Eric Beaty – Economic and Commercial Attaché

United States Consulate for Western France

 

Born in Sapulpa, Oklahoma on October 21, 1958, Eric Beaty grew up in Nacogdoches, Texas.  He graduated from Nacogdoches High School in 1976 and did his undergraduate studies at Stephen F. Austin University in Nacogdoches, earning a B.A. (Cum Laude - 1979) with a double major in French and German and a minor in history.  He went on to earn an M.A. in French literature at Rice University in Houston, Texas (1982).  Later, Beaty received an Msc. in Linguistics from Aston University in Birmingham, U.K. (1996).

Beaty began his career at the University of Rennes 2, France in 1981 as a lecturer in American studies.  He then worked as the assistant director of courses at two Chambers of Commerce in France.  In 1986, Beaty became the executive director of a bi-national center known as the Franco-American Institute, an organization created by Rennes City Hall, the U.S. Embassy in Paris and Rochester, N.Y. City Hall in 1961. 

In 1999, Beaty was instrumental in setting up the United States Consulate for Western France. He was hired in 2000 by the U.S. State Department that same year as the Economic and Commercial Attaché. 

Beaty has participated in the organization of 14 White House visits and 36 congressional delegation visits.  He has chaired the Rennes-Rochester, N.Y. sister-city relationship since 1986.   He is on the board of the University of Rennes 2.  Beaty has received 18 meritorious and superior service awards from the White House, the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Department of Commerce.  Beaty received a National Export Initiative award for his export success stories in 2011.   

Symposium: Europe Today and the Memory of Violence

All sessions at W. T. Young Auditorium, University of Kentucky

Karen E. Till is Senior Lecturer of Cultural Geography at Maynooth University and Director of the Space&Place Research Collaborative. Till’s geo-ethnographic research examines the significance of place in personal and social memory, and the ongoing legacies of state-perpetrated violence. In addition to numerous articles and chapters, her publications include The New Berlin: Place, Politics, Memory(2005), Mapping Spectral Traces (2010), and the co-edited volumesTextures of Place (2001) and Walls, Borders and Boundaries (2012). Till’s book in progress, Wounded Cities, highlights the significance of place-based memory-work and ethical forms of care at multiple scales that may contribute to creating more socially just futures.

Throughout Europe, a wave of anniversary commemorations remembering events such as war and division has been celebrated over the past five years. Using examples from the ‘Super-Gedenkjahr’ in Berlin (2014) and the ‘Decade of the Centenaries’ in Dublin, I examine how recalling difficult pasts may extend conservative agendas of ‘normalising’ the nation, but may also work to recall the foundations of the democratic state as a means of challenging forms of current-day social violence in a neoliberal and transnational Europe. 

For more information visit: http://www.uky.edu/academy/2016BBS.

Symposium

Cloistered Women’s Voices: Sound, Song and Lyric in Early Modern Convents

March 30-April 1, 2016

University of Kentucky, Lexington KY

In recent years, sound, lyric and song in early modern women’s religious communities has received increased attention from musicologists, historians and literary and cultural studies specialists.  Despite renewed scholarly interest, disciplinary and geographic boundaries tend to limit prior approaches.  For example, few extant works address the intersection of music and literary cultures in early modern women’s religious communities and none consider convent music-making from a global perspective.  As a result, it becomes difficult to draw conclusions about cloistered women’s lyrical and vocal production as a broad cultural practice.  The Cloistered Women’s Voices Symposium thus responds to these lacunae by examining song and lyric in convents throughout Europe and the Americas.  This comparative and cross-disciplinary scope puts diverse convent music cultures into dialogue and draws out paradigms of voice among cloistered women.

SCHEDULE

Thursday, March 31

6:00 pm—concert; St. Augustine's Chapel, Rose Street

Friday, April 1

Niles Gallery

9:00 am—First session: Voice and Lyric

1. “Reading Lyrics: Miguel de Toledano’s Minerva sacra.” Colleen Baade, Creighton University 

2. “The nun’s smooth tongue has sucked her in”: Cloistered Language in Marvell’s Upon Appleton House.”  Tessie Prakas, Kenyon College

3. “Songs in the Prison Cell, Songs at the Scaffold: Carmelite Convent Song extramuros, and the case of the Sixteen Carmelites of Compiègne.” Daniel Hanna, Lake Forest University

10:30—Coffee break

11:00—Second session: Sound and Contemplation

4. “Spiritual Soundscapes: La Musique spirituelle (1718) and La Dissection spirituelle of Marie-André Duplessis de Sainte-Hélène of the Hôtel-Dieu of Quebec." Thomas Carr, Harold E. Spencer Emeritus Professor of French

5. “Contrapuntal Voices: Silence in New Spanish Convents.” Sarah Finley, Christopher Newport University

6. “Nuns’ Spiritual Exercises and Music in Early Modern Rome.” Kimberlyn Montford, Trinity University

12:45—Lunch break

2:00—Third session: Performance Practice

7. “A Most Useless Vanity: Venetian Novices Singing at their own Monacations.” Jonathan Glixon, University of Kentucky

8. “Women Singing Low: Bass and Tenor parts in Viennese Convents.” Janet Page, University of Memphis

3:00—Coffee break

3:45—Keynote:  "Pænæ Catænæ sunt Præmium Amoris: Bodily Mortification and Mystical Death in Convent Choir Lofts." Craig Monson, Paul Tietjens Professor Emeritus of Music, Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri

Organizers: Mónica Díaz, U of Kentucky; Sarah Finley, Christopher Newport University; Jonathan Glixon, U of Kentucky; Daniel Hanna, Lake Forest College

Jay M. Winter, the Charles J. Stille Professor of History at Yale University, is a specialist on World War I and its impact on the 20th century and one of the pioneers of the field of the history of memory.  Winter is the author or co-author of a dozen books, including  Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History, 1914-1918: The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century, and Remembering War: The Great War between History and Memory in the 20th Century. He is co-director of the project on Capital Cities at War: Paris, London, Berlin 1914-1919,  was co-producer, co-writer and chief historian for the PBS series “The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century,” which won an Emmy Award, a Peabody Award and a Producers Guild of America Award for best television documentary in 1997.

This talk focuses on a contrast between the continuing presence today of the sacred language of martyrdom in some parts of Europe (and elsewhere), and the fading away or disappearance of the language of martyrdom in other parts of Europe by looking at the two contrasting cases of the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust.  While martyrdom is at the heart of how Armenians today remember the catastrophe of 1915, there has emerged since the 1940s a very different linguistic register in Jewish responses to the Holocaust, one by and large free of the language of martyrology.The implications of this distinction are far-reaching.  How we think about catastrophe matters in contemporary Europe. We must commemorate the victims of violence, but we must also seek a way out of the spiral of continuing conflict which the language of martyrdom perpetuates. 

For more information visit http://www.uky.edu/academy/2016BBS. 

Basque, a minority language spoken in a region straddling the border between Northeastern Spain and Southwestern France, has fascinated linguists and nonlinguists alike for centuries. Part of the mystique surrounding the language is the perception that it is an 'old language': it is an isolate with no demonstrable genealogical relationship with any other language, and has been spoken in the Basque Country for over 2,000 years, a surprising fact given its minority status. This puzzlement about Basque has led many to look for connections to languages spoken in places as far apart from the Basque Country and each other as the Caucasus, India, and North America, or to claim that Basque is the remnant of a language family that was spoken in a much larger area than it is now.



One of the goals of this talk is to demystify Basque, concentrating on a fact often overlooked by those not familiar with the language, namely, that it has been in continuous contact with other languages, especially with Latin and its descendant Romance languages for the last 2,000 years or so. This contact situation has had profound effects, both on the language itself and on its social status, as well as on our scholarly understanding of the structure of the language. On the one hand, the study of the influence that Latin and Romance languages have had on Basque has been one of the main tools that have allowed Basque linguists to elucidate certain aspects of the structure of the language as it was spoken about 2,000 years ago, a scholarly accomplishment that would probably not have been possible if Basque hadn't been in such a contact situation. On the other hand, it would be impossible to understand the current situation of Basque as a minority language without an understanding of its relation to the majority languages spoken in the Basque Country (Spanish and French).

Although the Romani language originated in India, it took its definitive shape in Europe. In this sense, the Romani people are as European as many other peoples who arrived in Europe during the Middle Ages, such as the Hungarians. This lecture will discuss the history and cultures of the Romani people and their place in discourses of Europe and nationhood.

From the mystique of the Arthurian Romances with its knights, swords and Camelot, to the scenes of contemporary Neo-Druids holding their white-robed ceremonies at Stonehenge, or the macabre images of the Wicker man, burning to propitiate the ancient gods, the Celts have about them an aura of the mysterious, the romantic, the sinister. Even among linguists the Celtic languages have something of a reputation for being "exotic" with their strange word orders and initial consonant mutations. Yet the current social status and future prospects of the Celtic languages are far less romantic and exotic, for indeed, like many or even most of the minority languages of the planet, the Celtic languages are all endangered, to one degree or another, as their speakers embrace a present and future that looks more successful through the lens of English or French. In this talk we will explore some of this ground together, from the record of the Celts in Antiquity to the current position of their languages as endangered languages of western Europe.