Arts & Sciences

Anyone looking at a ten-year-old map of Europe would find it woefully outdated. Since 1989, the region has undergone a profound but still incomplete transformation. While Germany has been reunited, the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Czecho-Slovakia have dissolved. New nation-states are emergin inthe East, and in the West old nation-states are both ceding authority to their regions (as in Britain) or giving up a measure of sovereignty to the benefit of the European Union.

The challenge to Europeanists is enormous. During the Cold War, scholars of eastern and western Europe were divided not only in their research and teaching but by the institutional separation within universities, reinforced by the Department of Education's Title Six programs--which flollowed Cold War boundaries to develop new ways of seeing Europe, a more flexible and pan-European vision of a region that seems to be simultaneously coming together and falling apart.

First in 1992, the faculty associated with Cornell's Western Societies Program and its Program on Slavic and East European Studies merged to create the Institute for European Studies. Since then, the institute has established a program of activities that promotes the study of Europe as a whole. An undergraduate concentration in Modern European Studies allows students to integrate a sound knowledge of a European language (Romance, Germanic, or Slavic) and area studies with a departmental major; thwo new core courses give students a pan-European perspective on the politics, history, culture, and literature of the region. At the same time, the Luigi Einaudi chair in European and International Studies has attracted distinguished scholars from both east and west Europe, and rotates among the fields of economics, history, political science, anthropology, and sociology. The institute has also forged working relations with the Universities of Turin and Bremen and is completing arrangements for exchanges of graduate students and faculty members with the Central European University in Budapest.

As the institute has worked to bring together east and west Europe, it has also fostered cooperation with Cornell's other programs dealing with European matters. Its faculty works closely with the French Studies Program and the Institute for German Cultural Studies--both of which provide an interdisciplinary forum for work on single countries in which Cornell has particular strength; with Jewish Studies, which, with the recent appointment of historian Vicki Caron to the Mann Chair, has taken on a strong European component; with the Law School, which maintains joint degree programs with Humboldt University and the University of Paris; and the Society for the Humanities, which graciously hosts many of the insitute's activities.

The four Europeanists whose essays appear in this edition of the Arts and Sciences Newsletter offer a diverse approach to current issues from the perspectives of anthropology, history, comparative politics, and international relations. What they share is a profound knowledge of the languages and cultures of their region that enables them to engage in interdisciplinary and comparative research and teaching. Their insights on Europe offer us new ways of thinking about Europe that are relevant to other parts of the world--not least to the United States.

Susan Tarrow, Ph.D. '80, is associate director of the Institute for European Studies. She teaches in the Department of Romance Studies and has written books and articles on Albert Camus, Primo Levi, and francophone Maghrebian novelists.