German Studies Lecture Series: Nikita Dhawan

Date
Tue March 7th 2023, 12:00 - 1:15pm
Event Sponsor
Department of German Studies
Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages
Location
Building 260, Pigott Hall
450 Jane Stanford Way, Building 260, Stanford, CA 94305
Room 216

Join us for the next meeting of the German Studies Lecture Series, featuring a talk by Nikita Dhawan.

Learning from the Germans?

In her book Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil, Susan Neiman argues that Germany is exemplary in how a country can come to terms with its historical wrongdoings. Tracing the long and difficult path Germans faced in their effort to atone for the crimes of the Holocaust, Neiman outlines how progress is evident in laws, in language and in the education system. However, a number of controversies  in the past years over Germany's colonial past indicate the pitfalls of German Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung (working through the past). These controversies confront us with the challenge of how to think together different forms of discrimination. In this talk, Professor Dhawan will address the conundrums of memory politics and engage with the “unfinished conversations” between Holocaust and Postcolonial Studies.

Nikita Dhawan holds the Chair in Political Theory and History of Ideas at the Technical University Dresden. Her research and teaching focuses on global justice, human rights, democracy and decolonization. She received the Käthe Leichter Award in 2017 for outstanding achievements in the pursuit of women's and gender studies and in support of the women's movement and the achievement of gender equality. She has held visiting fellowships at Universidad de Costa Rica; Institute for International Law and the Humanities, The University of Melbourne, Australia; Program of Critical Theory, University of California, Berkeley, USA; University of La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain; Pusan National University, South Korea; Columbia University, New York, USA. Select publications include: Impossible Speech: On the Politics of Silence and Violence (2007); Decolonizing Enlightenment: Transnational Justice, Human Rights and Democracy in a Postcolonial World (ed., 2014); Reimagining the State: Theoretical Challenges and Transformative Possibilities (ed., 2019); Rescuing the Enlightenment from the Europeans: Critical Theories of Decolonization (forthcoming).

Professor Dhawan has been awarded the Gerda Henkel Visiting Professorship in German Studies at Stanford University for the Winter academic quarter 2023 and the Thomas Mann Fellowship 2023.

Lunch will be provided. RSVP here to ensure we have an accurate count.

Questions: dlclevents.edu and mdeniz [at] stanford.edu (mdeniz[at]stanford[dot]edu)