S
Tomaž Šalamun | Renata Salecl | Michael Sandel | Klaus Scharioth | Jonathan Schell | Orville Schell | Bernhard Schlink | Vivien Schmidt | Rockwell Schnabel | Peter Schneider | Gesine Schwan | Karel Schwarzenberg | Henrik Selin | Richard Sennett | Zafer Senocak | Yuan-yuan Shen | Lilia Shevtsova | Martin Simecka | Jim Smith | Aleksander Smolar | Eugeniusz Smolar | Piotr Sommer | Göran Sonnevi l | George Soros | Vladimir Spidla | Rosemarie Stallworth-Clark | Ilan Stavans | Liborio Stellino | Angela Stent | John Sununu | Veton Surroi | Roman Szporluk
Tomaž Šalamun
Tomaž Šalamun was born in 1941 in Zagreb, but grew up in Koper, a coastal town in Slovenia south of Trieste. In 1966 he graduated in Art History from Ljubljana University. Šalamun, who won the Prešeren Prize in 2000, was the leading figure of the Slovenian poetic avant-garde in the 1960s and in the 1970s. In early 1970s he spent two years at Iowa on the International Writing Programme, and he has lived on and off in the US since then. In 1996 he became Slovenian Cultural Ataché in New York. He has published 34 volumes of poetry in Slovenian. His work has also been translated into fifteen different languages, reaching a total of 45 volumes, and he has been included in numerous anthologies. He was a former Fulbright Fellow at the Colombia University in New York and visiting professor at the Universities of Alabama, Georgia, Massachusetts and Tennessee. Šalamun has also been in residence at DAAD Berlin, Bogliasco, Cité des Arts Paris, Yaddo and McDowell.
His natural interest in the absurd, the playful and the irrelevant was greatly aroused by the study of American postwar art and poets such as Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, not to speak of Walt Whitman. But he remains a great postwar central European poet, which means that his work is a battle to give equal power to the cheeky voice and the soaring voice, avoiding always the obvious and the prosaically meaningful, making sure that nothing can make poetry happen, and that poetry in turn can become more important than history or politics or mere philosophy. (Biography by Iztok Osojnik on Poetry International Web, last updated February, 2009)
Tomaz Salamun: An Introduction by Robert Haas
November 5, 2009
Renata Salecl
Renata Salecl is Centennial Professor at the department of law at the London School of Economics. She is also Senior Researcher at the Institute of Criminology at the Faculty of Law in Ljubljana, Slovenia and also often teaches at Visiting Professor at Cardozo School of Law in New York.
Renata Salecl is currently working on a book Tyranny of Choice, which analyses why late capitalist insistence on choice increases feeling of anxiety and guilt. The book also analyses how matters of choice apply to law and criminology. She directs a big research projects on Crime in Postmodern Times ant the Institute of Criminology, Faculty of Law in Ljubljana. Her work focuses on bringing together law, criminology and psychoanalysis.
February 19, 2008
Michael Sandel
Michael J. Sandel is the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government at Harvard University, where he has taught political philosophy since 1980. His publications include Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge University Press, 1982, 2nd edition, 1997; translated into seven languages), Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Harvard University Press, 1996), Liberalism and Its Critics (ed., Blackwell, 1984), and articles in scholarly journals, law reviews, and general publications such as The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, and The New York Times. His undergraduate course, “Justice,” has enrolled over 10,000 students, making it one of the most popular courses in Harvard’s history. In 1985, he was awarded the Harvard-Radcliffe Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Prize, and in 1999 was named a Harvard College Professor in recognition of his contributions to undergraduate teaching. Sandel has lectured to academic and general audiences in North America, Europe, Japan, India, and Australia. He delivered the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Oxford University in 1998. The recipient of three honorary degrees, he has received fellowships from the Carnegie Corporation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Ford Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies. He currently serves on the President’s Council on Bioethics, a national body appointed by the President to examine the ethical implications of new biomedical technologies. (2005)
September 24-25, 2005
Klaus Scharioth
Klaus Scharioth is Ambassador of the Federal Republic of Germany to the United States. He served as State Secretary in the German Federal Foreign Office in Berlin from November 2002 until March 2006. He entered the German Foreign Service in 1976, and has held positions at the German Embassy in Quito and the Permanent Mission of the Federal Republic of Germany to the United Nations in New York.
He served as Political Director and head of the Political Directorate-General from 1999 to 2002 and Head of the International Security and North America Directorate from 1998 to 1999. He was also Head of the Defense and Security Policy from 1996 to 1997 and Chef de cabinet (Director of the Private Office) to the NATO Secretary-General in Brussels from 1993 to 1996. (2006)
October 17, 2006
October 10, 2007
Jonathan Schell
Jonathan Schell is the author of several books, the best known among them being The Fate of the Earth and The Village of Ben Suc. He has been a long term contributor to The New Yorker, where his reporting from Vietnam first appeared. He writes regularly for The Nation, Harper’s Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly and Foreign Affairs, and has taught at Wesleyan, Princeton, Emory, and Yale, among other universities. He lives in New York City, where he is the Harold Willens Peace Fellow at The Nation Institute. His latest book is The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People. (2006)
April 28, 2004
November 14-15, 2005
December 16, 2006
Orville Schell
Orville Schell is Dean of Berkeley School of Journalism and a prize-winning journalist. He is author of 14 books, including Virtual Tibet, Mandate of Heaven, and Discos and Democracy, and also written widely about Asia and other topics for Wired, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, Harper’s, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Newsweek and other national magazines. (2005)
November 14-15, 2005
Bernhard Schlink
Bernhard Schlink was born in Germany in 1944. He is professor of public law at the Humboldt University of Berlin and from 1988 to 2006, he sat on the Constitutional Law court for the state of Nordrhein-Westfalen, Munster. He has taught in Freiburg, Bonn, and Frankfurt and is a regular visitor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York. A best-selling novelist, he is the author of the major international best-selling novel The Reader (currently a film by Stephen Daldry starring Kate Winslet and Ralph Fiennes), Homecoming, and Flights of Love: Stories, as well as several prize-winning crime novels including, The Gordian Knot, Self Deception, Self-Administered Justice, and Self Slaughter. He lives in Bonn and Berlin. (2008)
Edward Marriott meets Bernhard Schlink | Books | The Observer
Taking Bernhard Schlink’s Holocaust novel from book to film | Film | The Guardian
February 2, 2009
Vivien Schmidt
Vivien A. Schmidt is Jean Monnet Professor of European Integration and Associate Chair in the Department of International Relations at Boston University. She received her B.A. from Bryn Mawr College, her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, and attended the Institut d’Etudes Politiques, Paris.
She was formerly Professor of Political Science and Management at the University of Massachusetts Boston; has held visiting professorships at the Institut d’Études Politiques in Paris, the European University Institute in Florence, the Max Planck Institute in Cologne, the Universities of Paris V and X, and the Universities of Lille I and II; and has been a visiting scholar at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University, and a Visitor and Fulbright fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford University. (2006)
October 21, 2004
March 29, 2005
March 14, 2006
Rockwell Schnabel
Rockwell Schnabel was appointed as the U.S. Representative to the European Union on September 26, 2001, and served until July, 2005. He was chairman and co-founder of Trident Capital, a venture capital firm aimed at supporting new economy companies. A longtime businessman, he started in the securities business as a financial analyst before joining the LA-based firm of Bateman, Eichler Hill Richards Inc. (now Wachovia Bank) and rising through the ranks to become its president.
He accepted his first government post in 1986, when former President Ronald Reagan named him U.S. ambassador to Finland. After leaving Helsinki in 1989, Ambassador Schnabel went to Washington, D.C., where he served at the Department of Commerce as Deputy Secretary and then as Acting Secretary of Commerce in the administration of George Bush Sr. (2005)
October 26, 2005
Peter Schneider
Peter Schneider is author of over twenty novels, screenplays, and volumes of journalistic essays. His works translated into English include The Wall Jumper, 1984; The German Comedy, 1990; Couplings, 1996; and Edward’s Homecoming, 2000. His essays can be found in Der Spiegel, Die Zeit, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Le Monde, Time, and The New York Times.
He was a central figure in the 1968 Student Protest Movements in Berlin and Turin, Italy, and has greatly contributed to the literary and cultural life of Germany over the last four decades. (2005)
January 27, 2005
October 6, 2005
Gesine Schwan
Gesine Schwan has been President of the Europa-Universität Viadrina since 1999. She studied Roman Languages, History, Philosophy, Political Science in Berlin and Freiburg/Breisgau and had several research stays in Poland (Warsaw and Krakow). From 1971 until 1995 she was Professor of Political Science at the Free University of Berlin, serving as Dean from 1993 to 1995. She has been a Member of the “Commission for Fundamental Values” of the Social Democratic Party of Germany and, since 1994, a member of the Board of Governors of the German Association for Political Science. Dr. Schwan has published extensively on normative and philosophical problems of theories of democracy and socialism, on the history of political ideas, on political psychology, and on current political issues (policy of the two Germanys, détente policy, European unification). She has been awarded a Bundesverdienstkreuz (Federal Cross of Merits) and a Verdienstorden der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Medal of Merits Federal Republic of Germany). (2004)
March 1, 2004
Karel Schwarzenberg
Prince Karel Schwarzenberg is Chairman, Board of Patrons of the Institute for Human Sciences and, since January 2007, Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic. He is Former President of the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights and former Chairman of the Advisory Board to Czech President Vaclav Havel. (2003)
November 11, 2003
Henrik Selin
Henrik Selin is Professor of International Relations at Boston University. He is also a Core Faculty member of the Center for Energy and Environmental Studies, Boston University; a Fellow with the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of Longer-Range Future, Boston University; and an Affiliated Researcher with the Center for Climate Science and Policy Research, Linköping University. He conducts research and teaches classes on global and regional politics and policy making on environment and sustainable development. He is the co-editor of two forthcoming books: Changing Climates in North American Politics: Institutions, Policy Making and Multilevel Governance (MIT Press, with Stacy VanDeveer) and Transatlantic Environment and Energy Politics: Comparative and International Perspectives (Ashgate, with Miranda Schreurs and Stacy VanDeveer). (2009)
Click here for Professor Selin’s personal webpage.
May 9, 2009
Richard Sennett
Richard Sennett was born in Chicago in 1943. He grew up in the Cabrini Green Housing Project, one of the first racially-mixed public housing projects in the United States. At the age of six he began to study the piano and the cello, eventually working with Frank Miller of the Chicago Symphony and Claus Adam of the Julliard Quartet. Mr. Sennett was one of the last students of the conductor Pierre Monteux. In 1963 a hand injury put a sudden end to his musical career; for better or worse he then embarked on academic study.
Mr. Sennett trained at the University of Chicago and at Harvard University, receiving his Ph.D. in 1969. He then moved to New York where, in the 1970s he founded, with Susan Sontag and Joseph Brodsky, The New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University. In the 1980s he served as an advisor to UNESCO and as president of the American Council on Work; he also taught occasionally at Harvard. In the mid 1990s Mr. Sennett began to divide his time between New York University and the London School of Economics . In addition to these academic homes, he maintains informal connections to MIT and to Trinity College, Cambridge University.
Mr.Sennett is married to the sociologist Saskia Sassen. He continues to play chamber music for pleasure, and is a passionate cook.
Guardian Profile: Richard Sennett
Review of The Craftsman in The New York Time Book Review
September 26, 2008
Zafer Senocak
Born in Ankara in 1961, Zafer Senocak has been living in Germany since 1970, where he has become a leading voice in the German discussions on multiculturalism, national and cultural identity, and a mediator between Turkish and German culture.
The widely published poet, essayist, journalist and editor, has won several prestigious literary awards in Germany. His works have been translated into Turkish, English, French, Dutch, and Hebrew. In 1996, Senocak was writer in residence at Miami University, Ohio and at the Villa Aurora in Pacific Palisades.
Currently, he is Max Kade Distinguished Visitor and writer in residence at the Foreign Languages and Literatures Section at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Additional support has been provided by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), Bonn, Germany. (2008)
March 19, 2009
Yuan-yuan Shen
Yuan-yuan Shen is Research Fellow at Harvard University’s Center for the Environment China Project, Lecturer in the Department of Economics at Brandeis University, and Visiting Professor at Tsinghua University’s School of Law. She is a graduate of the People’s University in Beijing and Harvard Law School and holds a doctorate in law from the University of Wisconsin. She has written extensively on human rights and women’s issues in contemporary China. (2006)
April 4, 2006
Lilia Shevtsova
Lilia Shevtsova co-chairs the Russian Domestic Politics and Political Institutions Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Before joining the Endowment, she was deputy director of the Moscow Institute of International Economic and Political Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences and director of the Center of Political Studies in Moscow. She is one of Russia’s top political analysts, an award-winning journalist, and a regular media commentator. She is also the author of six books, including Yeltsin’s Russia: Myths and Reality (Carnegie Endowment, 1999) and Putin’s Russia (Carnegie Endowment, 2003). (2006)
March 25, 2002
March 18, 2004
March 14, 2005
September 11, 2006
Martin Simecka
Martin Simecka belonged to the Czechoslovak literary underground until 1989. During the communist regime, his works were forbidden and were published only in Samizdat or abroad. After 1989, he founded a publishing house specialized in books concerning social sciences, Archa, and was the editor-in-chief. His novel The Year of the Frog appeared in several languages and he won various literary prizes. He also published political essays. He was the editor-in-chief of the political and cultural weekly Domino-fórum, and from 1999 to 2006, he was the editor-in-chief of the most influential Slovak daily, SME. Since 2006, he has been editor-in-chief of the Czech weekly Respekt. (2008)
November 14-15, 2005
December 1, 2008
Jim Smith
Foreign Editor, The Boston Globe. (2004)
September 29, 2004
Aleksander Smolar
Aleksander Smolar is President of the Stefan Batory Foundation in Warsaw, an independent private Polish foundation established by American financier and philanthropist George Soros, and Senior Researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris. His essays and other writings have appeared in journals throughout Europe and the United States. Between 1971 and 1989 he was political émigré in Italy, France, and England, active on behalf of opposition movements in his native Poland and other Eastern European countries. In 1974 he founded the political quarterly Aneks which he served as editor-in-chief until its closure in 1990. From 1989 to 1990, he was advisor to first democratically elected prime minister of Poland, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, and in 1992-93 he served as advisor for foreign policy to Prime Minister Hanna Suchocka. (2005)
March 25, 2002
November 16, 2004
December 1, 2005
Eugeniusz Smolar
Eugeniusz Smolar is Senior Fellow at the Centre for International Relations in Warsaw. (2005)
November 14-15, 2005
Piotr Sommer
Piotr Sommer is a poet, essayist, and translator of Anglo-American poetry into Polish. He has published seven collections of his poems, two books of essays, and has translated John Ashbery, John Berryman, D.J. Enright, Seamus Heaney, Kenneth Koch, Robert Lowell, Derek Mahon, Frank O’Hara, and Charles Reznikoff. He works for Literatura na swiecie (Literature in the World), a Polish journal of international writing, and lives outside Warsaw. He has taught at several American universities. This year he is a fellow at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina. Wesleyan University Press has just brought out C ontinued, his new book of poetry in English translation. (2005)
April 6, 2005
Göran Sonnevi
Göran Sonnevi was born in Lund, Sweden in 1939 and lives outside Stockholm. He has published fifteen books of poems and one of translations. For his most recent work, Oceanen (The ocean), he received the Swedish Academy’s Nordic Prize, dubbed “the little Nobel,” in 2005 and the Literature Prize of the Nordic Council in 2006. Books available in English include A Child Is Not a Knife (Princeton University Press, 1993) and Mozart’s Third Brain (Yale University Press, fall 2009), both translated by Rika Lesser.
George Soros
George Soros is Chairman of the Open Society Institute and the founder of a network of philanthropic organizations active in more than 50 countries in Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, Africa, Latin America, Asia, and the United States. (2003)
November 11, 2003
Vladimir Spidla
Vladimir Spidla was Prime Minister of the Czech Republic from July 2002 until June 2004. In November 2004 he was appointed European Union Commissioner for Employment, Social Affairs, and Equal Opportunities. Since 1976, Mr. Spidla has held a number of jobs, including a worker in the field of preservation of historical monuments and nature conservation; an archaeologist, a saw mill worker, and an employee in a dairy and a building materials warehouse. In 1990, he became Vice-Chairman of the Jindrichuv Hradec District National Committee responsible for education, health care, social affairs and culture. From 1991 – 1996, he served as director of the local job centre. In 1992, he became a member of the Presidium of the Czech Social Democratic Party (CSSD), in March 1997 its statutory Vice-Chairman, and in April 2001 its Chairman. In the Chamber of Deputies, to which he was elected in 1996, he served as Chairman of the Parliamentary Social Policy and Health Care Committee. From July 22, 1998 to July 12 2002, he held the post of the First Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Labour and Social Affairs authorised by the Government to co-ordinate the departments of labour and social affairs, health care, education, youth and physical training, the environment, and culture. He was appointed as Prime Minister on July 12, 2002.
September 24-25, 2005
Rosemarie Stallworth-Clark
Rosemarie Stallworth-Clark is Associate Professor of Educational Psychology, Georgia Southern University; and President, American Educational Research Association Peace Education Special Interest Group. (2006)
December 16, 2006
Ilan Stavans
Ilan Stavans was born in Mexico in 1961 to an Eastern European Jewish family. In 1985, after a sojourn in Spain, he moved to the United States and began writing while taking a doctorate from Columbia University. The past decade has established him as a distinguished Latino critic, editor and author. Currently he is a professor of Latin American and Latino Cultures at Amherst College. His published work, translated into several languages, includes The Hispanic Condition; On Borrowed Words: A Memoir of Language; The Essential Ilan Stavans; and The One-Handed Pianist and Other Stories. He is the editor of The Oxford Book of Jewish Stories and The Oxford Book of Latin American Essays. Stavans has been a National Book Critics Circle Award nominee and the recipient of the Latino Literature Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among other honors.
2003 saw the publication of the controversial Spanglish: The Making of a New American Language, a pan-Hispanic socio-linguistic reference work which includes a vibrant introductory essay examining the historical context of Spanglish, a lexicon of 4,500 words, and Stavans’ Spanglish translation of the first chapter of Don Quijote de La Mancha. (2009)
Ilan Stavans’s page at Amherst College
May 4, 2009
Liborio Stellino
Liborio Stellino is Consul General of Italy in Boston. (2007)
March 28, 2007
Angela Stent
Angela Stent is National Intelligence Officer for Russia and Eurasia at the National Intelligence Council. She is on leave from Georgetown University, where she is Director of the Center for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies in the School of Foreign Service and Professor of Government. From 1999 to 2001, she served in the Office of Policy Planning at the U.S. Department of State. An expert on Russian and Soviet politics and foreign policy, and on German foreign policy, she has published widely on: Soviet relations with Europe and the United States; Russian foreign policy; West and East German foreign policy; and East-West trade and technology transfer. Her latest book is Russia and Germany Reborn: Unification, The Soviet Collapse and The New Europe (Princeton University Press). (2004)
March 18, 2004
John Sununu
John Sununu became Governor of New Hampshire in 1983 and served three consecutive terms. He was White House Chief-of-Staff under George H.W. Bush from 1989 to 1991. (2005)
September 24, 2005
Veton Surroi
Veton Surroi is Member of the Parliament of Kosova for the ORA Civic Group; Former Chairman, KOHA Media Group, Pristina. (2005)
November 14-15, 2005
Roman Szporluk
Roman Szporluk’s interests include nation formation, nationalism, and Marxism in Ukraine, Russia, and Poland; historiography; and ethnicity and politics in the USSR and its successor states. His most recent publication is Russia, Ukraine, and the Breakup of the Soviet Union (Hoover Institution Press, 2000, second printing 2002), a collection of articles written over the past thirty years on the decline and fall of the USSR. He is working on a history of Ukraine from the late 18th century to 1991. (2005)