Schedule

"Modernity and the World Cities: Tel Aviv and Jaffa in the Long 20th Century "
Winter, 2008
by
Mark Levine
Professor of History

In this talk LeVine discusses how Jaffa, one of the oldest towns in the world, and Tel Aviv, it's ultra-modern daughter city-turned-conqueror to the north, developed in the late 19th and 20th centuries. He explores how the competing visions of urban modernity in each city has reflected the larger nationalist competition between Jews and Palestinian Arabs during the last century, and how contemporary globalization marks a new stage in the conflicted relationship between modernity and urban development in the Middle East.

Mark LeVine is professor of History at UCI and author or editor of half a dozen books, including Overthrowing Geography: Jaffa, Tel Aviv and the Struggle for Palestine, 1880-1948, Why They Don't Hate Us: Lifting the Veil on the Axis of Evil, and the forthcoming Heavy Metal
Islam.

"From Bombay to Mumbai: Politics in the Making of a Postcolonial City"
Spring, 2008
by
Vinayak Chaturvedi
Professor of History

Vinayak Chaturvedi is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at UC Irvine, specializing in social and intellectual history of nineteenth and twentieth century South Asia. He is the author of Peasant Pasts: History and Memory in Western India (Berkeley & London: University of California Press, 2007) and the editor of Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial (London: Verso, 2000).

"The Four Ages of Paris: Making of a 21st Century City "
Spring, 2008
by
Timothy Tacket
Professor of History

At the beginning of the twenty-first century Paris stands as one of the most beautiful and most user friendly cities in the world. With its gracious riverside walks and broad tree-lined streets, its sidewalk cafes and boutiques of every description, its restaurants, palaces, museums, and magnificent churches, it offers endless possibilities for walks and exploration by both residents and tourists. As one strolls through the city with the eye of the historian, it is also fascinating to contemplate the multiple layers of the past imprinted on the cityscape of the present. For close to a thousand years, the city has been continually remaking itself, building and rebuilding on the islands and banks of the Seine. Yet the development of Paris has been far from continuous; it has advanced rather through a series of intense spurts of growth. The lecture, offered by a part-time resident and full-time connoisseur of
Paris, will focus on four major moments in the city’s development: Medieval Paris, Bourbon Paris, Haussmann’s Paris, and Presidential Paris. It will conclude with reflections on prospects for the city’s future.

Timothy Tackett has been a professor of history at UCI since 1988. He is a specialist of the history of France in general and of the French Revolution in particular. His books include Priest and Parish in Eighteenth-Century France (Princeton, 1977); Religion, Revolution, and Regional Culture in Eighteenth-Century France (Princeton, 1986); Becoming a Revolutionary: The Deputies of the French National Assembly and the Emergence of a Revolutionary Culture (Princeton, 1996); and When the King Took Flight (Cambridge, Mass., 2003). He regularly teaches a course on
the history of Paris.

From the days of its founding as a refreshment station for the Dutch East India Company, Cape Town has absorbed and reconfigured influences from both Atlantic and Indian Ocean cultures, building a cosmopolitan city on African soil and exhibiting incredible diversity long before there were conversations about globalization. The context of the Mother City’s 350-years of colonial history helps to make sense of highly charged issues debated in today’s pubs, including Apartheid-era violence, education, AIDS, and how to host the FIFA (soccer) World Cup in 2010.

UCI Professor of HistoryChina's largest city is currently generating a great deal of global chatter, much of it focusing on the dramatic shifts that began to take there in the 1990s, when futuristic-looking new skyscrapers started to shoot up in Pudong (East Shanghai) and the metropolis became a magnet for international investors and globetrotting tourist. Magazine cover stories have dubbed it everything from the "most happening city" to a "playgroundfor the world's architects, and its buildings have been featured in a variety of films, including the third installment of the "Mission Impossible" series.

For historians, all of this has a dj vu quality to it, calling to mind an earlier period of internationalization that began in the 1840s and reached its zenith in the 1930s, a decade during which Hollywood films with Shanghai settings were made, including one starring Merlene Dietrich and another starring Shirley Temple. And the idea that Shanghai has resumed a cosmopolitan trajectory that was temporarily interrupted by several inward-looking Maoist decades that began in 1949 is being touted in the city itself, which continues to be run by the Chinese Communist Party but is now filled with nostalgia-themed restaurants and even whole districts designed to recall the early 1900s.

Illustrated by various visual representations of "Old Shanghai" of the pre-Communist era and photographs that the author took during his various recent trips to "New Shanghai," this talk will explore the similarities but also the important differences between the city's two great periods of internationalization

."St. Petersburg/Leningrad/St. Petersburg: City of Cultural Revolutions"
by
Lynn Mally
UCI Professor of History

This talk will examine three moments in the history of St. Petersburg: its founding by Peter the Great at the beginning of the eighteenth century; its function as the starting point of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917; and its crucial role in the collapse of the Soviet Union. I will show that while St. Petersburg always indicated the new direction of Russian history, it eventually lost its position of power to Moscow.

Illustrated by images of the building of St. Petersburg from the swamps of the Neva River and the city's dynamic role in the creation of the Russian avant-garde art, the lecture will examine what comes next for Russia's "window on the West." Will it become a museum city for foreign tourists or will it once again lead the way to a new stage of Russian development?

"Berlin 2005-1945: Back to the Future?"
"by
Robert Moeller
UCI Professor of History

In May 2005, sixty years after the Second World War had ended, Germans seemed eager to fight it all over again -- in TV documentaries, the illustrated press, glossy coffee table books, and endless ceremonies. While some called for the creation of a center for the study of ethnic Germans driven from their homes by the Red Army in 1944 and 1945, others raised money to create a "Monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe," dedicated on May 8. Competing memories abounded. Nowhere were the multiple meanings of the war's end discussed more intensively than in the capital, Berlin.

This lecture will start in the present and move back to 1945 to consider the memories of the war that circulated in the capital of the Third Reich, levelled by the bombs and occupied by soldiers in French, British, Russian, and American uniforms. After moving back to the future, I'll progress through sixty years of history and memory in Berlin to describe the different ways in which Germans have remembered and commemorated the Holocaust and the defeat of National Socialism.