THE REMARQUE INSTITUTE’S KANDERSTEG SEMINAR

KANDERSTEG, SWITZERLAND Wednesday, April 10 – Sunday, April 14, 2019

THE REMARQUE INSTITUTE’S KANDERSTEG SEMINAR

REVISITING 1919: A HUNDRED-YEAR-OLD POSTWAR MOMENT

Wednesday, April 10th – Sunday, April 14th, 2019

PROGRAMME

Wednesday, April 10th

Arrival of participants by train in Kandersteg

Check in: Waldhotel Doldenhorn CG-3718 Kandersteg Tel. +41.33.675.81.81 Fax +41.33.675.81.85 2 19:30 Welcome reception followed by dinner at hotel

Thursday, April 11th

10:00 INTRODUCTION AND WELCOMING REMARKS Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, New York University

Session I

10:30 – 12:30

CONSEQUENCES OF THE CONFERENCE AND THE PEACE

Denis Clark, University of Calgary, “Nation-States and National Characters at the Peace Conference: the Case of Poland?” Łukasz Mikołajewski, University of Warsaw, “Far Away from Versailles: War and Pogroms in Ukraine, 1919” Clara Mattei, The New School, “1919 Britain: Capitalism Contested" Madeleine Dungy, New Europe College, “Trade Politics in Transition” Stephen Gross, New York University, “Energy Transition?: Coal, Oil, and the End of the War” Alan Sharp, Ulster University, “‘A Living Thing is Born:’ A New World Order”

12:45 Lunch at hotel Free afternoon until:

Session II

17:30 – 19:30

RELIGIOUS AND IDEOLOGICAL TRANSITIONS

Brett Wilson, Central European University, “Modernity and Mysticism in the Twilight of the Ottoman Empire” Albert Wu, The American University of Paris, “1919 and the Crisis within Global Christianity” Lale Can, City College of New York, “Intersections of Ottoman Imperial and Religious Belonging, 1919” Gil Rubin, Harvard University, “Jews, Minority Rights and the Nation-State” Talbot Imlay, Laval University, “Socialist Visions of the International Order” Ara Merjian, New York University, “Birth of Fascism, 1919”

19:30 Drinks followed by dinner at hotel

Friday, April 12th

Session III

10:00 – 12:00

CULTURAL AND ARTISTIC TRANSFORMATIONS Maria Tatar, Harvard University, “The Afterlife of War on the German Home Front, 1919” Jonathan Wipplinger, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, “Jazz Occupies Germany: Transnational Exchange and Weimar Culture around 1919” Karen Painter, University of Minnesota, “Music and Loss: Shadows of 1919 over Germany and Austria” Abigail Weil, Harvard University, “Jaroslav Hašek in Russia” Irina Denischenko, Vanderbilt University, “The Avant-Garde in 1919: A Comparative Look at Soviet Russia, Hungary and Czechoslovakia”

12:15 Lunch at hotel

Free afternoon until:

19:00 Drinks at hotel 19:30 Dinner at the Landgasthof Ruedihus

Saturday, April 13th

Session IV

10:00 - 12:00

THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS AND THE GLOBAL POSTWAR SYSTEM

Susan Pedersen, Columbia University, “How Did 1919 Shape the Interwar System?" Kimberly Lowe, Lesley University, “Intergovernmental Humanitarianism, 1919: Planning for Peace during the Wars after the War” Urs Matthias Zachmann, Free University of Berlin, “The Reluctant Internationalist: Japanese Perspectives on Paris and Post-1919 International Institutions” Elisabeth Forster, University of Southampton, “The Global and the Local: The Treaty of Versailles, the May Fourth Movement, and the Rise of Communism in China” Durba Ghosh, Cornell University, “1919: Amritsar, Rowlatt, and a Royal Proclamation.” Trygve Throntveit, University of Minnesota, “In League: Popular Support for US Membership in the League of Nations, 1917-1920”

12:15 Lunch at hotel

Free afternoon until:

17:30 WRAP-UP SESSION Larry Wolff, New York University

19:00 Drinks and Gala dinner at hotel

Sunday, April 14th

Departure of participants

* * * * * * * * * * *

KANDERSTEG SEMINAR

Wednesday, April 10 – Sunday, April 14, 2019

PARTICIPANTS

Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, New York University

Lale Can, City College of New York

Denis Clark, University of Calgary

Irina Denischenko, Vanderbilt University

Madeleine Dungy, New Europe College

Elisabeth Forster, University of Southampton

Durba Ghosh, Cornell University

Stephen Gross, New York University

Talbot Imlay, Laval University

Kimberly Lowe, Lesley University

Clara Mattei, The New School

Ara Merjian, New York University

Łukasz Mikołajewski, University of Warsaw

Karen Painter, University of Minnesota

Susan Pedersen, Columbia University

Gil Rubin, Harvard University

Alan Sharp, Ulster University, Emeritus

Maria Tatar, Harvard University

Trygve Throntveit, University of Minnesota

Abigail Weil, Harvard University

Brett Wilson, Central European University

Jonathan Wipplinger, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Larry Wolff, New York University

Albert Wu, The American University of Paris

Urs Matthias Zachmann, Free University of Berlin

KANDERSTEG SEMINAR

Wednesday, April 10 – Sunday, April 14, 2019

PARTICIPANT BIOGRAPHIES Zvi Ben-Dor Benite’s research centers on the interaction between religions in world history and cultural exchanges across vast space and deep time. He is the author of The Dao of Muhammad: A Cultural History of Muslims in Late Imperial China (Harvard, 2005); The Ten Lost Tribes: A World History (Oxford, 2009); co-editor of Modern Middle Eastern Jewish Thought: Writings on Identity, Culture, and Politics (Brandeis, 2013); and an edited volume, The Scaffolding of Sovereignty (Columbia, 2017). He is currently working on a number of projects related to Jews, Jesuits, Chinese and Muslims. Lale Can is an Assistant Professor of History at The City College of New York, CUNY. She received her Ph.D. from New York University and specializes in late Ottoman history, with a focus on hajj-related migration, politics, and law. Her book, Spiritual Subjects: Central Asian Pilgrims and the Ottoman Hajj at the End of Empire, is forthcoming from Stanford University Press. She has received numerous grants to pursue research and writing, including fellowships from Zentrum Moderner Orient, SSRC, Fulbright-Hays, the Remarque Institute, ARIT, and IREX. Denis Clark is an Assistant Professor of British diplomatic history at the University of Calgary. His current book project, “Passions and Policies: Poles and Poland in Western Diplomacy, 1914-1921,” looks at how British, French, and American policy-makers thought about Polish independence in the era of the First World War. His work is published or forthcoming in Studia Historyczne Kwartalnik (Historical Studies Quarterly); Unknown Fronts, an edited collection on the Eastern Front of the First World War, and Nations and Nationalism. He holds an MPhil and DPhil from the University of Oxford and a BA from the University of Waterloo. Irina Denischenko is a Mellon Assistant Professor in the Department of German, Russian, and East European Studies at Vanderbilt University. Her research focuses on the avant-garde of the 1910s and the 1920s in Central and Eastern Europe, especially in Russia, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. She has published articles on Czech avant-garde photopoetry and Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of cognition. She is currently working on a collection of critical articles on Dada in Central and Eastern Europe and a volume of new Bakhtin translations. She holds a PhD in Slavic Languages and Comparative Literature from Columbia University. Madeleine Dungy is currently a Fellow at the New Europe College in Bucharest. She is completing her doctoral monograph, “Trade Politics in Transition, 1900-1930,” which analyzes the emergence of new multilateral frameworks in Europe during and after the First World War. As an offshoot of her doctoral work completed at Harvard, she is working on an article on the trade terms of the 1919 peace treaties. She is also researching a new project focused on the role of migration in international economic institutions.

Elisabeth Forster is a Lecturer in modern Chinese history at the University of Southampton. She previously taught at the Universities of Oxford, Freiburg, and Hamburg. She recently published a book with the title 1919 – The Year That Changed China: A New History of the New Culture Movement (De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2018), which emerged from her PhD thesis at the University of Oxford. Since then, her research has moved on to exploring Chinese discourses and performances of peacefulness from the 19th century to the present. Durba Ghosh is a Professor in the History Department and Director of the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program at Cornell University. Her research and teaching focus on modern South Asia, the British Empire, gender, and colonialism, with a particular interest in the history of colonialism on the Indian subcontinent. Her first book, Sex and the Family in Colonial India (Cambridge, 2006) was about relationships between colonial officials and residents and local women in India. Her most recent book, Gentlemanly Terrorists (Cambridge, 2017), focuses on an underground political movement in early and mid-20th-century India. Her articles have appeared in American Historical Review, Gender and History, Journal of Asian Studies, among other venues. Stephen Gross is an Associate Professor in the Department of History and the Center for European and Mediterranean Studies at New York University. He works on issues of political economy, imperialism, and energy in 20th-century Europe. His first book, Export Empire: German Soft Power in Southeastern Europe, 1890-1945 (Cambridge, 2015), explores questions of imperialism, trade, and cultural diplomacy. His articles on war finance, European integration, and energy decoupling have appeared in Central European History, Contemporary European History, and German Politics and Society. He is currently writing a book about the history of German energy policy from 1945 to the present, with support from the Andrew Carnegie Foundation. Talbot Imlay teaches in the Departement des sciences historiques of the Universite Laval in Quebec, Canada. Before the Universite Laval, he completed a PhD in history at Yale University and a postdoctoral fellowship at the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University. He has published articles in several journals, including the Journal of Modern History, Past & Present, and the American Historical Review. His most recent book is The Practice of Socialist Internationalism: European Socialists and International Politics, 1914-1960 (Oxford, 2018). He is currently working on a study of Clarence Streit and federalist and Atlanticist thinking in the United States during the 20th century. Kimberly Lowe is an Assistant Professor of History at Lesley University in Cambridge, MA. She received her PhD from Yale University and has held doctoral and post-doctoral fellowships at Amherst College, the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, and Albert-Ludwigs-Universität. Her research interests include the history of humanitarianism, international humanitarian law, transnational social movements and intergovernmental organizations. Her recent publications include writing on the Red Cross, humanitarianism, and sovereignty in Moving the Social, and Journal of Contemporary History.

Clara E. Mattei is an Assistant Professor at the Economics Department of The New School for Social Research and currently a member of the School of Social Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton. Her research contributes to the history of capitalism, exploring the critical relation between economic ideas and technocratic policy-making. She is currently working on her book project called, “Economic Crisis and Technocratic Repression: On the Origins and Rationality of Austerity.” The book investigates austerity as a powerful tool of reaction against the unprecedented crisis of capitalism after WWI, the mobilization of the working classes and the proposals for post-capitalist reconstruction. Ara H. Merjian is an Associate Professor of Italian Studies at New York University, where he is an affiliate of the Institute of Fine Arts and the Department of Art History. He was educated at Yale University and the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Giorgio de Chirico and the Metaphysical City: Nietzsche, Paris, Modernism (Yale, 2014); and Against the Avant-Garde: Pier Paolo Pasolini, Contemporary Art and Neocapitalism, 1960-1975 (University of Chicago, 2019). His book Blueprints and Ruins: The Architectonic Afterlifes of Giorgio de Chirico will be published with Yale University Press in 2022, and he currently is at work on two manuscripts: “The Mimesis of the Gaze: Shared Vision and Intersubjectivity in Modernist Painting,” and “A Future by Design: Modernity.” Lukasz Mikolajewski is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Applied Social Sciences at the University of Warsaw. He specializes in European intellectual history. In 2018, he published Disenchanted Europeans: Polish Émigré Writers from Kultura and Postwar Reformulations of the West (Peter Lang AG), based on his PhD thesis defended at the European University Institute. Currently, his fields of research include political assassinations, the history of Berdychiv, and the faculty of judgment in travel writing.

Karen Painter is an Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota’s School of Music. She is completing a book on music and tragic commemoration in the world wars. She was recipient of the Humboldt fellowship and Berlin Prize, and has been visiting scholar at Harvard’s Center for European Studies and the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. Her research has involved early bourgeois musical culture, the fin de siècle, World Wars, Austro-German socialism, and Nazism. She is the author of Symphonic Aspirations: German Music and Politics, 1900-1945 (Harvard, 2008); and an editor of Late Thoughts: Reflections on Artists and Composers at Work (with Thomas Crow, Getty, 2006); and Mahler and His World (Princeton, 2002). Susan Pedersen is Gouverneur Morris Professor of British History at Columbia University, where she teaches British and international history. Her first book, Family, Dependence and the Origins of the Welfare State (Cambridge, 1993) examined the way European welfare states came to account for dependence. Her second book, a biography of the social reformer Eleanor Rathbone, appeared from Yale University Press in 2004. Her most recent book, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (Oxford, 2015) was awarded the 2015 Cundill Prize for Historical Literature. She is currently writing a book about passion and politics in the Balfour family, and is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books.

Gil Rubin is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Jewish Studies, Harvard University. He studies the history of Jewish nationalism and Zionism in Eastern Europe and Palestine, and the Holocaust. He is currently completing his book manuscript, “The Future of the Jews: Planning for the Postwar Order” (under advanced contract with Harvard University Press). Alan Sharp is Emeritus Professor of International History at Ulster University, from which he retired as Provost of its Coleraine campus in 2009. His books include The Versailles Settlement: Peacemaking After The First World War, 1919-1923 (Third Edition, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018); and Versailles 1919: A Centennial Perspective (Haus, 2018). He was the general editor of, and a contributor to, the Haus series Makers of the Modern World. Its 32 volumes offered short biographies of the signatories of the Treaty of Versailles, an appraisal of the League of Nations, and some more general regional overviews. Maria Tatar is the John L. Loeb Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures and Folklore and Mythology at Harvard University. She is the author of Lustmord: Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany (Princeton, 1997); The Annotated Brothers Grimm (W.W. Norton, 2012); Enchanted Hunters: The Power of Stories in Childhood (W.W. Norton, 2009); and The Annotated African American Folktales (W.W. Norton, 2017), among other works. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, The New Republic, The New Yorker, and other media outlets, and she is a frequent contributor to National Public Radio. She was Dean for the Humanities at Harvard University from 2003 to 2006 and is a Senior Fellow at Harvard’s Society of Fellows. She is the recipient of the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work of 2018. Trygve Throntveit is Dean’s Fellow for Civic Studies at the University of Minnesota College of Education and Human Development. He was a John Sloan Dickey Center Fellow in US Foreign Policy and International Understanding at Dartmouth College, and earlier served as Assistant Director of Undergraduate Studies in History at Harvard University, where he also received his bachelor’s degree and his PhD. He is the author of two books and numerous articles on the history of American moral and social thought, politics, and foreign relations, including Power without Victory: Woodrow Wilson and the American Internationalist Experiment (Chicago, 2017). Abigail Weil is a doctoral candidate in Harvard’s Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. She has served as Teaching Fellow in Czech and Russian language courses, as well as courses on 19th-century Russian literature, Czech literature under communism, and East European modernism. Her dissertation, “Man is Indestructible: Legend and Legitimacy in the Worlds of Jaroslav Hašek,” analyzes the works and unlikely canonization of one of the most popular Czech modernist authors. Brett Wilson is Associate Professor and Director of the one-year MA Program in Comparative History at Central European University. He earned his PhD at Duke University and writes on modern Middle Eastern history and Islamic modernism. His first book, Translating the Qur’an in an Age of Nationalism: Print Culture and Modern Islam in Turkey (Oxford, 2014), explores late 19th- and early 20th-century projects to produce printed, vernacular translations of the Qur’an and their role in cultivating a nationalist, Turkish Islam. These days, he is thinking about recalibrations of mysticism and modernity in the interwar period.

Jonathan Wipplinger is Associate Professor of German at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Previously, he was Assistant Professor at North Carolina State University, and received his PhD from the University of Michigan. His work explores cultural exchange during Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany, with particular focus on the transnational flow around music and musical forms. He is the author of The Jazz Republic: Music, Race, and American Culture in Weimar Germany (University of Michigan, 2017). He has also published in German Quarterly, Germanic Review, Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters, Colloquium Germanica, as well as in edited volumes on Thomas Mann, Blackness and Opera, and African Americans in Germany. His current project explores the materiality of music and music objects, such as the gramophone in the 20th century. Larry Wolff is Julius Silver Professor of History at New York University, Director of the NYU Center for European and Mediterranean Studies, Executive Director of the Remarque Institute, and the Co-Director of NYU Florence. His research has focused on the relation between Eastern Europe and Western Europe, especially pursuing the argument that Eastern Europe was "invented" in the 18th century by the philosophes and travelers of the Enlightenment. Wolff’s most recent book is The Singing Turk: Ottoman Power and Operatic Emotions on the European Stage from the Siege of Vienna to the Age of Napoleon (Stanford, 2016). His other books include Paolina’s Innocence: Child Abuse in Casanova’s Venice (Stanford, 2012); Venice and the Slavs: The Discovery of Dalmatia in the Age of Enlightenment (Stanford, 2001); and Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, 1994). His current research concerns Woodrow Wilson and Eastern Europe. Albert Wu is an Assistant Professor of History at the American University of Paris. He is the author of From Christ to Confucius: German Missionaries, Chinese Christians, and the Globalization of Christianity, 1860-1950 (Yale, 2016). In 2016-2017, he was an Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellow at the Free University, Berlin, where he was working on a second book project related to histories of global health. Urs Matthias Zachmann is Professor of Modern Japanese History and Culture at Freie Universitaet Berlin. Prior to that, he was the Handa Professor of Japanese-Chinese Relations at the University of Edinburgh. His fields of specialization are the history of Northeast Asia’s international and transcultural relations, the history of political ideas and the history of law. Among other publications, he is author of China and Japan in the Late Meiji Period: China Policy and the Japanese Discourse on National Self-Identity, 1895-1904 (Routledge, 2009); Völkerrechtsdenken und Außenpolitik in Japan, 1919-1960 (The Japanese Discourse on International Law and Foreign Policy, 1919-1960, Nomos, 2013); and editor of Asia After Versailles: Asian Perspectives on the Paris Peace Conference and the Interwar Order, 1919-1933 (Edinburgh, 2017). He is currently preparing for an ERC-funded project on Japanese military justice in East and Southeast Asia during the Asia-Pacific War, 1937-45, starting later this year.