William Dow was a keynote speaker for the conference, "Re-Presentations of Working Life," held at the Friedrich-Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany, November 12-13.  He organized the seminar, New Journalism of the American 1960s as a Counter-Cultural Narrative, which took place at Université Paris-Est (MLV), November 18. His article, “New Alignments, New Discourses: A Reflection on teaching Blaise Cendrars and John Dos Passos,” was published in The Newsletter of the International Association of Literary Journalism Studies (Winter 2011), eds., David Abrahamson and Bill Reynolds. Northwestern University. Web. 13-15.  

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Fred Einbinder was a panelist on the topic of "Entreprises et Pouvoirs Publics / Comment améliorer la production du droit" at the third annual Business and Legal Forum held in Paris on November 23-24. The panel included the Chief Legal Counsels of three large French CAC 40 companies and the Secretariat General of the French Government.  Professor Einbinder is a member of a small working group of Chief Legal Counsels from French business and the Secretary General of the French government set-up to exchange views and provide recommendations for closer co-operation on procedures for legal review of pending legislation and its effect and implementation on business.

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Matthew Fraser spoke at the two-day "Social Media Impact" conference in Marrakech at the end of October. Organized by iCompetences, the event brought together social media experts from around the world to discuss issues and challenges for organizations and business.

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On November 7, Hall Gardner was invited to speak at the research seminar The G-20 after the Cannes Summit sponsored by the European Union Institute for Security Studies (EUISS), the Finnish Institute of International Affairs (FIIA) and the G8 Research Group at the University of Toronto (G8RG). The seminar took place at the Centres de Conférences Ministériels, Ministère des Affaires Etrangères et Européennes.  Professor Gardner moderated, and participated in, a panel discussion on the subject "The New Middle East - An Emerging Reality Panel: Strategic fallout and Peace Perspective: Chances, Risks, Obstacles" at the international conference entitled Policymakers' Responsibility in a Changing World. The Mediterranean: Waves of Change, jointly organized by the Region of Languedoc-Roussillon (France) and the New Policy Forum (Mikhail Gorbachev).

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Dan Gunn published an article in the Times Literary Supplement (18 November) entitled “An Accumulation of Reality”, reviewing Peter Robb’s recent book, Street Fight in Naples: A City’s Unseen History. He was interviewed by This Side of the Pond, the Cambridge University Press US website, on the subject of editing Volume II of The Letters of Samuel Beckett: 1941-1956. This volume has received further reviews: in the Jewish Daily Forward, The Spectator, The Independent on Sunday, This Space, The Oxonian; the New York Times and International Herald Tribune (“The heartwarming quality of these letters, and not just those to Duthuit, is Beckett’s trust in his own experience”); the Huffington Post (“It’s a mesmerizing feat that yields many vivid, surprising, and significant texts”); Buffalo News (“This is the most important, by far, of this season’s stunning volumes of much-awaited literary letters”); The New Statesman (“Volume two of The Letters of Samuel Beckett is exemplary by any conceivable measure”); the Times Literary Supplement (“Indispensable… the accompanying translations, introductions, notes… chronologies and profiles of the principal correspondents make of this volume, like its predecessor, an embarras de richesses. It is one for which we are greatly in the editors’ debt”); the Literary Review (“It is hard to do justice to the intelligence and devotion that have gone into the preparation of these volumes”); the Wall Street Journal (“one more masterly stroke in this landmark project”). In both the New Statesman and the Evening Standard (London) the volume was chosen as one of the “books of the year”.

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Peter Hägel published a commentary (“Baby Steps vs. Big Reforms”) on the current debt crisis in Europe with the New York Times’ “Room for Debate”. 

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Yudhishthir Raj Isar spoke on the topic ‘Arts Institutions and the Intercultural Challenge: Rhetoric and Practice’ at a conference entitled ‘Nordic or Global Visual Culture’ organized by the Danish Arts Agency at the Design Museum, Copenhagen, on November 4. The previous evening, he was interviewed on the issue in the evening news program of Denmark’s TV2 channel.  Having been selected by the European Commission’s Educational Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency as an ‘external expert’ to evaluate cultural policy proposals submitted for funding, he took part in a selection panel held in Brussels on November 21 and 22.  On November 22,  he also took part in a meeting in Brussels of the ‘High Level Advisory Group for a Renewed Strategy of the Anna Lindh Foundation for Euro-Mediterranean Dialogue’ and moderated the final session of the meeting entitled ‘Strategy, Programme and Institutional Framework’. His review article entitled ‘Cultural politics micro and macro’ has appeared in the International Journal of Cultural Policy, 2011, 1-3. 

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Farhad Nomani's contribution to Civil Society and Democracy in Iran (Global Encounters: Studies in Comparative Political Theory, Lexington Books), 2011, on "Democracy, Civil Society, and the Iranian Working Class" is now published, click here. 

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David Pike has completed three new articles to be published in the Paris quarterly Guerres mondiales et Conflits contemporains, entitled : “L’Eglise et la guerre d’Espagne,” “Les anarchistes dans la guerre d’Espagne,” and “Sept causes célèbres qui s’entremêlent.”

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Margery Arent Safir is the editor of Robert Wilson from Within, a publication of the Arts Arena about theater artist and AUP honorary doctorate recipient Robert Wilson.  The book was released in November, in both an English and a French edition, the latter published jointly by the Arts Arena and Flammarion.  This is the second full-format Arts Arena publication, following the earlier Balanchine Then and Now.  Professor Safir presented the English-language book in New York at PS1 MoMA, the New York Public Library, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and the French edition was praised as "a bible for approaching the work of Robert Wilson" in an article in Paris Match (November 3). Safir was invited to present the book again in Germany at the ZKM Museum for Art and Media in Karlsruhe on November 27.

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Stephen Sawyer published an article entitled "Anting or the Antinomies of Exurban Development in Shanghai" in the journal Public, which featured a special issue on the suburbs and the urban periphery. “This issue explores the Suburbs as dwelling in transition, as utopian vision, a way of life, a built form and as a significant economic and political dimension of the global phenomenon of urbanization. By suggesting transition as an appropriate trope for the critical examination of suburbs, past, present and future, this issue points to changing forms, locations, ideologies, and narratives. Turn the issue around to find a complete 112-page full-colour catalogue for The Leona Drive Project, including artist statements and a visual archive of the projects that made up the event.” Sawyer has also been invited to give a talk at the Université Paris III Sorbonne Nouvelle on December 10 entitled "The Case of Billy Budd: Veridiction, Representative Men and the Liberal State of Exception."

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George Wanklyn was invited to participate in the Journées d'étude Jean Cousin at the Louvre and the Institut national d'histoire de l'art on 15 and 16 November.  Jean Cousin le Père and Jean Cousin le Fils were two of the most important French artists of the XVI century.  Professor Wanklyn was specifically invited to be one of the three members of the Table ronde : Cousin et le dessin, but he participated in several of the six other table ronde discussions at the INHA.  In 1979, he published a drawing on parchment which he identified as a design for the sumptuous gift of a gold vessel weighing almost 13 kilos given by the Ville de Paris to King Henri II on the occasion of his Triumphal Entry into his capital in June 1549.  According to Dominique Cordellier, a Louvre curator and one of the two organizers of the colloquium, the design is one of only three drawings which can be used most surely as the basis for additional attributions of drawings to the elder Cousin.

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Jula Wildberger presented an invited paper on "Exemplary retreat from public life in Epicurus and imperial Stoicism" at a conference entitled "Menschenbilder zwischen Weltverantwortung und Weltflucht" at the University of Göttingen.

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Kathleen Wilson-Chevalier's review of the 2011 Art Institute of Chicago exhibition King's, Queen's, and Courtiers. Art in Early Renaissance France, can be viewed on the German art book review site.  On November 26, she chaired a session at the symposium Miroirs de Charles IX images imaginaires symboliques (Institut National d'Histoire de l'Art, Centre Allemand Histoire de l'Art, University of Chicago).

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On November 16 Professor Douglas Yates presented his research on how to improve governance of the oil sector in Africa at St. Mary's Guildhall in Coventry for a one-day conference sponsored by Chatham House, who have decided to hold a round table in London early next year upon the release of his new book, The Scramble for African Oil (London: Pluto Press, 2012). Professor Yates was interviewed by RFI about the recent visit of French Prime Minister Alain Juppé to South Africa (Nov. 11) and the negotiations between the French Socialist Party and the Green Party over a common policy for nuclear energy.  Yates also spoke on France24 television about the election in Morocco (Nov. 25).

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