Peggy Levitt (Chair and Professor of Sociology and the Luella LaMer Slaner Professor in Latin American Studies at Wellesley College, Massachusetts, USA)

Date: Thursday January 9th, 2020

Time: 15:00-18:00

Place: Sala Polivalent Rodoreda, Edifici Mercè Rodoreda, -1 Floor, UPF Ciutadella Campus

Title: Migrating People, Migrating Culture: How Museums and Manuscripts Redefine the Nation.

Abstract: This lecture explores how “national literature” and “national art” is used to create, reinvent, and reposition the nation and its position in the world.  Using the cases of Lebanon, Argentina, and South Korea, I explore how these different kinds of nations produce different kinds of national literatures, who gets included as a national cultural producer, what kinds of work national culture is expected to do, and what this tells us about the nation's current understanding of who its members are.

Bio: Peggy Levitt is Chair of the Sociology Department and the Luella LaMer Slaner Professor in Latin American Studies at Wellesley College and co-Director of Harvard University’s Politics and Social Change Workshop. She is also the co-founder of the Global (De)Centre.  Her most recent book, Artifacts and Allegiances: How Museums Put the Nation and the World on Display, was published by the University of California Press in July 2015. Peggy has received Honorary Doctoral Degrees from the University of Helsinki (2017) and from Maastricht University (2014). She is currently a Robert Schuman Fellow at the European University Institute (2017-2019) and a Distinguished Visitor at the Baptist University of Hong Kong (2019). Her books include Religion on the Edge (Oxford University Press, 2012), God Needs No Passport (New Press 2007), The Transnational Studies Reader (Routledge 2007), The Changing Face of Home (Russell Sage 2002), and The Transnational Villagers (UC Press, 2001).

www.peggylevitt.org 

www.wellesley.edu/sociology/faculty/levitt  

www.wcfia.harvard.edu/seminars/tsi  

Recommended Readings:

• Levitt, P. and M. Crul (2018). “Deconstructing and Reconstructing: Embracing Alternative Ways of Producing, Classifying and Disseminating Knowledge.” Etnološka Tribina 48 (41): 3-101.
• Levitt, P. and R. de la Torre. 2018. “Remapping and Rescaling the Religious World from Below: The Case of Santo Toribio and Santa Ana de Guadalupe in Mexico.”  Current Sociology 66 (3): 337-55.
• Levitt, P. 2015. Artifacts and Allegiances: How Museums Put the Nation and the World on Display. University of California Press.

For the upcoming GRITIM-UPF seminars, please visit this link.