Practice
Mike van Graan
Mike van Graan is currently a Fellow at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (STIAS) where he is working on his first novel. He is also the President of the African Cultural Policy Network having been elected to that position a by its founding members in 2017. As a multiple award-winning playwright, he has 34 plays under his belt.
Mike graduated from the University of Cape Town with a BA Honours Degree in Drama and is currently registered for a PhD through the University of Pretoria, where he was awarded an honorary doctorate in 2018 in recognition of his creative and advocacy work.
He served in leadership positions in a variety of anti-apartheid cultural organisations including Director of the Community Arts Project, Projects Officer for the Congress of South African Writers and General Secretary of the National Arts Coalition.
After the country’s first democratic elections in 1994, he was appointed as a Special Adviser to the first minister responsible for arts and culture where he played an influential role in shaping post-apartheid cultural policies. From 2011-2018, he served as a UNESCO Technical Adviser to assist governments in the Global South to develop cultural policies aligned to the 2005 Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions.
He served as the Executive Director of the African Arts Institute (AFAI) from 2009-2016; AFAI was a South African NGO based in Cape Town whose two-fold mission was to help develop leadership for the African creative sector and to build regional markets for African artists and their creative works. He also served – for six years (2007-2012) – as the founding Secretary General of Arterial Network, a Pan African network of artists, cultural activists, creative enterprises and others engaged in the African creative sector and its contribution to human rights, democracy and development in Africa.
As a cultural activist and commentator, Van Graan has written numerous columns for the Mail and Guardian, Artslink.co.za, The Cultural Weapon as well as Litnet.co.za. He initiated and co-edited three editions of The South African Handbook on Arts and Culture, a comprehensive directory on the arts in South Africa.
From 1 September 2016 to the end of May 2017, he was a Richard von Weizsaecker Fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin. In August 2017, he completed an artist’s residency at the Robert Rauschenberg estate on Captiva Island, Florida, where he wrote a play, Another One’s Bread, commissioned by the Centre for Excellence in Food Security at the University of the Western Cape.
His recent international work includes a commission from IETM, On the Move and Dutch Culture to produce at toolkit on fairer international cultural collaboration (launched 1 June 2018), preparing and facilitating the programme for Atelier for Young Festival Managers (Johannesburg, March 2018; Gothenburg, August 2018; Greece, February 2019; Malta, March 2019) and helping to design and then teach on the Arts and Culture Entrepreneurship programme hosted by the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture in Beirut (November 2018).
Creatively, Van Graan works as a playwright. He was appointed as Artscape’s Associate Playwright from 2011-2014 (Artscape is one of five nationally-subsidised theatres) and is considered as one of South Africa’s leading contemporary playwrights, having garnered numerous nominations and awards for his plays that interrogate the post-apartheid South African condition. Most recently, his play on African migration and refugees – When Swallows Cry – won the Naledi Theatre Awards for Best Production, Best Director and Best Script (2017).
He received the Standing Ovation Award at South Africa’s 2012 National Arts Festival for his sustained contribution to the Festival as a writer and activist, and in 2013 he was appointed as the inaugural Festival Playwright where four of his plays were showcased.
Van Graan is the 2018 recipient of the Sweden-based Hiroshima Foundation for Peace and Culture Award in recognition of his contribution to the fight against apartheid, to building a post-apartheid society and to the study of the interface between peace and culture both in his home country and across the African continent.
Ronald Grätz
Ronald Grätz is the Secretary General of ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen). Before assuming his current position at ifa, he was director of the Goethe-Institut in Portugal. Ronald Grätz worked as Division Director for German Language at the UNESCO scheme Colégio Benjamin Constant in São Paulo, of which he was also deputy director. In 1993, he qualified as a lecturer at the Goethe-Institut in Munich, Cairo and Goettingen and worked as consultant for pedagogical support and as a teacher with the Goethe-Institut in Barcelona from 1994 to 1998. From 2002 to 2005, Ronald Grätz was a consultant for new media and the director of local programme activities in Eastern Europe and Central Asia at the Goethe-Institut in Moscow.
Meenakshi Shedde
Meenakshi Shedde is India and South Asia Delegate to the Berlin Film Festival (with Berlin since 1998) and independent film curator, based in Mumbai, India. Winner of India’s National Film Award for Best Film Critic, she has been on the jury of 20 international film festivals, including Cannes, Berlin and Venice. She has been India/Asia/International Curator/Consultant to the Berlin, Toronto, Locarno, Busan, British Film Institute (BFI London), Dubai, IFFI-Goa, Kerala, Mumbai and Colombo Film Festivals. A filmmaker, she has also been Mentor on Script Labs and Film Critics’ Labs worldwide. A senior journalist, she freelances for media worldwide, including Variety, Screen International, Sight & Sound, Film Comment, Cahiers du Cinema and Midday, and has written for/edited 18 books, mainly on cinema.
Academic
Seyla Benhabib
Seyla Benhabib, born in Istanbul, Turkey, is the Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at Yale University and was Director of its Program in Ethics, Politics and Economics from 2002 to 2008. Professor Benhabib is the recipient of the Ernst Bloch prize for 2009 (one of Germany’s most prestigious philosophical prizes) and of the Leopold Lucas Prize from the Theological Faculty of the University of Tubingen for 2012. She was the President of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association in 2006-07 and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1995. She has previously taught at the New School for Social Research and Harvard Universities, where she was Professor of Government from 1993-2000 and Chair of Harvard’s Program on Social Studies from 1996-2000. A Guggenheim Fellowship recipient (2011-12), she has been research affiliate and senior scholar in many institutions in the US and in Europe such as Berlin’s Wissenschaftkolleg (2009).
Professor Benhabib holds Honorary Degrees from the Universities of Utrecht (2004), Valencia (2010) and Bogazici University in Istanbul (2012).
She is the author of Critique, Norm and Utopia. A Study of the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory (1986; German, Kritik, Norm und Utopie, Fischer Verlag, 1992); Situating the Self. Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics(1992; winner of the National Educational Association’s best book of the year award; German, Selbst im Kontext, Suhrkamp 1995) ; together with Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell and Nancy Fraser, Der Streit um Differenz 1993; in English, Feminism as Critique (1994); The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (1996; reissued in 2002; Hannah Arendt und die Melancholische Denkerin der Moderne,Suhrkamp 2006); The Claims of Culture. Equality and Diversity in the Global Era, (2002); The Rights of Others. Aliens, Citizens and Residents (2004), which won the Ralph Bunche award of the American Political Science Association (2005) and the North American Society for Social Philosophy award (2004); translated as Die Rechte der Anderen (Suhrkamp 2008); Another Cosmopolitanism: Hospitality, Sovereignty and Democratic Iterations, with responses by Jeremy Waldron, Bonnie Honig and Will Kymlicka (Oxford University Press, 2006); German, Kosmopolitismus und Demokratie (Campus 2008), and Dignity in Adversity. Human Rights in Troubled Times (UK and USA: Polity Press, 2011). She has most recently edited, together with Judith Resnik, Migrations and Mobilities: Gender, Borders and Citizenship (NYU Press, 2009; named by Choice one of the outstanding academic books of the year), and also, Politics in Dark Times. Encounters with Hannah Arendt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
Her work has been translated into German, Spanish, French, Italian, Turkish, Swedish, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Hebrew, Japanese and Chinese and she has also edited and coedited 10 volumes on topics ranging from democracy and difference to feminism as critique; the communicative ethics controversy and identities, allegiances and affinities.
Professor Benhabib has held many prestigious visiting professorships such as the Spinoza chair in Amsterdam (2001); the Gauss Lectures at Princeton (1998); the John Seeley Memorial Lectures (Cambridge University, 2002), the Tanner Lectures (Berkeley, 2004) and was the Catedra Ferrater Mora Distinguished Professor in Girona, Spain (Summer 2005).
She has been Adjunct Faculty in Law at the Yale Law School (2011; 2008; 2007); a Visiting Professor of Law at the University of Tel-Aviv’s Zvi Meitar Center for Advanced Legal Studies (2010) and is a Straus Fellow at NYU’s Straus Center for Advanced Studies in Law and Justice (2011-2012).
Francoise Benhamou
Economist, Commissioner at ARCEP (Autorité de régulation des communications électroniques et des postes). Professor of Economics at Paris 13 University and Sciences Po-Paris. Member of the Board of the Musée du Louvre, of the Board of the Institut national du Patrimoine, of the Cercle des Economistes. Member of the program Committee of the TV channel ARTE, of the Board of the Association française de sciences économiques, of the board of the journal Esprit. President of the research Committee of the Centre National du livre. Past-President of the ACEI (Association for Cultural Economics International). Blog on the book market in Livres Hebdo. She has recently published Le livre à l’heure numérique. Papier, écrans. Vers de nouveaux vagabondages (Seuil, 2014) and Politique culturelle, fin de partie ou nouvelle saison ? (La Documentation française, 2015).
Mira Burri
Mira Burri has been a senior research fellow at the World Trade Institute since the very beginning of the NCCR Trade project. During the NCCR Phase 1 (2005-2009), Mira was the alternate leader of the eDiversity group. Since then she has been leading the projects on the digital technologies and trade governance.
Mira is a lecturer at the University of Bern. She teaches the course ‘International Law of Contemporary Media’ , and co-teaches ‘International Trade Regulation’ and ‘International Intellectual Property Law’.
Mira received her law degree from the University of Sofia and a Master of Advanced European Studies (MAES) from the Europe Institute of the University of Basel. Her doctoral thesis dealt with EC communications and competition law (Cameron May 2007) and was awarded the Professor Walther Hug prize for one of the best doctoral theses in law in Switzerland (2006/2007). Prior to joining the NCCR in 2005, Mira was a research fellow at the University of Lucerne and contributed actively to establishing the i-call research centre.
Mira is the co-editor of the publications Free Trade versus Cultural Diversity(Schulthess 2004); Digital Rights Management: The End of Collecting Societies?(Staempfli et al. 2005), as well as more recently, Intellectual Property and Traditional Cultural Expressions in a Digital Environment (Edward Elgar 2008), Governance of Digital Game Environments and Cultural Diversity (Edward Elgar 2010) and Trade Governance in the Digital Age (Cambridge University Press 2012). She has published in a number of peer-reviewed outlets such as the Journal of International Economic Law, the Common Market Law Review, the European Law Review, the International Journal of Cultural Property and I/S: A Journal of the Law and Policy of the Information Society.
Mira is a member of the editorial board of the International Journal of Communications Law and Policy and of the International Journal of Cultural Property, as well as a rapporteur to the UK Economic and Social Research Council. Mira has consulted the European Parliament on cultural diversity matters. She consults also on trade and innovation issues, in particular with regard to digital trade.
Victoria de Grazia
I was born in Hyde Park, Chicago after World War II. My paternal grandfather, who came from Sicily, was a musician and symphony band conductor, and he, along with my father and his three brothers, were active in city reform politics. My mother, Jill Oppenheim, came from New York City , the daughter of a well-to-do German Jewish family long resident in the U.S.. She and my father met at the University of Chicago. The family, growing to seven children, moved back and forth across the United States. My first trip to Europe was in 1960 when my father was appointed as a delegate to UNESCO and he took me with him to Paris. My first long residence abroad was in 1963 when my father moved the family to Italy. I eventually married an Italian, Leonardo Paggi, and have a daughter, Livia. I have been a resident of New York City since 1969 interrupted by long stays in Italy, France, and Germany.
My schooling was mainly in the United States. After attending Princeton High School and Miss Barry’s American School in Florence Italy, I went to Smith College where I graduated magna cum laude in 1968. After a year at the University of Florence on a Fulbright Fellowship, I pursued my doctoral studies in history at Columbia University. From my involvement in the student anti-war movements in Italy and the U.S., I became interested in studying how force and persuasion or hard and soft power mix differently in liberal and authoritarian systems of rule. My doctoral thesis was on the Italian fascists’ after-work organizations, and it was defended with “distinction” in 1976 and won the Shepard Clough dissertation award and Society for Italian Historian Studies prize for best first manuscript. I was able to turn it into a book at the American Academy in Rome where I was a Rome Prize Fellow in 1978. In 1981. it was published as The Culture of Consent: Mass Organization of Leisure in Fascist Italy, (Cambridge University Press, 1981) and subsequently translated into Italian and Japanese.
Before becoming a professor at Columbia University in 1993, I taught at Lehman College of the City of New York (1974-76) and at Rutgers University (1976-1993). As the project director at the Rutgers Center for Analysis in 1991-1993, I directed a study of ‘Consumer cultures in historical perspective,” the results of which were published in The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective(University of California Press, 1996). In the time that my daughter was very young and being raised between New York City and Civitella della Chiana , a tiny Tuscan hill town near Arezzo, I also began to write about the different ways national and family politics shape women’s lives. The result was How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy, 1920-1945 (University of California Press, 1992) . This book won the Joan Kelly Prize of the American Historical Association for 1992 and the Premio Acquistoria citation for 1994. I returned to thinking about the Fascist dictatorship in 2000 when I was able to work with the Italian historian, Sergio Luzzatto compiling the Dizionario del Fascismo. The two volumes were brought out by the venerable Turin publishing house Einaudi in 2002-2003. Their 660 entries by 180 scholars from Italy and many other countries signal a new season in the study of Italy under Mussolini’s regime.
My book, Irresistible Empire (Harvard University Press, 2005) grew out of my longstanding curiosity about how Europeans have contended with the U.S.’s rising hegemony in the twentieth century. It is the outcome of long periods of research in U.S. and European archives, and was completed with support from a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Jean Monnet Fellowship at the European University Institute. Many parts of the work benefited from being presented to New and Old World audiences, and earlier versions of chapters have appeared in German, French, Italian, and Spanish-language publications.
A member of the founding collective of the Radical History Review, I have served on the board of editors of numerous journals including the Journal of Modern History,Geneses, Contemporary European History, and the Journal of Consumer Culture. From 1997 to 2002, I was the National Chair of the Council for European Studies. In the past several years, I have also taught at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and various other European universities, as well as lecturing in the U.S., Canada, Cuba, and Europe. Currently I also teach at the European Union’s graduate faculty, the European University Institute at Fiesole, Italy.
Amitai Etzioni
After receiving his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley in 1958, Dr. Amitai Etzioni served as a Professor of Sociology at Columbia University for 20 years; part of that time as the Chairman of the department. He was a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution in 1978 before serving as a Senior Advisor to the White House from 1979-1980. In 1980, Dr. Etzioni was named the first University Professor at The George Washington University, where he is the Director of the Institute for Communitarian Policy Studies. From 1987-1989, he served as the Thomas Henry Carroll Ford Foundation Professor at the Harvard Business School.
Dr. Etzioni served as the president of the American Sociological Association in 1994-95, and in 1989-90 was the founding president of the International Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics. In 1990, he founded the Communitarian Network, a not-for-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to shoring up the moral, social and political foundations of society. He was the editor of The Responsive Community: Rights and Responsibilities, the organization’s quarterly journal, from 1991-2004. In 1991, the press began referring to Dr. Etzioni as the “guru” of the communitarian movement. Dr. Etzioni is the author of twenty-four books, including The Monochrome Society (Princeton University Press, 2001); The Limits of Privacy (Basic Books, 1999);The New Golden Rule (Basic Books, 1996), which received the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s 1997 Tolerance Book Award; The Spirit of Community (Crown Books, 1993); and The Moral Dimension: Toward a New Economics (Free Press, 1988). His most recent books are My Brother’s Keeper: A Memoir and a Message (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003); From Empire to Community: A New Approach to International Relations (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); and How Patriotic is the Patriot Act? (Routledge, 2004).
Outside of academia, Dr. Etzioni’s voice is frequently heard in the media.
In 2001, he was named among the top 100 American intellectuals as measured by academic citations in Richard Posner’s book, Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline.
Also in 2001, Dr. Etzioni was awarded the John P. McGovern Award in Behavioral Sciences, as well as the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. He was also the recipient of the Seventh James Wilbur Award for Extraordinary Contributions to the Appreciation and Advancement of Human Values by the Conference on Value Inquiry, as well as the Sociological Practice Association’s Outstanding Contribution Award.
Patricia Goff
Patricia Goff is a CIGI Senior Fellow. She is also director of the PhD Program in Global Governance at the Balsillie School of International Affairs and associate professor of political science at Wilfrid Laurier University. She specializes in international political economy, international relations theory, and international organizations, with a particular interest in trade, intellectual property, and the cultural capacity of international organizations.
She is the author of Limits to Liberalization: Local Culture in a Global Marketplace (Cornell University Press, 2007), co-editor (with Paul Heinbecker) of Irrelevant or Indispensable?:The United Nations in the 21st Century (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2005) and co-editor (with Kevin C. Dunn) of Identity and Global Politics: Theoretical and Empirical Elaborations (Palgrave, 2004).
At CIGI, Patricia’s research will focus on global, plurilateral and regional trade arrangements, in particular Canada’s agreement with the European Union on the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) and the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP).
Toby Miller
Toby Miller is a British-Australian-US interdisciplinary social scientist. He is the author and editor of over 30 books, has published essays in more than 100 journals and edited collections, and is a frequent guest commentator on television and radio programs.
His research covers the media, sports, labor, gender, race, citizenship, politics, and cultural policy, as well as the success of Hollywood overseas and the adverse effects of electronic waste. Miller’s work has been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Swedish, German, Spanish and Portuguese. He has been a Media Scholar in Residence at Sarai, the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in India, Becker Lecturer at the University of Iowa, a Queensland Smart Returns Fellow in Australia, Honorary Professor at the Center for Critical and Cultural Studies, University of Queensland, CanWest Visiting Fellow at the Alberta Global Forum in Canada, and an International Research collaborator at the Centre for Cultural Research in Australia.
Among his books, SportSex was a Choice Outstanding Title for 2002 and A Companion to Film Theory a Choice Outstanding Title for 2004. Born in the United Kingdom and brought up in England, India, and Australia, Miller earned a B.A. in history and political science at the Australian National University in 1980 and a Ph.D. in philosophy and communication studies at Murdoch University in 1991. He taught at Murdoch, Griffith University, and the University of New South Wales and was a professor at New York University from 1993 to 2004, when he joined the University of California, Riverside. Miller retired in December 2013.
Andrew Moravcsik
ANDREW MORAVCSIK is Professor of Politics and Director of the European Union Program at Princeton University. He has authored over 125 scholarly publications, including four books, on European integration, international relations theory, qualitative/historical methods, human rights, international law and organization, and other topics. His history of the European Union, The Choice for Europe, has been called “the most important work in the field” (American Historical Review). The National Science, Ford, Fulbright, Olin and Krupp Foundations, as well as various universities and institutes, have supported his research. In 2011, he won the Stanley Kelley Award for Undergraduate Teaching from Princeton University. He has served as trade negotiator for the US Government, special assistant to the Deputy Prime Minister of the Republic of Korea, press assistant for the European Commission, and on various policy commissions. He has published over 100 commentaries and policy analyses, currently serves as Book Review Editor (Europe) at Foreign Affairs, and was formerly Contributing Editor at Newsweek and Editor-in-Chief at a Washington foreign policy journal. Since 2004 he has been a Non-Resident Senior Fellow of the Brookings Institution, and has been at various times a long-term visitor at research institutes in France, Italy, Britain, the US and China. His daily commentary on classical music, particularly opera, has appeared in The Financial Times, New York Times, Newsweek, Opera, Opera News and elsewhere, and his scholarship on the sociology of music, again focusing on opera, has appeared in Opera and Opera Quarterly. He holds a BA from Stanford, an MA from Johns Hopkins (SAIS), and a PhD from Harvard University, as well as having attended German and French universities. He lives in Princeton, NJ, with his wife Anne-Marie Slaughter, and his two sons, Edward (17) and Alexander (14).
Christine Sylvester
Christine Sylvester is professor of political science and of women’s studies at UConn and is affiliated with the School of Global Studies, The University of Gothenburg Sweden. A native of Connecticut, she also holds Australian citizenship and has worked extensively outside the USA, including at the Australian National University (Canberra), The Institute of Social Studies (The Hague, Netherlands), and Lancaster University (UK). She was awarded the Swedish Research Council’s Kerstin Hesselgren Professorship for Sweden for 2010-2011. Other recent awards include a Leverhulme fellowship at the School of Oriental and African Studies, The University of London; the Susan Northcutt Award of the International Studies Association (ISA); Eminent Scholar of the Feminist Theory and Gender Studies Section of the ISA; the inaugural Ann Tickner Award of the ISA, and ISA Vice-President. She was also named one of Fifty Key Thinkers in International Relations, Martin Griffiths, Steven Roach, M. Scott Solomon, eds. (Routledge, 2008), and has regularly given lectures at the United Nations University, Tokyo. Her most recent research and writings are on the state of theory in International Relations, war as experience, and art/museums and international relations. She is the editor of the Routledge book series: War, Politics, Experience. In 2014 Lund University awarded her an honorary doctorate in the social sciences.
David Throsby
Professor David Throsby AO is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Economics at Macquarie University. He is internationally known for his work as an economist with specialist interests in the economics of the arts and culture. He holds Bachelor and Master degrees from the University of Sydney and a PhD in Economics from the London School of Economics. Professor Throsby’s research interests include the role of culture in economic development, the economic situation of individual artists, the economics of the performing arts, the creative industries, the economics of heritage and the relationship between cultural and economic policy. He has published several books and a large number of reports and journal articles in these areas, as well as in the economics of education and the economics of the environment. His book Economics and Culture, published by Cambridge University Press in 2001, has been translated into eight languages.
Recent research-related publications include Handbook of the Economics of Art and Culture Vol. 2 (Elsevier/North Holland, 2014) co-edited with Victor Ginsburgh. He also co-edited, with Michael Hutter, Beyond Price: Value in Culture, Economics and the Arts(Cambridge University Press, 2008). Professor Throsby’s latest book, The Economics of Cultural Policy, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2010.
David Throsby has been a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia since 1987, and was elected a Distinguished Fellow of the Association for Cultural Economics International in 2008. During a career spanning employment in both government and academia, he has been chair or member of a number of boards and committees at both national and international levels. He has also been a consultant to a number of international organisations including FAO, UNCTAD, UNESCO, OECD, and the World Bank. He is a member of several Editorial Boards, including the Journal of Cultural Economics, the International Journal of Cultural Policy, Poetics, the Asia Pacific Journal of Arts and Cultural Management and the Journal of Cultural Property.
In January 2014, David Throsby was made an Officer of the Order of Australia for distinguished service to the community as a leading cultural economist, to the promotion and preservation of Australian arts and heritage, and to tertiary education.
In addition to his academic work, he has also written several plays, one of which was produced at the Royal Court Theatre in London in 1975. He is married with two daughters and lives in Sydney.
Arts and International Affairs 