Montana bound

I flew from Berlin to Montana this week and will be based here, working for the next couple of months, before returning to UCSB for teaching in the fall. The summers here are so beautiful, as you might be able to surmise from this photo of a late night sunset in Missoula. My year at the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin was very interesting and productive. Our end of the year party was last weekend on July 13th, and many of the fellows showcased their talents by participating in original musical compositions, skits, cooking an enormous feast, and by tearing it up on the dance floor into the early morning hours! I will miss many of the fellows and staff at the wissenschaftskolleg, and am grateful to have had this past year of work abroad. I'm glad to be back home, however, and I look forward to making the adjustment here in Montana.

Budapest Seminar on Media Globalization

I am in Budapest for a media globalization seminar at the Central European University organized by faculty at the University of Amsterdam. There are participants from Poland, Hungary, Bellarusse, Ukraine, Latvia, Estonia, Romania, Russia, Bulgaria, and Indonesia, among others. It has been a fantastic week here and the participants in the seminar are amazing. We have been discussing post-communism, national identity, media and memory, the expansion of Europe and the EU, and a variety of other topics. We are creating a blog so that participants can post their thoughts and ideas about media research in central and eastern Europe. Here is the url: www.ceumediastudies.blogspot.com