Architect and Bauhaus Dessau director Hannes Meyer (1889–1954) lived and worked in Switzerland, Germany, the Soviet Union, and Mexico. His career was shaped by political persecution, resistance, and efforts to construct more egalitarian and just societies. This presentation argues that Meyer’s itinerary illustrates especially clearly architecture’s poetic relationship with space and time, a relationship defined more by disjuncture and interruption than coherency and continuity. Ryan Long is the current Vambery Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature and is an associate professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Maryland.

In post-revolutionary Iran, women are legally “second class” citizens, with lesser rights than men in situations of family law (inheritance, custody, divorce, age of marriage) and public participation (restrictions on political office, public service, and legal testimony). But other evidence (ethnographic, demographic, and cinematic) indicates an increasingly empowered female population, and reminds us to look beyond surface impressions to understand the politics of daily life in the contemporary Islamic Republic of Iran. Through this lens, the lecture will attempt to ask and answer the question: How do we evaluate actual social and political conditions under less representative political systems, when […]