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Not in Poznan : (


A casualty of the pandemic: today I should have been in Poznań, Poland.  But of course I am not.

I'm on the board of the Austrian Studies Association, which was planning to hold its annual conference this year in Poznań--its first European conference outside of Vienna.  The conference would have been wrapping up this weekend.  Afterwards I planned to spend a few days in Wrocław (formerly the German Breslau) before coming home.

I had organized a panel about the Austrian author Peter Handke.  Handke won the 2019 Nobel Prize for Literature, an award that was very controversial because of Handke's pro-Serbian writings during and after the Yugoslavian wars of the 90's.  I was interested in exploring the relationship between his political utterances and his fiction.

Now the conference is rescheduled for next summer.  Who knows what the world will look like by then?


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