music as well as cinematic artists who originate from South-eastern Europe. In 2016, after celebrating a decade of Balkan Trafik!, the festival has grown into much more than a “Balkans vs Europe”» festival. It enables people of all the communities in Brussels to see how rich their culture is and to share it with others in the famous Centre for Fine Arts of Brussels during the three festival days every April.

 

Musical performance by Srdjan Vucic and Sinisha Davchevski

Encounter with Jorgji Kote

Book promotion “True Stories from Red Albania”

“Dr Jorgji Kote’s book offers an intriguing insight into another world, which nonetheless existed so nearby, so recently. He tells his stories with characteristic humour and little trace of bitterness, which nevertheless cannot disguise the hardship of those days.Since it came into being more than a century ago, Albania has faced more than its share of challenges. Jorgji has lived through some of the most turbulent times, and his career as youth activist, teacher, interpreter, civil servant and diplomat brought him into contact with many influential personalities. These True Stories from Red Albania reflect personal experiences, and illustrate vividly how a resourceful population drew on the strength of families and communities to confront formidable problems. At the same time, they comprise a historical record offering foreign readers a better understanding of the country, and young Albanians an insight into the tribulations of earlier generations. Yet Jorgji’s perspective is always constructive and hopeful, and this bodes well for the future.” – Kate Holman

 

Interview with Maria Todorova: ‘Imagining the Balkans’ twenty years later

Maria Todorova is Professor of History at the The University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. Her ground-breaking work published twenty years ago, Imagining the Balkans deals with the region’s inconsistent (but usually negative) image inside Western culture, as well as with the paradoxes of cultural reference and its assumptions. In this book Todorova develops a theory of Balkanism as a region geographically inextricable from Europe, yet culturally constructed as “the other” that has often served as a repository of negative characteristics upon which a positive and self-congratulatory image of the “European” has been built. With this work, Maria Todorova offers a timely, accessible study of how an innocent geographic appellation was transformed into one of the most powerful and widespread pejorative  designations in modern history.