Director’s Note

The Fall Semester began with, to borrow a phrase familiar to those of us who grew up watching too much American television in the 1970s and 80s, both the triumph of victory and the agony of defeat. On July 21st,we were thrilled to learn that our application to the US Department of Education for Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) scholarships was approved. FLAS is a significant source of funding- -$978,788 over 4 years—that will allow dozens of IU undergraduate and graduate students to receive financial aid to study less commonly taught European languages like Norwegian, Dutch, Greek, Croatian, Bosnian, and Hungarian. It is a real boon to both our students and to the health of our less commonly taught language programs.

Just days after experiencing the thrill of FLAS application approval, however, we received the news that the National Resource Center portion of our Title VI application was not funded. We and our many partners had devoted a tremendous amount of energy to this application and felt that we had put our best foot forward. We were eager to start pursuing the wide-ranging outreach programs that we had proposed. The Department of Education, however, decided that it would only fund six Western European National Resource Centers this cycle—down from eight in the previous cycle—and we were one of the institutions that were left out.

In spite of this setback, EURO remains active in educational outreach. Colton Ames, EURO’s associate director, is still taking the lead role in the Digital Toolbox project (recently rebranded as “Windows to the World: Digital Artifacts for Global Educators”), a multi-center educational resource for K-12 teachers that bolsters international education by providing digital resources from IU collections and lesson plans targeted at specific curriculum standards and grades. Part of his work included a $100,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Social Science Research Council to help expand the project and support teachers who are going to be using the site in their classrooms this spring. EURO also continues to actively partner with Vesna Dimitrieska, who coordinates Global Educational Initiatives for the School of Education, and with Laura Stachowski and Faridah Pawan, who are exploring ways to expand the international experiences available to education majors in the state of Indiana and beyond through the continued growth Global Gateway for Teachers and the development of short-term international experiences.

Our intellectual program this semester was diverse and interdisciplinary. A highlight was the inaugural lecture of the Decolonizing European Studies series, titled “Conversations on the Death of Elizabeth II: Reflecting on the UK’s Colonial Past and the Future of the Monarchy,” which featured Šumit Ganguly, Feisal Istrabadi, and Purnima Bose. Particularly interesting for me, personally, was the visit of chef and food anthropologist Nafsika Papacharalampous, which was organized in conjunction with the Department of Geography and EURO faculty affiliate Olga Kalentzidou. Papacharalampous gave a cooking demonstration in the Read Test Kitchen as well as a talk titled “’It smells like the village; I don’t want the village in my home’: Imaginations of Greek Rurality and Identity” that explored the changing nexus of cuisine and identity in contemporary Greece. EURO also continues to give graduate students a forum to present their research. This semester, Ariana Gunderson, who is a second-year doctoral student in Anthropology, was the highlight of our Fall Social. She presented part of her summer research project: photographic explorations—using both a refurbished Polaroid and a homemade pinhole camera—into the performative of food in Germany.

Last, we are gearing up for a busy spring semester. One highlight will be a panel on the 21st birthday of the euro, titled “The Euro Comes of Age?: Reflections on 21 Years of the Eurozone.” We will also be working on the next installment of the Decolonizing European Studies series, a new series called Reflections on European Democracy and, of course, our annual Midwest Model EU simulation. Colton and I are also bracing ourselves for another cycle of grant-writing focused on the EU’s various Jean Monnet Grants. If you have any ideas for an event or initiative that would fall under the rubric of a Jean Monnet Center of Excellence Grant, we welcome your input.

Wishing you a productive spring semester, with hopes that your winter break was relaxing, though brief!

-Frank

Fall 2022 Curriculum Update

In addition to finding ways to continue our outreach, EURO has focused on curriculum development and bolstering enrollments in our academic programs by expanding our course offerings. This Fall, Colton Ames, EURO’s Associate Director, taught a new Curriculum course that draws on his background in Religious Studies, EURO-W 205 Religion in the European Union. The course, which enrolled 60 students, is designed as a Fall 2022 Update gateway course for our minor, and it has already borne in our efforts to expand our enrollments. EURO’s director, Frank Hess, is teaching a new course this semester, EURO-E 205 Introduction to Modern Greek Culture. He hopes to use this course to recruit students to both the Modern Greek and the European Studies minors. EURO is eager to begin offering similar courses focusing on aspects of culture, identity, and society in the European Union and are willing to entertain proposals for new courses offerings. EURO is also exploring ways to expand access to our Master of Arts degree by developing a 4 + 1 pathway toward the degree which will allow IU undergraduates to add a European Studies MA onto a relevant BA or BS with a year of additional coursework. We hope to use this degree pathway to recruit high quality IU undergraduates from HLS and relevant majors in the College and the professional schools.

Grants and Programming

February 15th, 2022 was the first day in over seven months that the EURO team was able to wake up and not think about our quadrennial grant application for the US Department of Education Title VI program. Since July 2021, at least a few hours of every day at EURO had been dedicated to preparing the nearly 300 pages of narratives, course lists, faculty CVs, and budgets that were submitted on February 14th. All those hours and the hard work of countless people resulted in a successful application for Foreign Language & Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship funds, which amounts to nearly $1 million over the next four years. We are excited that the first cohort of EURO FLAS Fellows started this past August and are studying Arabic, Portuguese, Modern Greek, and Polish, and we are ready for another round of applicants this spring.

If last year was The Year of Title VI Grants, though, then this year is The Year of European Union Jean Monnet Grants. Named after Jean Monnet, dubbed “The Father of Europe” for his pioneering efforts in establishing the European Coal and Steel Community (the precursor of today’s European Union), the Jean Monnet grants support the study of Europe and the EU in universities around the world. IU has frequently been recognized for its strengths in European Studies – EURO has regularly been designated as a Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence (a designation we are applying to renew). With our applications for the Jean Monnet grants, EURO hopes to develop a study abroad opportunity that would take students to Brussels to learn about the EU’s organization and institutions; continue to grow our curriculum and draw in new students; support faculty and graduate student travel and research, and more!

Finally, EURO was also awarded $100,000 by the US National Endowment for the Humanities and the Social Science Research Council to continue the growth and development of the Digital Toolbox project (now rebranded as “Windows to the World: Digital Artifacts for Global Educators”). This has been an ongoing project alongside other area studies centers and is a way to connect K-12 educators with curriculum materials based on the global content in IU’s museums, collections, and archives.

Student Spotlight – Jack Rosswurm

Jack is a first year Master of Arts student with the Institute for European Studies. He is from Fort Wayne, Indiana, and attended IU Bloomington for his undergraduate degree in International Studies. His research interests include the foreign and security policy of Estonia and Finland, E.U. foreign policy, and German politics. Jack has advanced proficiency in German and intermediate knowledge of Estonian. In the future, he hopes to learn Finnish, Ukrainian, and Kazakh.

A little background

I’m from Fort Wayne, Indiana. I have two beagles. I can speak English, German, and intermediate-level Estonian. I am an enormous fan of Star Wars (especially the Clone Wars series) and The Boys. I am always reading the news: state, national, and international.

Tell us a little about your undergraduate degree studies

I graduated from HLS at IU with a Bachelor of Arts in International Studies, with a concentration in diplomacy, security, and governance, and a minor in Germanic Studies. I think the biggest achievement of my undergraduate career was my senior thesis project. I showed how the domestic politics of individual EU member states has affected decisions of importance to the whole Union, sometimes in favor of one member state and at the expense of others.

Why did you choose the Institute for European Studies for your graduate program?

I chose EURO because I knew that I wanted to study the European Union and European states more closely, and the Institute for European Studies is the premier center for research on Europe in Indiana. Additionally, the small size of the institute was appealing. I was looking for a program where I could feel a sense of community with my fellow graduate students and the program directors, and I am pleased that I have found exactly that.

Tell us a bit about your research interests

While I am still fleshing out my research plans, I do have some broad interests: Baltic and Finnish foreign policy and security, EU foreign policy, and how the Baltic states and Finland play a role in the formation of EU security policy with respect to Russia, the Gulf of Finland, and the Baltic Sea.

You are a Foreign Language Area Studies Fellowship recipient. Congratulations! Tell us a little bit about your language of study (continued)

Thanks! My FLAS award allows me to study Estonian, the national language of Estonia. Estonian is not an Indo-European language, which already separates it from the most commonly studied languages such as Spanish, German, or French. Estonian is a Finno-Ugric language …meaning that it shares similarities with Finnish, and more distantly, with Hungarian. Studying the language has been challenging but immensely rewarding. Learning Estonian has forced me to change the way I think about language and use a different logic when constructing sentences. I think my favorite part about Estonian that makes it unique is the post-position. In English, we have prepositions, such as in, about, at, etc. In Estonian, these positions are not their own words, but instead are tacked onto the end of the thing whose position is being described. For example, in English we say, “The computer is in the bedroom”. In Estonian, we say, “Magamistoas on arvuti”. Fun, right?!

In your opinion, why is it important to study Europe?

If Russia’s illegal and malicious war on Ukraine does not demonstrate why we need to study Europe, I do not know what does. The European Union is the United States’ strongest ally, and it is only surpassed in economic power by the United States. Understanding the European Union is a matter not just of national security for the United States, but also critical to the international community. The EU is not a state, but an international organization made up of many sovereign states. As such, it is critical that we study and develop a deeper understanding of the parts of the European Union that are driving its economy, defense, and foreign policy. Russia has made this abundantly clear. Furthermore, it has become apparent that the voices of Eastern European states, who warned the world far in advance of Russia’s increasingly aggressive actions, have been ignored to the detriment of the global economy and the security of the European continent.

Faculty Spotlight – Dr. Gabriel Popescu

Gabriel Popescu is Professor of Geography in the department of Political Science at Indiana University South Bend. Prof. Popescu is originally from Romania, where he attended the University of Bucharest during the 1990s momentous social and political transformations in Eastern Europe. He serves as a member of EURO’s affiliated faculty as well as the EURO advisory board. Prof. Popescu describes himself as a “political geographer with interests in the ongoing influence of space on the relationships between states and societies.” He has recently taught courses focusing on geopolitics and globalization.

Professor Popescu first moved to Indiana in 2005 for an appointment as an ABD at Ball State University, and after the defense of his dissertation the following year he joined the Indiana University South Bend faculty to teach political geography. In his research, Professor Popescu has long been interested in the ongoing influence of space/geography on the relationships between politics and social life. Considering that the nation-state has been commonly imagined as the main political entity to divide the globe, national territories have become taken for granted as discrete containers of social relations and as natural divisions between people. Professor Popescu’s research agenda has been to understand how actors beyond the nation-state actively shape social interaction in space.

His recent scholarship focuses on examining how new developments in information technology are redefining the nature of contemporary borders and territorial institutions, and how these transformations affect citizenship rights, identity, and the ways in which people relate to space. He is studying the circumstances in which biometric and wireless technologies are routinely embedded into bodies, travel documents, phones, and drones in order to enable the circulation of flows and to achieve control of mobility at the smallest possible scale. He finds that the new kinds of political and social geographies that are emerging today can be better understood by employing notions of topological space, defined by nodes, connections, and “portals”, which is qualitatively different from the modern notion of Euclidean space defined by proximity and distance decay.

Professor Popescu has examined the connections between digitization and topology in his book Bordering and Ordering the Twenty-First Century: Understanding Borders (Rowman & Littlefeld, 2011), and during a subsequent sabbatical residency at the Mediterranean Institute of Advanced Studies in Marseille, France. There, he conducted a study entitled “Rearticulating Border Spaces: Technology, Bodies and Networks in the Age of Mobility” and became involved in the “Anti – Atlas of Borders” project, an interdisciplinary research program driven by an approach at the arts-science interface.

The project is based on the idea that the ways in which we draw borders on maps structure the ways we think and act upon the world. Collaborations between scientists and artists in academic seminars and art exhibitions illustrate technologically-enabled flows and instantaneous time-space connections in ways that go beyond drawing borderlines around territories on world maps.

Professor Popescu’s latest project investigates the movement of refugees unfolding in Europe, and refugees’ unprecedented reliance on digital technologies such as GPS, cellular phones, and social media platforms such as Facebook and WhatsApp, that help them navigate European space and decode a maze of European borders. In pursuit of his research interests, Professor Popescu has travelled widely around the world and has secured grants from various national and European Union institutions. In this sense, he has been a visiting professor at universities in Grenoble and Toulon, France; Hamburg, Germany; and a research fellow at the Center for the Study of Populations and Socio-economic Policies in Luxembourg. Professor Popescu says that Indiana University has played a key role in supporting his scholarship, providing access to grants and exchange programs that have enabled him to stay connected with networks of international scholars. He is a member of both the Institute for European Studies and the Russian and East European Institute.

At IUSB, Professor Popescu has taught a variety of courses ranging from undergraduate classes to graduate seminars, and has led study abroad programs to Mexico. His lectures on Political, Economic, World, and Human Geography, as well as his seminars on Global Cities and Networks, and on International Public Affairs and Global Governance, incorporate his research interests as much as possible. In classroom interactions with his students he seeks to help them gain knowledge about other places and cultures, as he believes that familiarity with difference is essential to foster critical thinking about their own place in the world, and to understand how their daily lives are inextricably connected with others in faraway places. The biggest rewards of all in his teaching is when he sees his students using the information they acquire to make sense of their own topics of interest, and when students’ questions about various issues they learn about in his classes make him think of a certain topic in a new way.

Remembering our friend, Esther Ham

Esther was a cherished colleague and one of EURO’s most important supporters. Appointed to both Germanic Studies and EURO, Esther embodied the best values of our broad community. As a member of EURO’s Advisory Board, Esther played a crucial role in EURO’s successes in our grant activities and the development of partners and collaborations in the Netherlands. Esther was also a warm and generous friend. Her and Peter’s annual Dutch New Year’s Celebrations, complete with the oliebollen and huzarensalade, were always a highlight of the holiday season. Our thoughts are with her loved ones that she has left behind.

Director’s Note

As the Fall Semester comes to a close, I’d like to pause for a moment to reflect on our blessings. The past year and a half have been a struggle, but by and large Indiana University has risen to the challenge that the COVID-19 pandemic has presented and is better prepared than ever to face the future challenges that will inevitably arise as the virus morphs and the pandemic evolves. We have done this because we are a community, and as a community, we are committed to the safety and welfare of our fellow community members. Our community-mindedness shows in our vaccination rates, which approach 95%. It shows in our willingness to subject ourselves to background testing, to wear masks, and to follow the advice of the public health experts who have been charged with guiding us. The results of our community-mindedness have been clear: extremely low infection rates and very little serious disease.

To my mind, Indiana University and other universities around the United States should be held up as models for the rest of the country. We are not ideologically uniform, yet we—students, faculty, and staff—were all able to unite in pursuit of common goals: the education of the next generation and the pursuit of knowledge. My hope is that we emerge from this experience with a stronger sense of shared purpose, one that will help us to find solutions to the looming problems that currently confront humanity: persistent racial injustice, rising authoritarianism in politics, growing economic disparities, and, perhaps most importantly, the ongoing global pandemic and the impending environmental crisis.

On all these fronts, Europe and the European Union are valuable interlocutors. As we attempt to transform our society and our globe for the 21st century, Europe is both a key partner in this process and an invaluable living laboratory of social, political, cultural, and economic change. We must work together and learn from each other if these threats to our future are to be addressed, and the Institute for European Studies is committed to facilitating this process through a wide range of outreach activities that include: helping you stay up to date on current events in Europe through our weekly EURO News Summary, fostering discussions on a wide range of European topics, providing travel and research support to faculty from across the IU system, promoting study abroad programs in Europe, providing teacher-training opportunities and learning resources to K-12 instructors, and promoting a deeper engagement with Europe in the local community.

Our academic program this past semester included a variety of events. We organized a panel on Climate Change and Energy Policy as part of our Future of Europe series that featured Nikolaos Zirogiannis of the O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs, Justyna Zając of the Political Science and Polish Studies Center, and Kacper Szulecki, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Oslo. We are planning on following this panel with a second one this Spring on Sino-European relations that will be hosted in cooperation with both the European and Chinese Gateways. We also hosted a talk by George Pagoulatos, Professor of European Politics and Economy at the Athens University of Economics and Business, who spoke on “European Challenges, Old and New: The EU in the Post-Covid Era.”

Providing faculty and graduate students with opportunities to present their research is also part of our mission. This past semester we hosted a talk by Despoina Panagiotidou, who is completing her Ph.D. in musicology at the Jacobs School of Music under the direction of Halina Goldberg. She gave a fascinating lecture on “Nationalizing Kalamatianós and Performing Greekness in Art Music” that focused on incorporation of regional dance traditions into an emerging Greek national culture in the 19th and 20th centuries. We also helped sponsor Alex Tipei’s talk, as part of the European History Workshop, on “Korais’s Greece and Napoleon’s Empire: The Egyptian Campaign, Race Science, and the Europeanization of an Idea.” Tipei, a graduate of IU’s Department of History, is an Assistant Professor at the University of Montreal.

In the Spring, we are planning talks by at least three IU researchers. Melissa Diverno of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese will be presenting on her ongoing research into the Frederico García Lorca Archive in March. Kathleen Myers, also from Spanish and Portuguese, will be talking about her research into the reconfiguration of shepherding in contemporary Spain. Last, Fionnan Mac Gabhann of the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology will be drawing from his dissertation research on Irish folk music for a presentation.

On the administrative front, the 2021/22 academic year started out with a major change at EURO: Our Associate Director, Heather Duemling, accepted a position in the Dean’s Office as Executive Assistant to the Dean and Strategic Initiatives Coordinator. I want to thank Heather for her service to EURO and wish her well in her new position. I look forward to collaborating with her in the future on a wide variety of HLS projects!

Heather’s departure necessitated a search for a replacement. The candidate pool was extremely strong, and the decision difficult. After deliberations, the hiring committee decided that Colton Ames was the candidate who was best positioned to help EURO move forward. Colton, who served as a Graduate Assistant for us last year, brings a tremendous skill set to the position. He combines a strong background in the Humanities and Social Sciences, courtesy of a Master of Arts in Religious Studies, and has brought that experience to his research as he pursues his doctorate in international education from the IU School of Education. Much as I anticipated when we interviewed him, Colton has hit the ground running, adapted quickly to his new responsibilities, and established himself as a resource for HLS’s educational outreach programs. Already, he has completed his first grant proposal: a joint proposal with African Studies and Caribbean & Latin American Studies to secure funding from the NEH for our Digital Toolbox Project. (We will know about the results in March.) I am very much looking forward to working with him on our upcoming Title VI and Monnet Center of Excellence grant applications!

Colton has also been an invaluable interlocutor for me as I have sought to find ways to increase EURO’s enrollments and the number of students in our program. Together, we developed two new courses that I hope will be offered for the first time next year: EURO-E 205 Introduction to Modern Greek Culture and EURO-W 205 Religion in the EU. Both will carry General Education World Cultures credits and either Arts and Humanities or Social and Historical Studies credits. We are planning to develop additional introductory level courses on culture and identity within the European Union in the coming months. I have also completed a proposal to add a Modern Greek minor to EURO’s offerings and hope to be able to offer it to students by the Fall of 2022. The minor will encourage students to complete additional language courses beyond the second year and take modern Greek culture courses.

The Spring Semester promises to be a busy one for EURO. Colton and I are actively working on our Title VI grant, which we anticipate being due in early February. If you have ideas about outreach projects that would benefit elementary, middle school, and high school students, or that would contribute to life-long learning in the State of Indiana and beyond, please reach out to us. We’d love to hear your thoughts. We are also interested in establishing tighter ties to community colleges and minority-serving institutions of higher education in Indiana and elsewhere. If you have friends or former students who are teaching in such institutions, please let us know. It would be great to brainstorm together about how we could leverage those connections for the mutual benefit of both institutions.

Shortly after completing our Title VI application, we will begin preparations for the Midwest Model European Union, which will be held from March 31st to April 2nd. After hosting the event virtually last year, we hope to be able to host it live at the IMU. Concurrently, we will begin work on our Monnet Center of Excellence grant application and possibly one or more Erasmus+ grants. Monnet grants are focused on expanding the study of Europe in the United States and often include events such as conferences on timely topics, course development grants, and student outreach events. Erasmus+ grants are designed to facilitate faculty and student exchanges with European Universities. We look forward to working with you on these grants as well. Please, do not hesitate to reach out to us with further questions about the grants or proposals for budget items.

As we wind down our current Title VI grant and as I wind down this Director’s Statement, I’d like to remind you that, if you have received a travel/research grant in past application cycles, the funds are still available. You must spend them, however, by July 31, 2022. Also, if you have spring or summer research travel planned, we still have funds and will be sending out a final call for applications early next semester.

Wishing you a successful conclusion to the semester and a wonderful and relaxing, if brief, holiday season!

-Frank

Euro Projects

by Colton Ames, Associate Director

The 2021-2022 academic year marks the end of EURO’s Title VI grant cycle. The current cycle started in Fall 2018 when EURO was designated as a National Resource Center by the US Department of Education and received yearly funding to conduct programming that brought the languages and cultures of Western Europe to Indiana University. This year, we have been diligently preparing to once again apply for Title VI funds to continue support for students, faculty, and staff who are exploring the continent.

Here are some of the projects we are really excited about:

–This spring, we are gathering scholars and artists from the U.S., Europe, and Africa to host a symposium on refugee and migration crises. The symposium is being sponsored by EURO, African Studies, and the Center for the Study of Global Change and will provide a forum for cross-disciplinary, transcontinental exchanges of stories, research, and ideas about critical global events. We hope to host similar symposia every year during the grant cycle and continue to support the research endeavors of IU faculty.

–Expanded K-12 outreach, especially through collaborations with the IU Center for Rural Engagement, the School of Education, and our own Digital Toolbox online curriculum project. We are excited to instill a love of learning about Europe in students around the state of Indiana.

–Support for the IU Center for International Business Education and Research (CIBER) and the IU School of Education Global Gateway for Teachers to continue preparing undergraduate students for successful professional careers connecting to Europe after graduation.

–Continued collaborations with other area studies centers at Indiana University to provide events, resources, and collaborations that foster dialogue with perspectives from around the world.

This is by no means an exhaustive list, and we hope to continue our support through individual faculty research and travel awards, graduate student support, study abroad opportunities, and resources for the continued engagement between Europe and the world. If you have any suggestions on areas that we could fund, please reach out to us!

In Spring 2022

As we discover the COVID-19 omicron variant’s transmissibility, it goes without saying that we find ourselves still in precarious times. We anticipate the spring with hope that together we will keep the virus at bay and follow through on our plans. Virtual or in-person, the IU community has been resilient and resourceful through- out this pandemic, and we will continue to find our way forward come what may. Three major collaborative events mark our spring calendar:

In Dialogue: Symposium on the Displacement of Peoples Between Africa and Europe
March 18–19, 2022
Together with the Hamilton Lugar School’s Center for the Study of Global Change and African Studies Program, the Institute for European Studies is proud to present a two-day symposium at the IU Europe Gateway in Berlin this March. Scholars, practitioners, activists, refugee community members and artists will convene over the nature, experience and effects of human displacement between Africa and Europe. This symposium aims to practice collectivity, seeking perspectives from both within and beyond academia to examine movements in their many dimensions—political, cultural, social, aesthetic, economic—and the lines they trace across two continents. Crucially, we hope to give place to a dialogue between refugees and non-refugees, between life and discourse.

Midwest Model EU
March 31–April 2, 2022
We’re pleased to say that this year the Midwest Model EU will be held in-person on the Bloomington campus. Last year we had great success working together with IU Conferences to host the simulation virtually, with the advantage that the format allowed teams from farther afield than normal to participate. The nature of the MMEU process, however, calls for fluid, face-to-face interaction. And we found that, overwhelmingly, students and faculty from the participating universities wanted to see the event return to in-person if possible. For 3 days undergraduates from across the Midwest will come together at the Indiana Memorial Union to play their roles as EU parliamentarians, commissioners and leaders. For many students who are preparing for futures in public policy and politics, the simulation represents a unique opportunity to get into the research, analysis and push-and-pull of real world legislating. At a time when bad ideas, bad leaders and bad circumstances seem to be proliferating, we’re privileged to gather these students together and contribute to their formation.

Future of Europe
Date TBA
Finally, we’re looking forward to the next engagement in our Future of Europe series. We kicked off the series in Fall 2020 with a two-day mini-conference convening researchers and current and former political leaders. This first event examined Europe’s response to COVID-19 and US-EU relations in the immediate wake of the 2020 presidential election. Climate change and energy policy were the focuses of the series’ second installment, held this Fall with participation from IU professors Justyna Zając and Nikolaos Zirogiannis and University of Oslo professor Kacper Szulecki.

This spring we’re going to continue to examine the greatest choices and challenges for Europe today as we turn to Sino-European relations. In collaboration with both the European and Chinese Gateways, we’ll be hosting a panel on the common present and future between Europe and China. We’re especially glad that this collaboration will aid an ecumenical approach, encouraging participation from experts in both areas. When we discuss the future of Europe, we are always also having a discussion about the global future and what our collective tomorrow will look like.

Faculty Spotlight: Melissa Dinverno

We spoke with Dr. Melissa Dinverno, Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Indiana University. Dr. Dinverno teaches a range of courses at both the undergraduate and graduate levels at IU, most often focusing on issues of power, cultural memory, and gender/sexuality. Dr. Dinverno’s main area of academic research is 20th-century Spanish literature and culture, focusing specifically on four areas: Garcia Lorca studies, textual scholarship and editorial theory, gender and sexuality studies, and memory studies. Dr. Dinverno is currently working on a book project titled Deconstructing Lorca: Memory, Culture and Nation in Contempo- rary Spain, which analyzes how the figure and works of García Lorca were constructed in Spain’s post-dictatorship period, aiming to both spark a shift in Lorca Studies and offer a new vantage point for examining contemporary Spanish politics and society. In 2019-2020, Dr. Dinverno was awarded a U.S. Fulbright Senior Scholar Award for Research to work on Deconstructing Lorca. Dr. Dinverno is the recipient of a national research award from the Women’s Caucus for the MLA as well as several other external fellowships and grants.

You received a Title VI Faculty Research Grant from the IU Institute for European Studies in support of Desde el exilio al centro: El archivo de Federico García Lorca. Can you give us a description of this exhibit and the work you are completing on it?

From Exile to the Center: The Archive of Federico García Lorca Foundation is a major museum exhibit that I am coordinating and, with Andrew A. Anderson (University of Virginia), Christopher Maurer (Boston University), co-curating at the Centro Lorca in Granada, Spain. Based on new research, its five chapters will tell for the first time the story of the Lorca Foundation’s archive since its inception, using diverse materials to activate and sew together stories of salvage, discovery, acquisition, loss, and perseverance within the com- plex political and cultural landscape of each moment. A 6-part documentary film projected throughout the exhibit will combine a range of archival material with interview footage, deepening the vision of the archive as an embodiment of contextualized human experience. It will explore concepts of the archival as well as the contemporary plight of private archives in Spain that deal with the Civil War and dictatorship. Despite public interest in the materiality of Lorca’s work, this will be the first work in any form entirely focused on the construction of Lorca Foundation’s archive. It aims to break scholarly ground and contribute to a new public understanding of this archive and its place in collective memory processes in Spain. It will result in a major museum exhibit, an edited volume, a short documentary film, a virtual symposium, and a free interactive virtual online tour.

What other research are you involved in at this time?

Broadly speaking, much of my current research works at the intersection of archive, trauma, mourning and cultural memory.

Edited Volume: Lorca and the Archive.

I am editing Lorca and the Archive, a volume that assembles a multi-disciplinary cast of scholars (curators, literary scholars, archivists, librarians, art historians, museologists) to offer the first critical intervention on the intersection of Lorca and archival theory and practice. In this volume, archive is understood as a technology of memory, a set of documentary and visual practices, a repository of materials, a physical space, and a theoretical construct.

Monograph: Deconstructing Lorca: Memory, Culture and Nation in Contemporary Spain

In this book-length study, I analyze how the figure and works of modernist poet and playwright Federico García Lorca were constructed in Spain’s post-dictatorship period, aiming to both spark a shift in Lorca Studies and offer a new vantage point for examining contemporary Spanish politics and society. Thus, my book explores the country’s persistently fraught relationship with its dictatorial past and its legacy in the field of Lorca Studies. García Lorca (1898-1936) is the most widely known Spanish writer after Cervantes and his hefty cultural, social, and political capital has transformed him into an iconic figure of enormous significance. Since his assassination and mass grave burial in the Spanish Civil War, Lorca has served as a lightning rod for national concerns, while his literary work continues to be read, performed, and exhibited internationally. Current debates on the recuperation of historical memory are a reminder of his overwhelming iconic presence in contemporary Spanish politics, culture and society, as conflicting sides continually return to Lorca as a rallying point regarding the unearthing of mass graves.

In Deconstructing Lorca, I contend that Spain’s transition to democracy (1975-1992) shaped the invention of “Lorca” (both the person and his artistic corpus) as a national icon that mediated cultural, political, social, and economic processes in the country’s transition. Working with literary editions, film, theatre, archives, exhibits, comics, newspapers, magazines, photographs, biographies, and clothing, Deconstructing Lorca proposes an ambitious, multi-faceted overhaul of how we understand Lorca and his work, analyzing the dynamics and complex transitional cultural politics wrapped up in his construction at a pivotal moment in contemporary Spanish history, a moment that, I argue, forged the narratives that continue to frame scholarly and popular understandings of Lorca and evince the dictatorship’s long shadow. Some of the issues I focus on are memory and mourning, exile and diaspora, sexuality, commodification and globalization.

In Spring 2022, Dr. Dinverno will teach Introduction to Hispanic Literature (S328) which introduces the analysis of Hispanic literary texts and film through works by some the most important writers/filmmakers in 20th – 21st century Hispanic culture. She will also teach Contesting Repression: 20th-Century Spanish Fiction (S419), which explores how writers in Spain both represented and pushed back against repression and the totalitarian state from within the Franco regime itself (1939-1975), as well as the ways that, during democracy, they’ve responded to the Franco era as an apparently past event, both reexamining that experience and voicing a preoccupation with memory, self-construction, and defining the emergent nation.

In mid-spring, Dr. Dinverno will also present a talk regarding her current research on the Lorca archive for EURO. Information for Dr. Dinverno’s upcoming talk will be circulated via social media and email via the Institute for European Studies when it becomes available. To be added to our mailing list, please contact euroinst@iu.edu.

Staff Updates

This semester we’ve been thrilled to see two of our EURO colleagues thrive in new roles. Justyna Zając, EURO affiliate professor, took on the directorship of our sister unit, the Polish Studies Center (PSC). Colton Ames, who we welcomed just last year as a graduate assistant, stepped up to serve as Associate Director for EURO and PSC. We commend them both for their dedicated work making their first semester in these posts a success.

Justyna Zając is Professor Practice in European Security Studies in the Department of International Studies. A Polish native and professor at the University of Warsaw, she came to IU in 2018 as a research fellow and visiting professor. Her research focuses on European and Euro-Atlantic Security, Politics and Security in the Mediterranean and East-Central Europe and Foreign Policy Analysis. She is the author of Poland’s Security Policy: The West, Russia, and the Changing Interna- tional Order, in addition to numerous books and papers. Justyna’s academic interest in issues at the center of politics, policy and science is reflected in her undertakings in public service. She was appointed to the National Strategic Review Committee by the President of the Republic of Poland. She chaired the Minister of Science and Higher Education’s Council of Young Scientists and served two terms on the Steering Committee of the Standing Group on International Relations. She also authored expert opinions for Poland’s Ministry of Regional Development and National Security Bureau, as well as the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung.

Colton Ames joined the Institute for European Studies in Fall 2020 as a graduate assistant, developing content for the in-production Digital Toolbox educational resource and penning entries for our Across the Pond blog and weekly news summaries. He is a doctoral student in the Department of Curriculum & Instruction at the IU School of Education where he conducts research on international forms of citizenship education. He has excelled since being tapped this September to become EURO’s new Associate Director: spearheading the center’s annual Title VI report in his first month in the role, assisting Director Frank Hess in planning programming for the year and most recently submitting a NEH grant proposal in collaboration with African Studies and Caribbean & Latin American Studies to draw in funding for the Digital Toolbox.

Welcome to the EURO Cafe!

Three courses presented by Ludovic Mompelat

Ludovic Mompelat, Associate Instructor of French, provided the Institute for European Studies with reflections and recipes for French cuisine with an island influence. Though Mompelat was born and grew up in Metropolitan France, his mother is from Tahiti (a French island located in French Polynesia, in the Pacific Ocean) and his father is from Marti- nique (a French island located in the West Indies).

Mompelat is a 3rd Year double-PhD student in the departments of French Linguistics and Computational Linguistics at IU. In his five years of teaching at the university, he has taught nearly every under- graduate French class that the department offers!

Mompelat’s research interests encompass the following fields: Sociolinguistics, Creole Languages, Syntax, Corpus Linguistics, Natural Language Processing, and Machine Learning.

Growing up in Metropolitan France, with both parents coming from two very remote islands, all my life I have been in contact and interacted with three different cultures, with each its own customs, traditions, and more specifically, cuisine.

The food from Martinique and Tahiti is rich and hearty. The key ingredients in both cuisines are coconut in any shape and form, seafood, fish, spices, meat and local vegetables, which can all, with no surprise, be found locally. In Martinique and Tahiti, you’ll also find yams, sweet potatoes, bananas and breadfruit, guava, papaya, tamarind among many other fruits and vegetables. Traditional Tahitian food is wrapped in leaves and cooked in an “ahima’a”, a Polynesian underground oven with hot stones covered in banana leaves.

Living in Metropolitan France, I grew up with such culinary influences from both my parents’ islands mixed with the most traditional and well-known French cuisine. The latter is very popular but few can accurately describe it. This, in part, stems from the fact that French cuisine encompasses many, many different types of food, cuisine, customs, traditions based on the region or the island you are staying in.

While it was hard to pick a recipe that could represent the entirety of France, I offer you a three-course meal, with a Martinican, a French and a Tahitian dish.

I. Salade tahitienne

This dish is probably one of the most traditional and popular dishes in Tahiti. The Tahitian salad consists of raw fish, generally fresh tuna, “cooked” in lime juice (through its acidity) accompanied with coconut milk and vege- tables (carrots, cucumber, tomatoes). It is best eaten chilled and the same day it’s been made. Growing up in Metropolitan France, I only had the chance to go to Tahiti once when I was 8, so eating this dish was a way for me to connect with my Polynesian roots and is something that I ho

Ingredients

• 1 3/4 pounds fresh sushi-grade tuna
• 8 limes, juiced
• 1 large onion
• 1 tomato
• 1/2 medium cucumber
• chives
• Kosher salt, to taste
• Freshly ground black pepper, to taste
• 14 oz. coconut milk

Steps

1. Dice the fish into 1/2-inch cubes, rinse with fresh water, drain, and place in a large nonreactive salad bowl.
2. Squeeze the limes and pour the juice over the fish. Mix well and chill 15 to 20 minutes in the refrigerator.
3. Cut onion and green pepper into thin slices, and cut tomato into small cubes. Remove seeds from cucumber and cut into thin half-moons.
4. Drain some of the lime juice, add the vegetables, and season with salt and pepper. 5. Five minutes before serving, add the coconut milk. Serve chilled.

II. Quiche lorraine

This dish is also one of the most popular dishes in France and is well known abroad as well. This dish is a tart with savory custard, pieces of cheese, meat (usually diced bacon or diced ham). This quiche is easy to make and you can adapt it to your own taste very easily as well. My mom and I would make quiches at home whenever my dad was at work. As a result, I always associate quiches with the special connection my mom and I had cooking together. This recipe by Elise Bauer will get you started on the quantities and the main ingredients, but like I said, it is an easily customizable recipe. Feel free to play around adding some greens in the quiche like asparagus, spinach, or leeks that you cooked before incorporating to the filling.

Ingredients

• 1 recipe pie dough or a prepared frozen pie crust
• 1/2 pound (225 g) bacon
• 1 cup (235 ml) milk
• 1/2 cup (118 ml) heavy cream
• 3 eggs
• 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
• 1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper, or less to taste
• 1/8 teaspoon ground nutmeg
• 1 cup (113 g) grated gruyere or other cheese
• 1 heaping tablespoon chopped chives

Steps

for the dough…

If you are making your own pie crust, roll out the pie dough into a 12-inch round. Place it in a 10-inch wide, 1 1/2-inch high tart pan, pressing the dough into the corners. (If you don’t have a tart pan, you can use a similarly sized pie pan.) Use a rolling pin to roll over the surface of the tart pan to cleanly cut off the excess dough from the edges. Freeze for at least 30 minutes before blind-baking.

…or the frozen crust

Pre-baking is also called “blind” baking. If you’re using a store-bought frozen crust, follow the directions on the package for pre-baking. If you are pre-baking a homemade crust, preheat oven to 350°F. Line the frozen crust with heavy duty aluminum foil. Allow for a couple inches to extend beyond the sides of the tart or pie pan. Fill tart pan with pie weights such as dry beans, sugar, or rice. If you are using a pan with a removable bottom, place the pan on a rimmed baking sheet in the oven to catch any spillage. Bake for 40 minutes. Then remove from oven, remove the pie weights (the easiest way to do this is to lift up the foil by the edges) and the foil, and set aside.

The bacon

Set a large frying pan over medium heat. Arrange strips of bacon in a single layer on the bottom of the pan (you may need to work in batches or do two pans at once). Slowly cook the bacon, turning the strips over occasionally until they are nicely browned and much of the fat has rendered out. Lay the cooked strips of bacon on a paper towel to absorb the excess fat. Chop the cooked bacon crosswise into 1/4-inch to 1/2-inch pieces.

Preheat the oven to 370°F.

The filling

Whisk the eggs in a large bowl. Add the nutmeg, salt, black pepper and chives and whisk a little more. Add the milk and cream and whisk vigorously to incorporate and introduce a little air into the mix – this keeps the texture of the quiche light and fluffy.

Arrange the bacon and cheese in the bottom of the pie crust. Whisk the egg-milk mixture hard again for a few seconds, then pour it gently into the pie crust. You want the bacon and cheese to be suspend ed in the mix, so you might need to gently stir it around just a little. You also want the chives, which will float, to be evenly arranged on top, so move them around with a spoon until you like where they are.

Bake

Put the quiche into the preheated oven and bake for 30-40 minutes. (If using pan with removable bottom, be sure to place a rimmed baking sheet underneath.) Check for doneness after 30 minutes by gently jiggling the quiche. It should still have just a little wiggle. (It will finish setting while it cools.) Cool on a wire rack. Eat at room temperature, cold (a quiche will keep for several days in the fridge), or reheated gently in a 200°F oven.

III. Flan coco

This dish is very popular in Martinique but quite popular as well in Metropolitan France. It is a great dessert for any coconut lover, big or small. It can be made as a one-cake flan or in smaller containers to make individual flans. I love this recipe because it is easy to do and delicious. For this dish I found a recipe by Audrey Le Goff. Instead of making the flan in one single pan, my family puts it in several person-size ramekins. We also put some zests of lime in the mixture before baking to add a little zing to it.

Ingredients

• 1 1/2 cup + 1 tbsp sweetened condensed milk
• 1 1/4 cup (300ml /10.15 fl oz) coconut milk (can)
• 3 large eggs
• 1 tsp vanilla extract (or seeds of 1⁄2 vanilla bean)
• 1 cup unsweetened shredded coconut (plus extra for garnish)
• 1⁄2 cup sugar

Steps

Pre-heat your oven to 350°F (180°C) with a rack in the middle. Prepare an un-greased loaf pan.

Caramel

Place the sugar in a small saucepan over medium-heat. Do not touch the sugar anymore –
no stirring; but you can occasionally shake the pan. Let the sugar melt, bubble and turn a golden color. Watch it carefully and when the caramel turns amber, immediately remove from the heat and pour the caramel evenly over the bottom of the pan. Set aside to cool and harden.

Flan

In a large mixing bowl, whisk together the condensed milk, coconut milk, eggs, vanilla extract and shredded coconut. Pour the mixture in the loaf pan (over top of the caramel).

Place the loaf pan into a larger dish, and fill the larger baking dish with water at least 1/4 up the
sides of the loaf pan. Cook for 50-55 minutes, until the top crust is lightly golden and firm to the touch. Transfer the flan to a cooling rack and let cool to room temperature. Transfer into the fridge and
chill for at least 3 hours.

When chilled, place the pan in about 2 inches of fairly warm water, so the caramel at the bottom of the pan softens again. Run a knife around the edges of the pan. Invert a plate over the pan, hold tightly and quickly turn over. Sprinkle with shredded coconut before serving.

Director’s Note

It is the beginning of May, and another semester is entering the rearview mirror. The past four months, which we all hope to be some of the last of the COVID-19 pandemic, have simultaneously been a blur and a tedious slog. The aggressive pursuit of vaccine development coupled with a strong measure of vaccine protectionism have given those of us who live in the US a measure of hope for a return to some sort of normality.

Things are not so rosy in Europe, where the European Commission bungled the vaccine procurement process, and various member states, including some of the most economically powerful, have struggled to get shots in arms. Things are even worse in much of the rest of the world, where vaccination supply is minimal to non-existent and vaccine campaigns are barely getting off the ground. The virus continues to ravage much of the world, in the process morphing into new variants that will challenge our defenses in the months and years to come.

As a result of these and other failures of governmentality, including an anti-vax movement, which has been allowed to proliferate and will limit the percent of the populace that is vaccinated—the chimera of herd immunity is slipping from our grasp. Whether we like it or not, our world will continue to rotate around COVID-19 for the foreseeable future. The disease will become part of our new normal, hopefully somewhere on the spectrum between a cold and a flu and not as a permanent pandemic.

One of the outcomes of the pandemic has been a tectonic shift in American political discourse. From the weaknesses in our supply chain that emerged early in the pandemic to the failures of our privatized health- care system and our fiscal response to the crisis, the pandemic has exposed weaknesses in our economy, our social safety net, and global governance. It has also demonstrated the need for proper planning and proactive policies if other looming crises, such climate, and food security, are to be averted.

The coming years will be full of challenges as we negotiate the politically fraught process of shaping policies and reimagining governmental and non-governmental agencies that can address our changing world. The European Union and its member states will be important partners in shaping the post-pandemic world. They also constitute a real-time, living laboratory for policy and governmentality. Their policy decisions that the United States’ political leaders make. Now, more than ever, we need to study the EU and learn from its policy triumphs and failures. Now, more than ever, we need to create trans-Atlantic and global dialogues between policymakers and intellectuals.

Over the past year, the Institute for European Studies has dedicated itself to this mission. Our EURO News Summary has sought to keep you informed about current events in Europe and offer you European perspectives on important policy debates about domestic and global governance. Our lecture series, “(En)Countering Dictatorships in Post-WWII Europe” and “Understanding Race and Racism in Europe,” sought to provide comparative perspectives on two pressing contemporary issues, the growth of right-wing political extremism and the persistent racism that haunts European and North American societies and, indeed, the globe. As part of these lecture series, this past semester, we hosted talks by Neovi Karakatsanis of IUSB and Jonathan Swarts of Purdue University Northwest on “America and the Greek Colonels: The Making of Cold War Foreign Policy” and Gunther Jikeli on “Integration Efforts: Refugees in Germany.”

We also debuted a new forum this year, “The Future of the European Union,” a mini conference that explores salient domestic and foreign policy issues. The inaugural event featured an all-star lineup that included Stavros Lambrinidis (the EU’s Ambassador to the United States), Senator Chris Van Hollen from Maryland, our own Lee Feinstein (Dean of the Hamilton Lugar School), and Anna Diamantopoulou (former Greek Parliamentary Deputy and Minister, former European Commissioner, and President of the Athens-based think tank, DIKTIO Network for Reform in Greece and Europe), among many others. We look forward to organizing this event again in the Fall of 2022.

EURO’s intellectual program in the Spring Semester also included two lectures that we co-sponsored with the Islamic Studies Program: John Bowen of Washington University spoke about Halal food in Europe, “Prov-ing Halal: Devices, Trust, and Networks.” His lecture was accompanied by a response from Olivier Roy of the European University Institute in Florence. Also, Charles Hirschkind spoke on “The Feeling of History: Islam, Romanticism, and Andalusia.”

I would like to highlight one last part of our intellectual program this year, a series of pedagogy events that we cohosted with the Committee for Undergraduate Education of the Modern Greek Studies Association. Originally, we were scheduled to host the MGSA’s biennial Language Pedagogy Workshop in the Fall. It was cancelled, of course, due to the pandemic. In its stead, we organized a lecture series that included some of the leading lights in the field of language pedagogy and pedagogy in general. Andrew Ross of Harvard University kicked off the series with a talk on “Language Learning in the COVID Crisis: Hybrid, Hyflex, & Online,” which examined various strategies for engaging students in a virtual environment. Chelsea Timlin of Brown University followed with an extremely useful talk on “Aligning Technologies and Learning Outcomes in the L2 Classroom,” that provided a wealth of practical information about optimizing the utilization of technology within language courses. Last, Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis of the University of Illinois concluded the series with a talk on “Meaning without Borders: From Translanguaging to Transposition in the Era of Digitally-Mediated Multimodal Meaning” in which they developed their theories about how education should adapt to the changing global mediascapes in which it is occurring.

A major part of EURO’s mission is outreach to students, and in January, we hosted a workshop on over- seas study opportunities for undergraduates. Representatives from the Office of Overseas Study, the College of Arts and Sciences, the Office of the Vice President for Diversity, Equity, and Multicultural Affairs, and Hutton Honors College presented information about their programs, financial aid, and scholarships. They also discussed the possibilities for studying abroad in the near future.

A long-standing event, as well as one of our principal vehicles for student outreach, is the Midwest Model EU (MMEU), which we hosted from April 1-3 on the virtual conference platform, Whova. The event, which simulates the EU’s legislative process, was a rousing success. Over 150 students from 19 different universities took part. The event also featured a keynote by EURO and HLS Visiting Scholar Judge Camelia Bogdan, who spoke about efforts to address corruption in her native Romania and in the EU. Read more about the MMEU and Judge Bogdan in related pieces in our newsletter.

EURO also took part in the long-postponed Beyond Boundaries Indiana Academies Symposium, which was an IU Bicentennial event that took place on a virtual platform. We presented two panel discussions: The first was “Future Opportunities for Hoosiers to Study Abroad” which explored the tremendous range of study-abroad opportunities that will be available for high school- and college-age Hoosiers as travel starts to reopen. The second was “Global Focus in Indiana” in which panelists discussed internationalization efforts within Indiana to increase both our state’s global awareness and global presence.

Despite pandemic travel restrictions, EURO continues to devote Title VI and our own funds to support faculty and graduate student travel and research. Travel awards still, of course, require that your travel is deemed essential by IU’s travel review committee. If this is not possible, we are also willing to help support your research through the procurement of research materials and research assistance. Our calls for proposals have just gone out and the funds will be available through July 31, 2022, so please consider applying!

This past academic year has seen a tremendous amount of progress on our Title VI projects like the Digital Toolbox, a cooperative venture with the African Studies Program and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, which provides digital access to cultural objects and standards-ready lesson plans for K-12 teachers. This coming summer, we will be involved with the Global Literacy Invitation Summer Institute for 3rd- through 6th-grade teachers along with our fellow area studies centers and the School of Education. We will also be supporting CIBER’s Business Is Global initiative by providing language and culture lessons in Norwegian and Modern Greek.

We are starting the application process to retain our status as a National Resource Center with Title VI funding. Internationalization of the curriculum at all levels of instruction is the mission of Title VI, and we anticipate that collaboration with community colleges and minority serving institutions will continue to be a priority for the US Department of Education. If you have ideas for projects to enhance the dissemination of European content throughout our educational system or to the public, please feel free to reach out to us with your proposals. The goal of a Title VI National Resource Center is to disseminate European content across K-16 education through programs and research funding. Diversity in our projects only strengthens us and our application. We are eager to work with you to include them in our funding application.

We are also continuing to support the Bridges Program, which introduces elementary school students to foreign languages and cultures. This year, we sponsored Modern Greek. Three of my students, George Stylia- nou, Victoria Martine, and Maria Emmanouelides, designed and co-taught classes for elementary school students from around the state. Last, we continue to actively work with our librarian, Luis Gonzalez, to build IU Libraries’ European Studies collection using Title VI funds.

Finally, I would like to conclude by congratulating our Modern Greek Program’s two Foreign Language and Area Studies Scholarship winners and thank REEI for supporting FLAS (Foreign Language and Area Studies) awards for Modern Greek. Ariana Gunderson, an incoming Ph.D. student in Anthropology, and George Stylia- nou, a multi-talented undergraduate who is majoring in Mathematics, Philosophy, and Political Science and minoring in Music and European Studies, will both be studying Modern Greek with the economic support of a FLAS in the Fall.

Wishing you a productive and healthy summer!

-Frank

2021 Virtual Midwest Model EU

In keeping with the trend of this academic year, the 2021 Midwest Model EU (MMEU) was held in a virtual platform, April 1st – 3rd. While students and faculty advisors all agreed they prefer the event be held in person in 2022, there were some unexpected silver linings. 19 universities represented 25 of the 27 member states. Since the event was virtual, travel – and the money that it demands – was not an issue. There was also no registration fee since we had never tried a virtual event such as this, and virtual events, while they are not free, do not have costs as high as in-person events. There were 7 schools who were new to the MMEU this year, adding new voices and new perspectives to the simulation.

For three days, approximately 150 students participated in putting forth directives, debating their merits, and voting on whether or not to pass, edit, or reject them. Current topics such as pandemic relief, human rights, migration, fake news, and combatting climate change were discussed. Seven governing bodies were represented: the European Commission, the European Council, the Directors-General, the Environment Council, the Economics & Financial Council, the Justice & Home Affairs Council, and the Foreign Affairs Council. The Whova platform, administered by IU Conferences, allowed for each session to be observed by faculty advisors and participants. This turned out to be an incredibly useful tool for faculty, since many teach a course on the European Union with students graded on their participation in MMEU.

The Keynote Address was delivered by Dr. Camelia Bogdan, Visiting Fellow with EURO. She is a judge on the Bucharest Court of Appeals and a corruption scholar specializing in asset recovery, countering money laundering, and combating transnational corruption and other financial crimes. She has twice been expelled from the Romanian judiciary on politically motivated charges as a result of her battle against the corruption of political and economic elites. She spoke about the history of corruption within the Romanian government and her experiences in shedding light on present-day EU kleptocrats.

As is traditional, there were awards for outstanding participants. Spain, represented by the University of Indianapolis, won as the 2021 MMEU Best Delegation. Individual students won in the following categories:

European Commission: Danny Vasquez Tarrau, FIU/FAU, Malta
European Council: Parker Abrell, Ball State University, Belgium
Directors-General: Regis Curtis, University of Pittsburgh, Croatia
Environment Council: Paul Annee, University of Indianapolis, Luxembourg
Economic & Financial Council: Edouard Whelan, Notre Dame University, Cyprus Justice & Home Affairs Council: Madalyn Buffington, University of Indianapolis, Spain Foreign Affairs Council: Kristopher Butler, University of Indianapolis, Spain

Among the positive aspects of the virtual platform were community chats, observation rooms, and open Zoom rooms that participants could join for private conversations about procedures or questions – and of course, not having to pay for travel. However, the extra layer of separation when communicating in a virtual platform that has made us all weary this year made faculty and students alike overwhelmingly vote for an in-person experience in future MMEU conferences. We learned a few new tricks this year, including successfully going paperless and live-streaming council sessions, but we look forward to welcoming faculty and students from across the Midwest to the IU Bloomington campus next year, March 31 – April 2, 2022.

Faculty Spotlight: Dr. Gunther Jikeli

For this semester’s Faculty Spotlight, we talked to Dr. Gunther Jikeli on his recent research that was part of a EURO-sponsored lecture series. Dr. Jikeli is the Erna B. Rosenfeld Professor at the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism with the Borns Jewish Studies Program and is also an associate professor in Germanic Studies.

Thanks for agreeing to talk to us, Dr. Jikeli. Could you start by just giving us a brief overview of your research? What first roused your interest in the area?

My main field of research is antisemitism in today’s world, and I look increasingly at the world that is online. However, I have been interested in the fate of refugees in Germany for a long time, in fact since the early 1990s, when I volunteered in a refugee reception center in Cologne and later helped to create a trilingual journal in Berlin by and for refugees (“The Fluechtlings-Voice”). I had noticed the rich diversity of backgrounds, viewpoints, and paths that refugees would take, as

well as the difficult situation that many of them found themselves in even after they found refuge in Germany. Attitudes and policies towards refugees were largely restrictive and negative back then.

The refugee crisis of 2014/2015 brought worldwide attention to the plight of refugees and Germany took in more than a million refugees, mostly from Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq. A surprisingly high number of Germans were supportive. However, there was also a backlash and fears of extremism, especially after mass sexual assault in Cologne on New Year’s Eve in 2015 and a terrorist attack in 2016 on a Christmas market in Berlin by an ISIS-affiliated terrorist. Some of the backlash against refugees was motivated in xenophobia and racism and resulted in the rise of the populist right party, the Alternative for Germany.

However, there was not much research on what refugees would think themselves. In the case of Syrian refugees, some had fled the regime, other had fled ISIS or other Islamist groups. All went through an educational system that advocates for discrimination against ethnic and religious minorities. But what would they think when they were free from these oppressive regimes? No one had asked. This is how I started out doing interviews with refugees in December 2016, later joined by my colleagues Asaad Alsaleh (IU), Haidar Khezri (UCF), and Alvin Rosenfeld (IU), talking to about 200 refugees. We are now finishing our third phase of inter- views to see what has changed five years after their arrival.

We found that some views are still influenced by the Syrian regime’s propaganda, which is not surprising. But many are rethinking attitudes that they had, be it on minorities in their country, such as Kurds, Chris- tians, Jews, on gender issues, and even on the Middle East and Israel. The Syrian regime has blamed the latter for all ills in the Middle East, but many realize that this is simply not true. Viewpoints are increasingly diverse and depend much on interactions with other communities and the German population.

You recently gave a talk at EURO about the refugee crisis in Syria that brought a massive (and controversial) influx of migrants to Europe and how the German people have responded over time. What are some things that stood out to you as you did that research? As a researcher, how did it feel to do work that was so emotionally charged?

A surprisingly high number of Germans were initially supportive of refugees and many still are, despite a xenophobic backlash by the populist right. According to some surveys, about every sixth German participated actively in refugee assistance during the autumn of 2015, and a third donated goods in kind. This, and a strong economy and relatively low unemployment rates, enabled the government to roll out a massive program that invests in the future of these migrants. The federal government has spent EUR 20-23 billion annually related to refugees, that is, 6-7 percent of the federal budget since 2015. Recognized refugees have access to the same welfare benefits as German citizens and to free language and integration classes of up to 1,300 hours. Refugees are also increasingly enrolling in job training so that they can get qualifications that are needed in the German job market with relatively few openings for unskilled labor. That does not mean that the situation of refugees in Germany is great, today. The housing situation, threats of deportation, racism, and unemployment are still a problem for too many, but the situation is better than in the 1990s and early 2000s. And, in my view, investing in refugees and more interactions between refugees and the German population are the only way forward, even if that includes frank debates and challenging some beliefs on all sides. Research indicates that this will have positive effects on German society, including the economy, and in the long run also on the countries of origin, such as Syria. Looking at the bigger picture helps to put into perspective often fierce and emotional debates about refugees.

Where do you see your research going in the future? What’s next for you? Has COVID changed anything on that trajectory?

The pandemic has led to some delays in our research, and we had to do the last phase of our interviews online or on the phone. Dr. Alsaleh and I have noticed that conspiracy theories play a large role in views of refugees but also about refugees. We hope to get funding for a research project that concentrates on those diverse conspiracy theories – and helps to debunk them. Dr. Khezri has convinced me that it is worth looking at Kurd- ish Syrians separately. They form about 30 percent of the 700,000 Syrians who are in Germany, today. We hope to get funding for a research project that concentrates on those diverse conspiracy theories – and helps to debunk them. Dr. Khezri has convinced me that it is worth looking at Kurdish Syrians separately. They form about 30 percent of the 700,000 Syrians who are in Germany, today. We hope to be able to bring together experts in a workshop on these issues in 2022.

EURO Visiting Fellow: Judge Camelia Bogdan

This March EURO proudly welcomed its latest visiting fellow, Romanian judge, and scholar Camelia Bogdan.

Dr. Bogdan is a judge on the Bucharest Court of Appeals and is an expert on asset recovery, countering money laundering, and combating transnational corruption and other financial crimes. Since 2017 she has twice been expelled from the Romanian judiciary on politically motivated charges, because of her battle against the corruption of political and economic elites. An accomplished scholar with a doctorate in criminal law from the University of Bucharest, she has authored two monographs on asset recovery and money laundering, several practical guides to asset recovery for practitioners at the national and EU level, and over 130 judicial studies in law journals. She is an associate researcher with the Centre Régional Francophone de Recherches Avancées en Sciences Humaines et Sociales de Bucarest (CERE-FREA–Villa Noël) and contributes regularly to the University of Cambridge’s International Symposium on Financial Crimes. In 2018, she was a Fulbright scholar at the University of Florida’s Levin College of Law. In recognition of her work, she received the 2019 Ion Ratiu Democracy Award from the Woodrow Wilson Center. ̇She is a Reagan-Fascell fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy.

During her fellowship at EURO Dr. Bogdan has been eager to share her unique experience and scholarship with the IU community. Assistant Dean for Curricular and Undergraduate Affairs and Maurer School of Law professor Shruti Rana has been instrumental in coordinating opportunities for the judge to speak to other law scholars. The Center for Constitutional Democracy invited Dr. Bogdan to her first speaking engagement of the semester. To an audience including both students and faculty she presented “The European Court of Justice and the Romanian Constitutional Court,” painting the context and details of her persecution within the court system.

When the Hamilton Lugar School held its International & Institutions Week this April, the school partnered with the National Endowment for Democracy to present a dialogue between Dr. Bogdan and Lee Fein- stein, HLS dean and former US ambassador to Poland. Their conversation traced the judge’s own story and examined modern corruption as a legal concern, including the plunder of public assets, money laundering, back-to-back loans, and shadow banking.

In April, Dr. Bogdan delivered the keynote address to the 2021 Midwest Model European Union. Titled “The Current State of Corruption in the EU,” her talk before a virtual audience of more than 150 students and faculty from universities across the country drew attention to the ongoing challenges of corruption in EU countries not held accountable for violations of EU and international statutes on corruption. Secret, stolen money and kleptocratic acts: these are not the most pleasant realities about the Union. But they are realities nevertheless, and they need to be contemplated, most of all by those who would take on the role of a statesperson, be it in simulation or real life.

Camelia Bogdan is currently based in Washington, DC, but we sincerely hope to welcome her to the Bloomington campus in the future. Despite the distance, she has been a significant force in our spring semester, and we are eager to continue our work with the judge as her fellowship unfolds.

Welcome to the EURO Cafe!

Caponata & Cannoli

by Colton Ames

There are two things that characterize good Italian cooking: absolutely no precise measurements on any of the ingredients, and a colossal, insane,
stupid amount of garlic. I learned this when I moved away from home and realized I would no longer have regular access to the Italian food made by my mother and grandmother. Food was the strongest way I connected to my Italian heritage; every bite felt like a memory from a country that I never really got to claim as my own. So, imagine my frustration when I had to learn to make these cherished recipes myself, and yet a “Family Recipe” was never to be found. I would ask my grandmother, “Hey, Nonna, can you show me how to make gigi (a small Sicilian cookie normally eaten elsewhere around Carnevale)?” and she uses measurements that include “this much, did you see how much?” and “just a little bit”, or better yet, “three spoonfuls from this spoon” because apparently every kitchen is equipped with that large spoon, she uses to scoop Crisco. I learned that she made things her own way and that my mom learned to do the same recipes her own way after helping my nonna for years. It was time for me to do things my own way, and instead of following a recipe I would have to just try and follow the lessons I had been learning from them my whole life.

So as the weather begins to warm, here are my best attempts at offering two recipes that remind me of my family, and our connections to Italy that we keep alive through food.

*
CAPONATA is a Sicilian dish that is typically served cold as a salad or spread. It uses eggplant as a base

and includes tomato, olives, celery, onion, roasted red peppers, capers, nuts, and garlic. The origin of caponata is somewhat disputed, but most say it came from Arab groups who spread into Sicily in the 9th century and brought much of their cuisine with them. My favorite way to eat it is on top of some lightly toasted bread, almost like a bruschetta. You can even go the extra mile and spread some ricotta or goat cheese on the bread first. All these measurements are my best approximations, and as with most Italian food, it will be most delicious when you make changes that best fit your taste. The good thing about a dish like caponata is that it’s very well-suited to alterations. Leave things out and it will still be delicious. Like it spicy? Throw in some Calabri- an chilis. Love roasted peppers? Add the whole jar instead of half. Some of these measurements are vague because, at the end of the day, it’s up to you to make your food how you want.

Caponata recipe

1. Eggplant, two medium size (I sometimes use 3–5 Japanese eggplants, which are a little less bitter than the normal variety)
2. Onion, one medium yellow
3. Celery, 3–4 stalks (I recommend using celery hearts since they’re a little more tender and, again, less bitter)
4. Garlic, only your heart can tell you how much (but I recommend 3–4 cloves)
5. Green olives, pitted, enough for around 3/4 cup (check out the deli section of your local grocery store and see if they have an olive bar––any marinated green olive will do)
6. Roasted red peppers, around half a 12oz jar
7. Capers, 2–3 tablespoons
8. Pistachios, shelled, about 1/2 cup (toasted pine nuts are more traditional, but who can afford those? Pistachios are always a good substitute for pine nuts, even in things like pesto!)
9. Tomato paste, 2–3 tablespoons
10. Red pepper flakes, to taste
11. Lemon, or some other acid like red wine vinegar, 2–3 tablespoons 12. Sugar, two teaspoons
13. Salt and pepper, to taste

1. Start by roasting your eggplant. Start by taking a fork and poking some holes all around the eggplant––this will let the steam out as they cook and prevent them from exploding. Leaving them whole, pop them in a baking pan and give them a rub down with some olive oil. Pop them in a 400-degree oven for about 40 minutes, until they are tender and you can stick a knife in them. Set them aside and let them cool.

2. While your eggplants are cooking, prep your other veggies. Dice your onion and celery into small pieces and mince your garlic. Drain the roasted red peppers and give them a rough chop. Drain the capers from their brine. Chop the olives and the pistachios.

3. In a large skillet or saucepan, heat some olive oil on medium heat. Add chopped onion and sauté until they start to soften, about 5 minutes. Add the chopped celery and garlic and continue to sauté another 2-3 minutes. You still want the celery to have some crunch to it, so don’t cook for too long.

4. Add tomato paste and red pepper flakes, sauté for another minute and then remove the skillet from the heat.

5. After your eggplant has cooled, chop into about one-inch cubes. The eggplant should be incredibly soft and will lose its form as you mix in the other ingredients. Take the chopped eggplant and dump it into the skilled with the celery, onion, garlic, and tomato paste. Add chopped olives, peppers, and capers, and then mix well.

6. As you mix, things should come together and look like a relish or a spread. You can add a glug (that’s the technical term) of olive oil if you think it needs a little bit of moisture to hold it together as a paste. Add a few tablespoons of lemon juice or vinegar, sprinkle a little sugar on top, and mix well. This will give the caponata the agrodolce or sweet and sour flavors of Italian cuisine. Toss in the pistachios and give it a final mix.

7. Caponata is best served cold, and so you want to let it cool and refrigerate it for a few hours before serving. This also gives the flavors time to really harmonize.

CANNOLI. You’ve heard of cannoli, right? They’re a favorite of Italian Americans and if you want to use a pretty decent Brooklyn accent, you can say the word “cannoli” with some attitude and you will be halfway there. Cannoli are delicious Sicilian pastries made of a tube of fried dough and filled with a cream that’s usually made from ricotta cheese. They’re not too sweet, and so they go perfect with a cup of coffee, or just standing in front of your open fridge at 2am.

But here’s the thing: cannoli shells are a pain to make. Making the dough, rolling it around special molds so they hold their shape while they fry, it’s all a mess and it’s exhausting. Here’s how I cheat: I buy pre-made cannoli shells. There’s a little Italian market downtown that make the best cannolis and they sell me cannoli shells when I want to impress my friends by saying “These are homemade…kinda.” Take my word for it, find some shells online or at a local market, and just focus on making the best filling you possibly can. That will be good enough. be good enough.

P.S. For you linguists out there, yes, cannoli is technically the plural form of the word cannolo, which would be grammatically correct to describe one cannoli. But I’ve never heard a single person ever use the word cannolo, even if they’re only talking about one of the pastries. And more importantly, with how good they are, why would you ever want to talk about only one cannolo? Love yourself and have a second one.

Cannoli recipe

1. Cannoli shells (seriously, do not be prideful, just get them pre-made)
2. Ricotta cheese (whole milk if you can), 2 cups
3. Powdered sugar, 1 cup
4. Cinnamon, 1 teaspoon (but you can use a little extra if you want, I will not tell) 5. Heavy cream, around 1/4 cup (but you might not use all of it)

6. Extras: small chocolate chips or chopped pistachios are traditional to mix into the filling, but are optional

1. Dump the ricotta into a large bowl and use a whisk to break it up and “whip it”. This helps make the ricotta a little lighter and makes adding the other ingredients easier.

2. Add the cinnamon and 1/2 cup of the powdered sugar, whisk to incorporate, and then taste it. This is where you can adjust the sweetness to your taste. I find that around 3/4 cup is good for me, but sometimes I use a little more. Follow your heart on this one.

3. Ricotta has some texture to it, and so your mixture will not necessarily be silky smooth. Here is where you can add some of the heavy cream to loosen the filling a little and make it a little smoother. Add a little at a time so you do not overdo it.

4. Once your filling is to your desired sweetness and texture, fold in the chocolate chips or the pistachios.

5. Put the filling in a pastry bag or a plastic food storage bag with a corner snipped off. Pipe the filling into your cannoli shells and then dust with some powdered sugar on top. Depending on how large your shells are this can make 12-24 cannoli (or fewer, if you periodically eat spoonfuls of the filling like I do).

Food Hack: You can also just make the filling and use it as a dip! Fruit and graham crackers go great in it, or you can take the cannoli shells, break them into pieces, and use those to dip. Or, like me, you can simply use a spoon.