Programming

One of our principal activities is to organize two to three major conferences per year. Our major conferences are organized around bold, ambitious and far-reaching "biq questions." We deliberately and immodestly seek to identify the most important topics, the broadest agenda,s and the most challenging questions. In an increasingly specialized scholarly world, we aim to orient, frame and engage the most important debates crossing over various disciplines. More specifically, our major conferences investigae a choherent theme with a focus on Europe, a pressing issue of the day for Europe, or key lessons that Europe can offer for the rest of the world.

Beyond our conferences, the CES contributes to hosting eminent scholars of Europe through a variety of Duke's seminars. Among others, Neil Fligstein spoke in the Center for International Studies Seminar on Global Governance and Democracy, and Marius Busemeyer and Robert Franzese spoke in the Comparative Politics workshop. The CES also co-sponsors events and speakers on Duke's campus, and in recent years has contributed to the Triangle Intellectual History Seminar, and conferences on "Mapping Difference," "The Forum on European Expansion and Global Interaction" and "Transatlantic and Transmediterranean Representations Across Early Modern Worlds." On a limited basis, the CES has occasionally supported faculty and student travel fro unique opportunities in Europe.

Please scroll down below for information on our upcoming events, and click here to learn more about our recent events.

Events: FALL 2010

Vorticism: New Perspectives Conference | Friday, Oct 29 - Saturday, Oct 30, 2010 | Nasher Museum of Art Auditorium

Vorticism: New Perspectives, is an international symposium co-sponsored by Duke and Wake Forest Universities which will be held at the Nasher Museum of Art in conjunction with the exhibition The Vorticists: Rebel Artists in London and New York, 1914-1918 (the exhibition will be on view from September 30, 2010 to January 2nd, 2011). 

Key figures associated with the Vorticists include the American expatriate poet Ezra Pound; the artist, author and polemicist Wyndham Lewis; the radical sculptors Jacob Epstein and Henri Gaudier Brzeska and artists Helen Saunders, Dorothy Shakespeare and Edward Wadsworth; and the photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn, creator of the first fully abstract photographs known as the “Vortographs.”  The Vorticists disseminated their aesthetic not only through three key wartime exhibitions which are the subject of the Nasher show, but also through their avant-garde journal Blast (1914-15), which had a huge impact on subsequent avant-garde movements through its radical typography, strident manifestos and innovative poetry and prose.

Hieratic Head of Erza Pound, 1914 by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska

Speakers from Europe and North America will consider such issues as Vorticism and the Occult; the Vorticists’ relation to Italian Futurism; the reception of Russian art and culture among  British modernists; themes of procreation in Vorticist sculpture; anarchism and Vorticist aesthetics; Wyndham Lewis’s avant-garde writing; the impact of Vorticist aesthetics on the early American avant-garde; World War One and the dissolution of modernism in Britain; and the legacy of Vorticism in the thought of Marshal McLuhan.

The conference, which will be free and open to the public, will be held at the Nasher Museum of Art Auditorium from Friday, October 29 to Saturday, October 30th.  Please contact Amy Vargas-Tonsi for further details.