Event

The Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures invites you to the first in a series of events on "Inglorious Comparisons: On the Uses and Abuses of Historical Analogy".  

Roundtable

Susan Buck-Morss, Distinguished Professor of Political Philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center

Susannah Heschel, Eli Black Professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College

Jonathan Steinberg, Walter H. Annenberg Professor of European History at the University of Pennsylvania

Frank Trommler, Emeritus Professor of German at the University of Pennsylvania

The discussion will be followed by a light reception.

In the pages of the newspapers of record in the United States and Europe, historical comparisons to current political events are flying thick and fast. The European history of the early twentieth century—in particular the rise of European fascism—has become an omnipresent simile. But an analogy is not necessarily appropriate or illuminating simply because it is common, and comparisons to history draw as much criticism as acclaim. The Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures invites you to a series of discussions intended to test the merit of these inglorious comparisons, asking whether they shed light on recent and ongoing developments or instead obfuscate or even trivialize them.

COSPONSORED BY School of Arts & Sciences, Penn Humanities Forum, SASGov, GAPSA. Departments of English, History, History of Art, Philosophy. Programs in Jewish Studies, Cinema & Media Studies, Comparative Literature and Literary Theory, Penn Program on Democracy, Citizenship, and Constitutionalism.