Visiting Speakers

Professor Shovlin works in the areas of political and cultural history of ancien régime Europe, particularly France; the French Revolution; history of political economy; aristocratic culture and politics; international politics and international political thought in eighteenth-century Europe; the Franco-British relationship.

Alexandr Skidan was born in Leningrad in 1965. He is a poet, critic, essayist and translator. Skidan attended The Free University (1989–1992), while working as a stoker in the boiler house (1985–2002).

Mary Ann Smart is Gladyce Arata Terrill Professor of Music at the University of California, Berkeley.  Her book, Mimomania: Music and Gesture in Nineteenth-Century Opera (U of California Press, 2004), looked at the ways music gives signals for stage movement and acting style in repertory stretching from the first French grand operas of the 1830s to Verdi’s Aida and Wagner’s Ring.

Kate Southwood received an M.A. in French Medieval Art from the University of Illinois, and an M.F.A. in Fiction from the University of Massachusetts Program for Poets and Writers. Kate has published articles and essays in The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, and The Huffington Post, among others. She has also written in Norwegian for the online news service ABCnyheter.no.  

Professor Spang is an historian of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe who has concentrated primarily on the interaction of politics, culture, and consumption. In her most recent research, she has been especially interested in money.

Art Spiegelman is a Pulitzer Prize-winning artist and illustrator, author of MAUS, In the Shadow of No Towers, and Breakdowns.

Stephanie Spray is a filmmaker, phonographer and anthropologist whose work explores and exploits the confluence of social aesthetics and art in everyday life. Stephanie is currently a PhD candidate and Teaching Fellow in the Sensory Ethnography Laboratory, housed in the Anthropology Department at Harvard University; has a secondary field in Critical Media Practice; and is a fellow at the Film Study Center. She holds a Master’s degree in the study of world religions from Harvard Divinity School and a B.A. from Smith College.

Reinhard Stauber has been with the Universität Klagenfurt since 2003, when he was appointed Professor of History. He has been serving as the Dean of Arts and Humanities since 2011. Some of Prof. Stauber's research interests include, Italy and its European ties in the Age of the Renaissance, the Wittelsbach territories and the empire in 1500, national and regional Early Modern History, Enlightenment and Absolutism in reform of the Austrian monarchy, Napoleonic rule in Germany and Italy, problems of national and non-national tradition and identity formation in the early modern period, and "space" as a historical category.