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Undergraduate Program in European Studies
The interdisciplinary European Studies Program offers students a broad background in the languages, politics, history, literatures, and cultures of Europe. European culture has been enormously influential in shaping today's global civilization. Europe is by far the largest trading bloc in the world, the site of the largest amount of foreign investment by the United States, and the largest international investor in the United States.
By studying with KU faculty members in business, humanities, law, the social sciences, languages, literatures, and linguistics students gain a deeper understanding of Europe's past, present, and future impact on the world.
For information about European Studies at KU, please contact Lorie Vanchena, Associate Professor of Germanic Languages & Literatures and Coordinator, European Studies.
vanchena@ku.edu
Congratulations to our graduating European Studies Co-Majors and Minors!
Please meet four of our students and learn more about their exciting post-graduation plans:
"As a European Studies minor, I focused on Western Europe and France in particular, studying comparative politics, history, and literature. I am a French and International Studies co-major, so European Studies helped me focus my interest on France, especially the political aspects of the country. I plan on attending graduate school to study French." — Hannah Wilson
"I am a History and European Studies co-major from Joplin, Missouri. At The University of Kansas my studies have emphasized European politics and history of the 18th–20th centuries. Within this broader category, I focused on French history and language, punctuated by a summer spent in Paris through KU Study Abroad. In the fall I will attend law school and it is my earnest desire that the years to come will find me living in Europe." — Rachael Goodrich
"In combining my intensive studies in French literature and language with European Studies, I have been able to pursue a better understanding of literary and social psychology. Over the last four years I have specialized in medieval French with an emphasis in the first appearance and evolution of the novel. Wanting to understand the formation of the novel, I focused on the development of psychological expression in literature. I have also studied ethnic tension and identity construction in contemporary France. In the fall I plan to teach English for one year in Bordeaux, France as a Lecteur de Langue Vivante and then return to The University of Kansas to pursue my M.A. in French Literature and Language." — Taylor Leibbrandt
"I am a graduating senior with a major in English and a co-major in European Studies. I enjoy poetry, traveling and foreign languages. After graduation, I plan to serve in Benin as a TEFL volunteer for the Peace Corps." — Alex Zoubine
Fall 2012 European Studies Courses
EURS 500: Seminar in European Studies
Provides an interdisciplinary approach to the study of modern European civilization. Students acquire an understanding of the development of modern European culture and society and Europe's contemporary problems. Topics include the economic and political integration of European states; modernism and anti-modernism in European culture; imperialism, migration, and ethnic and racial division in European society; democracy versus dictatorship; American-European relations; mass culture, urban development, and the welfare state; and contrasts and comparisons between European Cultures--East and West, North and South. Required of all European Studies majors. Prerequisite: Junior standing or consent of instructor.
Urie,Dale Marie 12490 W 03:00 -05:30 PM
EURS 501: Senior Thesis in European Studies
European Studies majors will do research and write a substantial paper on a topic in the culture, economy, history, or politics of Europe. Topics will be approved by the European Studies Committee. Students will work with an advisor chosen from among the European Studies faculty and with the European Studies Coordinator. Required of all European Studies majors. Prerequisite: Completion of EURS 500 and 15 hours toward the Co-Major.
Levy,Richard E. 19596
Vanchena,Lorie A 12491
EURS 502: Senior Honors Thesis in European Studies
Open to European Studies majors doing their senior thesis for Honors. Prerequisite: Completion of EURS 500, 15 hours toward the Co-Major, and approval of Honors thesis by European Studies Committee. Completion of or concurrent enrollment in EURS 501.
Marx,Leonie A. 17921
Vanchena,Lorie A 12492
EURS 511: Topic: German Cinema in Context
A study of significant themes, movements, or problems in European history, literature, politics, society, or culture.
Baron,Frank 20970 R 06:30 -09:20 PM
EURS 511: Topic: International Relations / Political Philosophy
Stinnes,Manfred H. 29667 MW 03:00 -04:15 PM
EURS 511: Topic: International Conflict
Stinnes,Manfred H. 29668 MW 12:30 -01:45 PM
EURS 565: The Literature of Human Rights
Examines in literature, art, and film from about 1800 to the present, both sides of the ongoing debate surrounding the idea that all human persons possess inalienable rights because all persons possess intrinsic value as persons, value independent of race, gender, caste or class, wealth, age, sexual preference, etc. Anti- and pro-rights proponents are paired and studied with equal care. (Same as PCS 565.)
Janzen,Marike 25719 T 05:00 -07:30 PM
EURS 580: Directed Study in European Studies
Independent study and directed reading on special topics. Permission of the instructor who will supervise the student's work is required.
Fourny,Diane R. 17168
Vanchena,Lorie A 21954
Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Slovene, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian
Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, England, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Scotland, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom
Coming Soon
Events:
European Topics in the Africa World Documentary Film Festival
Wednesday, April 25–Saturday, April 28
Spencer Museum of Art
From April 25-28 the Africa World Documentary Film Festival, which promotes knowledge and culture of the people of Africa in a Pan-African context, will take place at KU. Of the 21 films to be screened at the Spencer Museum of Art, five are particularly relevant for Europe. Films in languages other than English are subtitled or dubbed in English. All film screenings are free of charge.
The festival program can be found at http://www.africaworldfilmfestival.com/2012/schedule.
Wednesday, April 25, 9:25 – 11:05 p.m.
Family Portrait in Black and White (directed by Julia Ivanova, Canada. In English)
Olga Nenya, from a small Ukrainian town, is raising 16 black orphans in the country of Slavic blue-eyed blonds. The reality of growing up as a bi-racial child in Eastern Europe, a rare and truly visible minority, is not for the faint of heart. http://www.familyportraitthefilm.com/
Friday, April 27, 8:00 – 9:36 p.m.
The Story of Lovers Rock (directed by Menelik Shabazz, United Kingdom. In English)
In the 70s and 80s Britain was rife with racial tension and police harassment, particularly against black British youths, a rebel generation searching for an identity. They created a subgenre of reggae known as Lovers Rock, which became a global brand through artists such as UB40 and Maxi Priest. http://www.loversrockthefilm.com/
Saturday, April 28, 1:00 – 2:18 p.m.
Kontinuasom: A Documusical from Cape Verde (directed by Óscar Martínez, Spain, Cape Verde, Portugal. In Portuguese)
Beti lives in her homeland, Cape Vert, where she dances in the company Raiz di Polon. When she is has a chance to join a Cape Verdean music show in Lisbon and launch a new career in Portugal, it sets off a deep and essentially Cape Verdean conflict: the identity constructed through the centuries by the diaspora of her people. http://www.kontinuasom.com/blog/en/sobre-la-pelicula-2/
Saturday, April 28, 8:30 – 9:44 p.m.
Indochina: Traces of a Mother (directed by Idrissou Mora Kpai, Benin and France. In French)
Between 1946 and 1954, over 60,000 African soldiers were enlisted to fight the Viet Minh. Pitted against each other, these colonized peoples came into contact and a number of African soldiers took Vietnamese women as wives. After the war, when the colonial army ordered that their children be repatriated to Africa, many were put up for mass adoption by African officers. The film explores a little-known chapter of the Indochina war. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZrXCh9mf1I
Saturday, April 28, 10:50 – 11:00 p.m.
Goodbye Mandima (directed by Robert-Jan Lacombe, Switzerland and Democratic Republic of Congo (Zaire). In French)
Growing up in Mandima, a small village in the northeastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Robert-Jan Lacombe, the son of European parents, never thought he would have to say goodbye to the island at the age of ten. In this poignant short documentary, the director recalls his unique and carefree childhood while studying a panoramic photograph documenting the day he left behind the only way of life he had ever known.
http://www.swissfilms.ch/en/film_search/filmdetails/-/id_film/2146536127
Co-sponsors of the film festival include the Kansas African Studies Center, EGARC, European Studies Program, Spencer Museum of Art, KU Libraries, AAAS, French & Italian, Film & Media Studies, Geography, Sociology, Project on the History of Black Writing, CGIS, Beach Center of Disability, Spanish & Portuguese, and CREES
Lecture: "Negotiating Urban Nature: Paris's Water Shortages, 1880-1914"
Peter S. Soppelsa, University of Oklahoma
Monday, April 16
4:00 PM
Parlors, Kansas Union
Between 1880 and 1914, Paris experienced frequent water shortages, most often during the summer. These shortages consistently caused political conflict as engineers, politicians, journalists, and everyday Parisians debated who or what was to blame: people, technology, or nature. Such debates thus reveal how 19th-century Parisians negotiated the place of nature in the city and the meaning of urban ecology.
Peter S. Soppelsa is Assistant Professor, Department of the History of Science, University of Oklahoma, and Managing Editor of Technology and Culture.
Sponsored by the Center for Global & International Studies, Department of French & Italian, Department of History, and the European Studies Program. 
Peter S. Soppelsa's lecture will earn participating GAP students double points!
Lecture: Wynfrid Kriegleder, "A History of Austrian Literature: Why Do We Need It?"
Tuesday, March 13
7:30 PM
Max Kade Center (Sudler House)
Quite often, German literary histories have treated Austrian literature and culture as if it were just part of the German cultural heritage. In his talk, Professor Kriegleder will not only question this practice, but also call into doubt the very concept of a national literature. Wynfrid Kriegleder is Associate Professor of German, University of Vienna, and Visiting Max Kade Professor, KU Department of Germanic Languages & Literatures. Free and open to the public; Reception to follow. Co-sponsored by the Dept. of Germanic Languages & Literatures, European Studies Program, and the Center for Global & International Studies.
James H. Brown, Assistant Professor, Germanic Languages & Literatures, and Wynfrid Kriegleder, Visiting Max Kade Professor and Associate Professor, German, University of Vienna, at the Max Kade Center at KU.
European Studies co-sponsors visit by acclaimed sculptor Karen LaMonte
Karen LaMonte has earned international praise for her striking cast-glass sculptures. The New York-born artist, who now lives and works in Prague, delivered a lecture, “Beauty & Catastrophe,” at the Spencer Museum of Art on March 4. The talk was co-sponsored by the Spencer Museum of Art and the KU European Studies program.
LaMonte’s monumental 2010 glass sculpture, Chado, is in the Spencer Museum’s collection and on view in the museum’s 20/21 Gallery.
Born in New York in 1967, LaMonte earned her BFA at the Rhode Island School of Design in 1990. She began working in the medium of glass, creating innovative pieces that combine intellectual depth with masterful technique and stunning forms. In 1999, she earned a Fulbright scholarship to study in Prague, the Czech Republic, to expand her skills at making large-scale cast glass in one of the world’s top glass factories. Her goal was to make a life-size, hollow, cast-glass dress. Although she is modest about this goal, and its eventual achievement, no one had ever done this before.
Detail images are available at the Spencer Collection page.
European Studies participates in K-12 Teacher Workshop, "World Heritage Sites through Time" at the Lied Center
Dr. Lorie A. Vanchena, Coordinator of European Studies, speaks about Berlin's Museum Island at a K-16 Teacher Workshop on UNESCO World Heritage Sites, Saturday, 25 February 2012.
Fall 2011
European Debt Crisis
Roundtable Discussion
Thursday, November 17
3:30 - 4:30 P.M.
Alderson Auditorium, Kansas Union
Panelists:
John Keating, Associate Professor, Department of Economics, KU
Stephanie Kelton, Associate Professor, Department of Economics, University of Missouri-Kansas City
Robert Rohrschneider, Sir Robert Worcester Distinguished
Professor in Public Opinion and Survey Research, Department of Political
Science, KU
Victor Bailey, Charles W. Battey Distinguished Professor of Modern British History, Department of History, and Director, Hall Center for the Humanities
Co-sponsors: European Studies Program; Center for Global & International Studies; Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies; Hall Center for the Humanities; and the Departments of Classics, French & Italian, Germanic Languages & Literatures, Slavic Languages & Literatures, and Spanish & Portuguese.
European Debt Crisis panel members John Keating (KU Economics), Victor Bailey (KU History and Hall Center for the Humanities), Robert Rohrschneider (KU Political
Science), and Stephanie Kelton (Economics, University of Missouri-Kansas City)
Past Events:
Spring 2011
Lecture: “The Global Mindset---What is it, Why you need it, and How you get it” Manfred Stinnes, Visiting Scholar in Global and International Studies and European Studies Program
Monday, May 9 12:30 P.M. over lunch and 5:00 P.M. over dinner
International Visitors Council of Greater Kansas City
Union Station of Kansas City
30 West Pershing Road Suite 405
Kansas City, MO 64108
Irish Photographer Alen Mcweeney at the Spencer Museum
Thursday, May 5 and Sunday, May 7Film Screening and Discussion, SMA Auditorium
Co-sponsored by the Center for Global & International Studies, The KU European Studies Program and the Spencer Museum of Art.
SMA owns 31 art works by Alen
MacWeeney. Ten of these are currently on display as part of Conversation X: That
Invisible Dance, on view until May 29, 2011. All of the SMA-owned work can be
seen here.
You will find all of Alen MacWeeney’s
work here.
On Thursday, May 5, 2011 at 6:00 PM in the SMA auditorium, MacWeeney will screen his film titled Irish Travellers: Tinkers No More with a slide-show of images from Ireland from his 1965-1969 period. Both the film and the slideshow relate directly to the ten artworks currently on exhibit at the Museum. MacWeeney will also lead a tour through Conversation X: That Invisible Dance and will discuss his photographs in relation to Irish art and literature in general.
On May 7, 2011 at 2:00 PM, MacWeeney will participate in SMA’s annual Art & Culture Festival with a repeat presentation of his slideshow and tour.
Current publications and Reviews of MacWeeney’s work on Irish Travellers:
The Smithsonian
The Berkeshire Review: An International Journal for the Arts
Yankee Magazine
Milky Blacks
Vermont Center for Photography
Gail Parker, former President of Bennington College
Circa 1976, gelatin silver print, Gift of Esquire, Inc., Spencer Museum of Art
Little Tinker Child, Ireland
1965, gelatin silver print, Gift of Frederick M. Myers and Elizabeth Myers, Spencer Museum of Art
Click on image to view and download press release.
Lecture: Professor Katherine Conley: "Surrealistic Collections and Reconcilliations from the Trocadero to the Quai Branly Museum"
Monday, May 2
4:00-5:30 P.M.
Pine Room, Kansas Union
Co-Sponsored by the Department of French and Italian, The Center for Global & International Studies and the European Studies Program.
Professor Katharine Conley, Edward Tuck Professor of French Language and Literature (and Associate Dean) at Dartmouth College, will present the third public lecture in the Identities-Cultures-Nations series.
Professor Conley is a distinguished and internationally well-known scholar who has published extensively on Surrealism, in particular women Surrealists, the major Surrealist poet Robert Desnos, ghostliness, and ethics ofreconciliation in a cultural context. I quote from her Dartmouth website: "Professor Conley’s research and teaching focuses on surrealism as the premier avant-garde movement of the twentieth century. She has published books and articles on women and the surrealist movement, on the poet 
Robert Desnos as the founding figure upon whom surrealist practice was founded—a poet whose surrealist idealism helped him in his work on the radio in the 1930s and in the French Resistance up through his deportation and death in a newly liberated concentration camp in 1945—and on the links between surrealist poetry and painting and surrealism and outsider art. She is also the author of essays in museum exhibition catalogues. She teaches courses in the Department of French and Italian and in the Comparative Literature and Women’s and Gender Studies Programs on surrealism, women in surrealism, modernism and anthropology, primitivism and outsider art, and on surrealism and photography. Her current research project explores ghostliness in surrealist thought, film, photography, painting, sculpture, and writing."
Peace & Conflict Studies Lecture: Commerce and Complicity:
Corporate Responsibilty for Human Rights Abuses as a Legacy of Nuremberg
Wednesday, March 3
8:00 P.M.
Alderson Auditorium, Kansas Union
Reception to follow in the English Room
Elizabeth Borgwardt
Associate Professor of History
Washington University in St. Louis
Distinguished Lecturer, Organization of American Historians
Cosponsored by the Center for Global & International Studies, Hall Center for the Humanities, Department of History, Center for European Studies
Brownbag Lecture: Social Inequality in Germany since 1989: East v. West
Manfred Stinnes, Visiting Scholar in Global and International Studies and European Studies Program
Tuesday, April 26
12:00-1:00 P.M.
706 McCluggage, 7th Floor, Fraser Hall
Presented by the Department of Sociology, the Center for Global & International Studies and the European Studies Program.
International Focus Film: World Migration Series Special Event
Friday, April 29
3:00 P.M.
Spencer Museum Auditorium
Screening of "Delfina's Story"
Documentary in German and English with English subtitles.
Followed by question and answer session with the film's director, Annelie Runge.
Sponsored by the Center for Global and International Studies, European Studies Program, Department of Film & Media Studies, and the Department of Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies.
This film explores the life of Delfina, a Filipino woman who has moved to Germany to work as a housekeeper in order to support her aging parents, siblings, and even some extended family. She struggles internally with events in her past, elements of her faith and the two very different lives she has led in Europe and her home country. She is employed illegally but is much beloved by her employers. She faces the tough decision of whether to try to remain in Germany so she can continue to offer financial support or to return home, which would be a bittersweet choice for both her and her family.
Fall 2010
European Studies Faculty Mixer
For Students
For Faculty
News:
German academic agency names KU senior a 2010 Young Ambassador:
"Brandy Nichole Groff, majoring in Germanic languages and literatures with
co-majors in international studies and European studies, is among students who
studied or interned in Germany in the previous academic year who will serve as
liasions for the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) in the United States
and Canada."
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