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Keynote Speakers

  • Zygmunt Bauman (University of Leeds)
  • Thomas Elsaesser (University of Amsterdam)
  • Sylvie Lindeperg (Paris1 Panthéon-Sorbonne)
  • Ronny Loewy (German Film Institute, Frankfurt)
  • Patricia Owens (Queen Mary, University of London)
  • Michael Rothberg (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
  • Annette Wieviorka (CNRS, Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne)

Zygmunt Bauman is Emeritus Professor of Sociology, having served as Professor of Sociology and, at various times, Head of Department at Leeds from 1972 until his retirement in 1990. He was formerly of the University of Warsaw until 1968 and the University of Tel Aviv, and held several visiting professorships, in Australia and elsewhere, before coming to Leeds. He is now Professor Emeritus also at the University of Warsaw. Zygmunt Bauman is known throughout the world for works such as Legislators and Interpreters (1987), Modernity and the Holocaust (1989), Modernity and Ambivalence (1991) and Postmodern Ethics (1993). He is the author of some 21 books in English and of numerous articles and reviews. A full bibliography to 1995 can be found in R. Kilminster and I. Varcoe (eds.) Culture, Modernity and Revolution: Essays in Honour of Zygmunt Bauman (Routledge, 1996) and an updated bibliography to 2000 at the following Bibliography Link. His reputation, although already well-established by the 1970s in Western Europe and North America as well as throughout the then Eastern Bloc, grew at an especially rapid rate in the late 1980s, and today he is described variously as one of the twentieth century's great social theorists and the world's foremost sociologist of postmodernity. Even this second designation may, however, belong in the past, because Bauman's thought is always moving on to break new ground - at least two new books are projected for the early 2000s. Suffice it to say that his undeniable success is built not only on his powers of creative thought and analysis and his superb sociological acumen, but also on his literary skill as a writer and expositor. Professor Bauman was awarded the Amalfi European Prize in 1990 and the Adorno Prize in 1998.It is difficult to think of higher honours being bestowed on a sociologist, in this case of European and indeed world standing.

Thomas Elsaesser is Emeritus Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of Amsterdam and since 2005 Visiting Professor at Yale University. In recent years, he has been visiting research fellow at UC Berkeley, IFK Vienna, Sackler Institute Tel Aviv, and New York University. In 2006 he was Ingmar Bergman professor at the University of Stockholm and in 2007 Leverhulme Professor and Overseas Fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge. Among his books are Weimar Cinema and After (2000); Metropolis (2000); Studying Contemporary American Film (2002, with Warren Buckland); Harun Farocki - Working on the Sight-Lines (2006, editor), Filmgeschichte und Frühes Kino (2002); European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood (2005); Terror und Trauma (2007; English edition forthcoming); Filmtheorie: zur Einführung (2007, with Malte Hagener; English edition forthcoming) and Hollywood Heute (2008).

Sylvie Lindeperg is a lecturer in film history at the University of la Sorbonne nouvelle and at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS). She is the author of Les Ecrans de l'ombre (prize Jean Mitry, 1997), Clio de 5 à 7 (2000, CNRS Editions) and Nuit et Brouillard. Un film dans l'histoire (Odile Jacob, 2007). She is also the co-author and editor of several DVDs using film archives as a way of teaching and rethinking history (such as Images de guerre, INA/Éditions du Nouveau monde). She recently published in collaboration with Annette Wieviorka Univers concentrationnaire. Voir, savoir, comprendre (2008)

Ronny Loewy was born in Tel Aviv in 1946. He studied Sociology and works for the German Film Institute in Frankfurt/Main. He was curating in the 1987 exhibition From Babelsberg to Hollywood. Film Emigration out of Nazi Germany. He has written on "Film in Exile", "Holocaust & Film", "Yiddish Cinema", "Stanley Kubrick", "Max Ophüls", "Helmar Lerski", "Meyer Levin" and "Victor Vicas". In 1983 he directed The Yiddish Cinema, in 1992 with Inge Classen Once Upon a Time in Yiddishland. In 1995 he shared direction of Auschwitz - Five Days in November with Cilly Kugelmann and Hanno Loewy. In 1996 he co-directed Willi Münzenberg or the Art of Propaganda. From 1992 to 2005 he was co-publisher of the magazine "Filmexil". As a film historian Loewy works for the German Film Institute (DIF) in Frankfurt/Main. Since1996 he is project manager of "Cinematography of the Holocaust" in cooperation with the Fritz Bauer Institute. He lives in Frankfurt.

Patricia Owens is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Politics, Queen Mary, University of London and Senior Research Associate in the Leverhulme Programme on the Changing Character of War, University of Oxford. She was Seton-Watson Research Fellow at Oriel College, Oxford (2004-7) and is the author of Between War and Politics: International Relations and the Thought of Hannah Arendt (Oxford, 2007), War and Security (Polity, forthcoming) and co-editor of The Globalization of World Politics (Oxford, 2008). She has held research positions at Princeton, Aberystwyth, UC-Berkeley, and the University of Southern California and is Associate Editor of Security Dialogue.

Michael Rothberg is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Affiliated with the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures and the Programs in Comparative Literature and Jewish Culture and Society, Rothberg works in the fields of critical theory and cultural studies, Holocaust studies, postcolonial studies, and contemporary literatures. His new book is Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization, which is being published by Stanford University Press in their "Cultural Memory in the Present" series. Chapters from that book have appeared in Critical Inquiry, PMLA, and The Yale Journal of Criticism. He is also the author of Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation (2000), and has co-edited The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings (2003) and Cary Nelson and the Struggle for the University: Poetry, Politics, and the Profession (2009). He is the founding editor of the online public forum Kritik.

Annette Wieviorka is Head of Research at CNRS (IRICE- Paris 1-Panthéon-Sorbonne), and also member of the Conseil Supérieur des Archives. She is the author of numerous books: Déportation et génocide.Entre la mémoire et l'oubli (1992,1995,2003), Le Procès de Nuremberg (1995,2005), L'Ere du témoin (1998,2000) translated by Jared Stark The Era of the Witness (2006), Auschwitz, 60 ans après (2005) and Univers concentrationnaire. Voir, savoir, comprendre in collaboration with Sylvie Lindeperg(2008)