Please join us for the Inaugural Mosse Lecture at Deutsches Haus, Columbia University, with guest speaker Professor Emeritus Steven E. Aschheim of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and respondent Professor Emerita Victoria de Grazia of Columbia University. Professor Aschheim will reflect on the legacy of George L. Mosse (1918-1999), one of the most prominent historians of National Socialism. The lecture, titled "George Mosse: Historian of Fascism, Masculinity, and Nationalism", will be followed by a reception.
This event is organized by the Department of Germanic Languages at Columbia University. The annual Mosse Lecture has been made possible by the generous support of The Mosse Foundation. Co-sponsors include the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities, the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society (ICLS), the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies (IIJS), the University Seminar on Cultural Memory, and the European Institute. The talk is free and open to the public. Registration is required. Please email [email protected] to request disability accommodations. Advance notice is necessary to arrange for some accessibility needs.
Featured guest speaker: Steven E. Aschheim is Emeritus Professor of History at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem where he taught Cultural and Intellectual History in the Department of History since 1982 and held the Vigevani Chair of European Studies. He also acted as the Director of the Franz Rosenzweig Research Centre for German Literature and Cultural History. Apart from academic journals, he has written for the Times Literary Supplement, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Jewish Review of Books and Ha'aretz.
He has spent sabbaticals at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton and in 2002-3 was the first Mosse Exchange Professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. During September-October 2005 he taught at Columbia University as the Max Kade Distinguished Visiting Scholar of German Studies. He has also taught at the University of Maryland, Reed College, the Free University in Berlin and the Central European University in Budapest. He taught at the University of Toronto in 0ctober 2008 and at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor from September-December 2009. He served as a Research Fellow at the Hamburg Institute for Social Research in the summer of 2010 and in March-April 2011 was the Stan Gold Visiting Professor of Jewish History at Trinity College, Dublin. In 2013-2014 he was a Fellow of the Straus Institute for the Advanced Study of Law & Justice at New York University School of Law. In April 2016 he was a Fellow at the Dubnow Institute, Leipzig and in November 2016 was a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Warwick. In 2017 (September-October), he held the first Menasseh Ben Israel Institute Chair in Jewish Studies at the University of Amsterdam, and also taught at the University of Antwerp. He is married, has three children – and five grand-daughters and two grandsons.
He is the author of Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German-Jewish Consciousness, 1800-1923 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982); The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890-1990 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992) which has been translated into German and Hebrew; Culture and Catastrophe: German and Jewish Confrontations with National Socialism and Other Crises (New York: New York University Press, 1996); In Times of Crisis: Essays on European Culture, Germans and Jews (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001); Scholem, Arendt, Klemperer: Intimate Chronicles in Turbulent Times (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), which has also appeared in Italian, and presently being translated into German, and Beyond the Border: The German-Jewish Legacy Abroad (Princeton University Press, 2007). He is the editor of the conference volume, Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), also translated into Hebrew. His At the Edges of Liberalism: Junctions of European, German and Jewish History (Palgrave Macmillan) appeared in June 2012. A volume, co-edited with Vivian Liska, entitled The German-Jewish Experience Revisited (Berlin, De Gruyter) appeared in 2015. His volume entitled Fragile Spaces: Forays into Jewish Memory, European History and Complex Identities appeared in 2018.
Respondent: Victoria de Grazia, Moore Collegiate Emerita Professor of History, Columbia University, was educated at Smith College, University of Florence, and Columbia University where she received her Ph.D. in history with distinction in 1976. Before joining the Columbia faculty in 1994, she taught at Rutgers University. Her research interests lie in contemporary history, with longstanding commitments to studying western Europe and Italy from a gendered perspective and to developing a global perspective on commercial revolutions. Her publications include: Irresistible Empire: America's Advance Through Twentieth Century Europe (2005); The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective (ed., 1996); How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy, 1922-1945 (1992); The Culture of Consent: Mass Organization of Leisure in Fascist Italy (1981). She is currently writing a book about intimacy and power in Fascist Italy.
The purpose of the annual Mosse Lecture at Columbia University is to honor the legacy of the progressive Mosse publishing house, founded by Rudolf Mosse, whose flagship paper, the Berliner Tageblatt, helped to shape the democratic public sphere during the Weimar Republic. Descendants of the Mosse Family including Prof. George L Mosse, the acclaimed historian of fascism, Dr. Hilde L. Mosse, a distinguished child psychiatrist who worked with Harlem children suffering from reading disabilities, and George and Hilde's step-nephews-Hans Strauch, an accomplished architect, who also serves as Chair of Boston's Lesley University and Roger Strauch, a successful high technology entrepreneur and venture capitalist who has served as the Chair of a theater company and a-mathematics institute and is the founder of a significant non-profit infrastructure and social development organization in a developing country. Hans and Roger co-lead The Mosse Foundation's efforts to sustain and promote the Mosse Family's philanthropic legacy to support distinguished educational, research, health, and arts institutions and progressive causes and people focused on the needs of economically disadvantaged fellow citizens. Invited lecturers will represent cutting edge research in areas such as history and cultural history, politics, economics, art and literature, with a cross-disciplinary perspective and may include literary authors, artists, and major public figures of interest.