A FLAS Fellow's Semester Abroad in Amman

Audrey Dombro, an agricultural and consumer economics student and 2019-20 FLAS fellow, reflects upon her experience studying in Jordan.

Master of Arts in European Union Studies

The European Union Center at the University of Illinois offers the only Master of Arts in European Union Studies (MAEUS) program in the Western Hemisphere. Learn more here.

Nuclear Energy and Its Environmental, Policy, and Security Implications

On Earth Day 2022, the EU Center organized a symposium on the future of technology, energy, and security in Europe, featuring prominent scholars and policy makers from France, Germany, and the U.S.

Conversations on Europe

Watch the collection of online roundtable discussions on different EU issues sponsored by the University of Pittsburgh.

Accelerating Climate Change Mitigation: Policy Statements on the Road to Sharm-El-Sheikh and Beyond

Bruce Murray, Resident Director of the Illinois Program in Vienna, presents a series of student-written policy statements for accelerating climate change mitigation.

Videos of Previous Lectures

Missed an EUC-hosted lecture? Our blog's video tag has archived previous EUC-sponsored lectures.

Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Albanian diasporas in Italy and Greece: A blessing and a curse for the Albanian immigrants after 1990

On February 17, Dr. Eda Derhemi delivered a lecture entitled "Albanian diasporas in Italy and Greece: A Blessing and a Curse for the Albanian Immigrants after 1990" as part of the EUC's Jean Monnet Module course, Europe and the Mediterranean: Transnational Spaces and Integration. You can watch her full lecture below or by clicking here.


Eda Derhemi is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Media and Cinema Studies and a Lecturer of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her research interests include linguistic endangerment and language death, minority languages and ethnicity, and language of the media and propaganda.
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Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition


Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition is a recent book by Yasemin Yildiz, Assistant Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures and EUC-affiliated faculty member at UIUC. The book is published by Fordham University Press. Check out the synopsis below and an article about the book from the Huffington Post.

Monolingualism—the idea that having just one language is the norm—is only a recent invention, dating to late-eighteenth-century Europe. Yet it has become a dominant, if overlooked, structuring principle of modernity. According to this monolingual paradigm, individuals are imagined to be able to think and feel properly only in one language, while multiple languages are seen as a threat to the cohesion of individuals and communities, institutions and disciplines. As a result of this view, writing in anything but one's "mother tongue" has come to be seen as an aberration.

Beyond the Mother Tongue demonstrates the impact of this monolingual paradigm on literature and culture but also charts incipient moves beyond it. Because newer multilingual forms and practices exist in tension with the paradigm, which alternately obscures, pathologizes, or exoticizes them, this book argues that they can best be understood as "postmonolingual" that is, as marked by the continuing force of monolingualism.

Focused on canonical and minority writers working in German in the twentieth century, Beyond the Mother Tongue examines distinct forms of multilingualism, such as writing in one socially unsanctioned "mother tongue" about another language (Franz Kafka); mobilizing words of foreign derivation as part of a multilingual constellation within one language (Theodor W. Adorno); producing an oeuvre in two separate languages simultaneously (Yoko Tawada); writing by literally translating from the "mother tongue" into another language (Emine Sevgi); and mixing different languages, codes, and registers within one text (Feridun Zaimoglu). Through these analyses, Beyond the Mother Tongue suggests that the dimensions of gender, kinship, and affect encoded in the "mother tongue" are crucial to the persistence of monolingualism and the challenge of multilingualism.
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Friday, February 10, 2012

The Mediterranean: Colonial and Post-Colonial Identities

On February 8, Dr. Emanuel Rota delivered a lecture entitled "The Mediterranean: Colonial and Post-Colonial Identities" as part of the EUC's Jean Monnet Module course, Europe and the Mediterranean: Transnational Spaces and Integration. You can watch his full lecture below or by clicking here.



Emanuel Rota is an Assistant Professor of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese and European Union Center affiliated faculty member at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His research interests include culture, socialism and fascism in Europe and the history of Italy.
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