(POST)WAR COSMOPOLITANISM// Ideas of World Order from the
Seven Years’ War to the Cold War
1-2 May 2014, UCL Centre for Transnational History
Day 1
4pm
Registration and coffee
4.30
Welcome
Foyer of the UCL Roberts Building
UCL Roberts Building, G06 Sir Ambrose Fleming Lecture Theatre
Dina Gusejnova, UCL, Centre for Transnational History
Axel Körner, UCL, Centre for Transnational History
4.45pm – 6pm
OPENING CONVERSATION/ On Cosmopolitanism and (Post)war
Georgios Varouxakis, Queen Mary
Susan Morrissey, UCL, SSEES
Axel Körner, UCL, Centre for Transnational History
6.30pm – 7.30pm
Concert: ‘A Dream of Germany’
Please note different location: Lecture room at the Warburg Institute
Curated by David Owen Norris and Joseph Spooner
David Owen Norris, piano, Mark Wilde, voice, and Joseph Spooner, cello
Performing works by Sullivan, Battison, Dyson, Schubert, and Owen Norris
Followed by an excerpt from Ernst Gombrich’s A Little History of the World (1936)
With Carl Gombrich, voice
Even after a hundred years, nations struggle with the legacy of the Great War. Recently, Germany
raised the delicate subject of the United Kingdom’s approach to the 2014 centenary, hoping it would
shun triumphalism and celebrate the achievements of peace. Historically, musicians make a
splendid case-study of the fruitfulness of international amity. For many, many years British
composers were inspired to study and work in Leipzig, Dresden, Frankfurt and Berlin, while German
musicians pursued careers in London. The sudden loss of centuries of fertile musical exchange
between Britain and the great cultural centres of Germany is one of the least appreciated
consequences of the Great War. This is the first in a series of concerts curated by Joseph Spooner
and David Owen Norris that celebrate the composers for whom there was no cultural divide. For this
evening’s performance, David Owen Norris will play the Grotrian Steinweg piano that belonged to
Ernst and Ilse Gombrich. The Gombrichs, a renowned family from Austria-Hungary, moved to
Britain in 1936, the same year that Ernst Gombrich joined the Warburg Institute, an institution in
exile from Nazi Germany. In that year, Gombrich also published A Little History of the World, a book
for his grandchildren Carl and Leonie.
8pm – 9pm
Foyer of the UCL Roberts Building
Wine Reception and Canapées (catered by Kipferl)
2
DAY 2
All panels are in the UCL Roberts Building, G06 and Foyer
1. 9am-10.30am
PERPETUAL PEACE? AFTER THE SEVEN YEARS’ AND THE NAPOLEONIC
WARS
Key image: Ivan Terebenev, Soap bubbles (1813-14)
Chair: Avi Lifschitz, UCL
Stephen Conway, UCL
Wartime Cosmopolitanism in Eighteenth-Century Europe
Alexander Schmidt, University of Jena
Anthropology and the moral foundations of Kant’s idea of perpetual peace
Maria Maiofis, Russian Academy of National Economy and Public Administration
Sergey Uvarov’s Treatise on Perpetual Peace (1813) and the Arzamas circle in the
post-Napoleonic era
10.30-11am coffee
2. 11am – 12.30 pm
POSTIMPERIAL DISCONTENTS/AFTER WORLD WAR I
Key image: Map of Europe, 1919
Chair: Daniel Laqua, University of Northumbria
Alexander Etkind, European University Institute
William Bullitt from World War I to the Cold War: A Case of Traumatic
Cosmopolitanism?
Dominique Reill, University of Miami
Port-city cosmopolitans: Post-Imperial subjects in a Wilson-Era City-State
Zaur Gasimov, Deutsches Orient-Institut, Instanbul
Baku in the twentieth century: Russian periphery or cosmopolitan centre?
12.30pm- 2pm Foyer, UCL Roberts building
lunch (catered by Kipferl)
3
3. 2pm-3.30pm
STATELESS PEOPLE, WELTBÜRGER, COSMOPOLITES/ WORLD WAR II AND
THE HOLOCAUST
Key image: View of the ruined Castle at Königsberg (archive of Olga Sezneva)
Chair: Sarah Snyder, UCL
Lea Ypi, LSE
Citizenship, statelessness, and the cosmopolite
Olga Sezneva, University of Amsterdam
Germans, Spies and Cosmopolites: the Ecology of Fear in an Imperial Periphery
Natan Sznaider, Academic College of Tel-Aviv
Jewish Cosmopolitan Thought in the Twentieth Century
3.30-3.45 pm coffee
5. 3.45pm-5.15pm
BEFORE AND AFTER THE COLD WAR / DIVISIVE PHILOSOPHIES
Key image: The Earth seen from Apollo 17 (1972)
Chair: Coşkun Tuncer, UCL
Andrew Arsan, Cambridge University
Ordering the world and organising the peace: universalism and war in the thought
of Charles Malik
Cemil Aydin, University of Carolina, Chapel Hill
Pan-Islamic and Pan-Asian Cosmopolitanisms from WWI to Cold War
B. Venkat Mani, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Conflicted Cosmopolitanisms: Unfinished (Hi)Stories of World Literature in a
Divided Germany
5.15 – 5.45pm coffee
5.45pm – 6.45pm
CLOSING CONVERSATION/ COSMOPOLITAN SENSES
Chair: Dina Gusejnova, UCL
Marie Gillespie, Open University
On Radio
Kathleen Burk, UCL
On Wine