Call for Proposals

European Studies and the International Studies Curriculum

April 2-3, 2004

Slippery Rock University

Slippery Rock, PA

Panels or individual presentations are invited from all disciplines on topics related to teaching the New Europe, and /or the place of Europe in view of changes occurring as a result of the formation of the European Union. Suggested topics or questions include but are not limited to the following:

• How has the historical evolution of the idea of Europe impacted upon cultures and nations?
• How have the music and literature of Europe shaped the development of a European Identity?
• What is the role of European thought and continental philosophy in the cultures of Europe and beyond?
• How can the choice to form a European Economic Union create European community or identity?
• How can the choice to form a European Economic Union create European community or identity?
• How do the concepts of identity and rights themselves, referring equally to persons, cultures, subcultures, and nations, allow or thwart enduring European social cooperation?
• What is the relationship between the social division of labor and the myth of assimilation and social mobility across national borders?
• What has been the effect of transnational migration as a result of wartime dislocation and political upheaval on the continuity of cultures and the possibility of a new Europe?
• What have been the consequences for European identity and culture of the unification of Germany and the fragmentation of the Soviet Union?
• How can the richness of national culture-the givens of its ethnic, linguistic, and aesthetic heritage-be fostered in the face of economic union?
• How do the concepts of race and ethnicity differ in the rhetoric of American individual or equal rights and the more prevalent concept in Europe of human rights?
• How can the ethos of self or modernity be modulated to allow for the context of others in a new Europe that understands its past and looks to future?

The conference at SRU will include a workshop on "Teaching the European Union: approaches and Resources" conducted by staff members of the University of Pittsburgh Center for the European Union.