Marci Shore, Chair in European Intellectual History at the Munk School at the University of Toronto, in conversation with Sarah Lawrence history faculty Philipp Nielsen.
A question many ask with great urgency these days is, “What can we learn from history?” Marci Shore, an intellectual historian focusing on Central and Eastern Europe, has engaged with this question in her academic career and increasingly as a public intellectual. In her dialogue and cooperation with Eastern and Central European intellectuals, Shore herself has become entangled in the region’s politics, most notably in her defense of Ukrainian independence but also of democracy more widely. This engagement is also no longer limited to Europe. Shore comments frequently on the state of politics in the United States. In conversation with Sarah Lawrence History faculty member Philipp Nielsen, Shore will explore what it means to be an engaged historian, what we can learn from history, and how it matters to ourselves, to our societies, and to international relations.
Marci Shore began a position as Chair in European Intellectual History at the Munk School at the University of Toronto in 2025. She was previously professor of history at Yale University; she is also a regular visiting fellow at the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna. In spring 2025 she guest curated, together with Oksana Forostyna, the Kyiv Book Arsenal with the theme “Everything is Translation.” She is the translator of Michał Głowiński's The Black Seasons and the author of Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation's Life and Death in Marxism, 1918-1968 and The Taste of Ashes: The Afterlife of Totalitarianism in Eastern Europe. A new edition of her book The Ukrainian Night: An Intimate History of Revolution was published in 2024. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship for her forthcoming book about phenomenology in East-Central Europe In Pursuit of a Certain Truth: The Lives and Loves of a Central European Idea.
Barbara Walters Campus Center BWCC Room B
Open to the public
/ Thursday