Transformational Leap as the basic Metaphor of Russian Sonderweg Theories

Dr Alessandro Milani (EHESS, Paris) gives a talk for the Cantemir Institute East and East-Central Europe seminar series.

Mikolaj Szoltysek (Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock) gives a talk for the Cantemir Institute on 12th February 2013.

Sofia Dyak (Center for Urban History, Lviv) gives a talk for the Cantemir Institute.

Professor Al-Azmeh, Professor in the School of Historical and Interdisciplinary Studies, Central European University, Budapest, gives a talk for the Cantemir Institute. The purpose of the lecture is to inform; to highlight elements pertaining to humanist freethinking in the Abbasid era, to relate these to an overarching history of humanist freethinking with classical antecedents and later workings in early modern Europe, no less than to their milieus of emergence and to what some might still think of as an early Muslim orthodoxy. In so doing, this lecture will seek to redress a number of imbalances in perspective, and a number of misconceptions. Of these, the idea that Abbasid freethinking was an aberrant curiosity in a milieu which was, in essence, 'orthodox,' is a resilient one. So also is underestimating the Fortleben of ideas generated in the Abbasid milieu in early European modernity. The lecture is intended to inform and sketch a very general picture of this little-known chapter in history. The suggestion made in conclusion is that a model for the historical interpretation of Arab freethinking based upon the introverted model of pre-Humanist European history, or that of contemporary Muslim, protestantised pietism, is clearly anachronistic.

Part of the Cantemir Institute seminar series. Rory Yeomans, senior research analyst at the Ministry of Justice, gives a talk on how interdisciplinary methodologies help us understand violent societies.

Part of the East and Est-Central Europe Seminar series. Dr Nóra Veszprémi (Cantemir Fellow, Budapest) gives a talk on art and identity in Austria and Hungary in the mid 19th Century.

Professor Victor Neumann (West University of Timisoara) delivers a lecture as part of the East and East-Central Europe Seminar Series at the Cantemir Institute.

Professor Halil Berktay delivers the final lecture in the Trinity term East and East Central Europe Seminar Series.

Professor Andrei Zorin presents the third East and East Central Europe seminar lecture for the Cantemir Institute on Thursday 7 June.

Often described as one of the most important historical theorists of our times, Hayden White discusses the ethical and aesthetic implications for discourses dealing with the Holocaust, genocide and industrialized death.