1 May 2014

4.30 pm Welcome: Dina Gusejnova, UCL, Centre for Transnational History

4.45pm – 6pm OPENING CONVERSATION/ On Cosmopolitanism and (Post)war
Axel Körner, UCL, Centre for Transnational History
Susan Morrissey, UCL, SSEES
Georgios Varouxakis, Queen Mary

6.30pm – 7.30pm: Concert: ‘A Dream of Germany’
Please note different location: Lecture room at theWarburg Institute

Even after a hundred years, nations struggle with the legacy of the Great War. Recently, Germany raised the delicate subject of the United Kingdom’s approach to the 2014 centenary, hoping it would shun triumphalism and celebrate the achievements of peace. Historically, musicians make a splendid case-study of the fruitfulness of international amity. For many, many years British composers were inspired to study and work in Leipzig, Dresden, Frankfurt and Berlin, while German musicians pursued careers in London. The sudden loss of centuries of fertile musical exchange between Britain and the great cultural centres of Germany is one of the least appreciated consequences of the Great War. This is the first in a series of concerts curated by Joseph Spooner and David Owen Norris that celebrate the composers for whom there was no cultural divide. For this evening’s performance, David Owen Norris will play the Grotrian Steinweg piano that belonged to Ernst and Ilse Gombrich. The Gombrichs, a renowned family from Austria-Hungary, moved to Britain in 1936, the same year that Ernst Gombrich joined the Warburg Institute, an institution in exile from Nazi Germany. In that year, Gombrich also published A Little History of the World, a book for his grandchildren Carl and Leonie.

8pm – 9pm: Wine Reception and Canapées (catered by Kipferl)

2 May 2014
1. 9am-10.30am
PERPETUAL PEACE?AFTER THE SEVEN YEARS’ AND THE NAPOLEONIC WARS
Key text: Kant’s Perpetual Peace (1795)
Key image: Ivan Terebenev, Soap bubbles (1813-14)
Chair: Avi Lifschitz, UCL

This panel will discuss the impact of war on cosmopolitan ideas in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Stephen Conway, UCL: Wartime Cosmopolitanism in Eighteenth-Century Europe

Maria Maiofis, Russian Academy of National Economy and Public Administration: Sergey Uvarov’s Treatise on Perpetual Peace (1813) and the Arzamas circle in the post-Napoleonic era

Alexander Schmidt, University of Jena: Kant on War (tbc)

2. 11am – 12.30 pm
POSTIMPERIAL DISCONTENTS/AFTER WORLD WAR I
Key text: Sigmund Freund, William C. Bullit, Thomas Woodrow Wilson: Twenty-eighth President of the United States. Psychological Study (1967)
Key image: Map of Europe, 1919
Chair: Daniel Laqua, University of Northumbria

This panel will illuminate the links between cosmopolitan identities and the decline of empires, as well as the connections between imperialism and cosmopolitanism more generally.

Alexander Etkind, European University Institute: William Bullitt from World War I to the Cold War: A Case of Traumatic Cosmopolitanism?

Dominique Reill, University of Miami: Port-city cosmopolitans: Post-Imperial subjects in a Wilson-Era City-State

Zaur Gasimov, Deutsches Orient-Institut, Instanbul: Baku in the twentieth century: Russian periphery or cosmopolitan centre?

3. 2pm-3.30pm
STATELESS PEOPLE, WELTBÜRGER, COSMOPOLITES/WORLD WAR II AND THE HOLOCAUST
Key texts: Primo Levi, If This is a Man (1947)
Key image: Destruction of the Castle at Königsberg, two photographs
Chair: Sarah Snyder, UCL

This panel will discuss and challenge ideas of cosmopolitanism as a universal form of thinking through the lenses of cultural memory studies and traumatic memory research.

Lea Ypi, LSE: Citizenship, statelessness, and the cosmopolite

Olga Sezneva, University of Amsterdam: Germans, Spies and Cosmopolites: the Ecology of Fear in an Imperial Periphery

Natan Sznaider, Tel Aviv-Yaffo Academic College: Jewish Cosmopolitan Thought in the Twentieth Century

5. 3.45pm-5.15pm
BEFORE AND AFTER THE COLD WAR / DIVISIVE PHILOSOPHIES
Key image: The Earth seen from Apollo 17 (1972)
Chair: Coskun Tuncer, UCL

This panel will discuss the ties between cosmopolitan and geopolitical imaginaries in connection with the Cold War.

Andrew Arsan, Cambridge University: Ordering the world and organising the peace: universalism and war in the thought of Charles Malik

Cemil Aydin, University of Carolina, Chapel Hill: Arnold J. Toynbee and Islamism in the Cold War Era Turkey: Civilizationism in the Writings of Sezai Karakoç (1933-)

B. Venkat Mani, University of Wisconsin-Madison: Conflicted Cosmopolitanisms: Unfinished (Hi)Stories of World Literature in a Divided Germany

5.45pm – 6.45pm
CLOSING CONVERSATION/ COSMOPOLITAN SENSES
Chair: Dina Gusejnova, UCL

Marie Gillespie, Open University: The BBC, imperial and diasporic cosmopolitanism

Kathleen Burk, UCL: Cosmopolitan wine consumption in the twentieth century