Guest Lecture: “‘I Know You Are Here. I Feel It.’ - On Democratic Forms as Elusive Objects”

July 4, 2017, 6 p.m.
Campus
C 5 3, Room 119

As concerns over the future viability of democracy pervade scholarly and public controversies, is it possible to identify which forms and styles stimulate, sustain and revive democracy as a way of life? This talk will explore the role of humanities in scholarly exchanges over the meaning, the fragility and the contingency of democracy as a way of life. Drawing on key episodes of postwar Europeans search for democracy, the talk invites conversations about the democratic content of aesthetic forms, styles, and manners.

Till van Rahden holds the Canada Research Chair in German and European Studies at the Université de Montréal. Currently, he is a research fellow at the “Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften,” an Institute for Advanced Studies of the Goethe University Frankfurt am Main. He specializes in European history since the Enlightenment and explores the tension between the elusive promise of democratic equality and the recurrent presence of diversity and moral conflicts. He is a member of the IRTG „Diversity: Mediating Difference in Transcultural Spaces“ that Université de Montréal is conducting with Saarland U and Trier.