RECAS Fellows in conversation with Basil Kerski
June 14, 13h
Venue: University of Belgrade’s rectorate building, Room TBC
Moderator: TBC
Basil Kerski
Current cohort of Regional Network of Centres for Advanced Studies of Southeast Europe is focused on a culture of shared future in Southeast Europe – bringing forward narratives, evidence, and politics to replace a culture of hostility with a common vision of a joint future. The conversation with the Director of the European Solidarity Centre Basil Kerski will be valuable for acknowledging the need to cultivate a culture of productive oblivion and forward-looking narratives of our region.
Biography:
Cultural manager, exhibition curator, editor, essayist, publicist and expert on international politics. Director of the European Solidarity Centre in Gdansk, editor-in-chief of the German-Polish magazine DIALOG in Berlin.
Basil Kerski lives in Gdansk and Berlin and is the father of two sons. He was born into an Iraqi-Polish family in Gdansk in 1969 and lived in Iraq and the People’s Republic of Poland as a child. He fled Iraq with his parents in 1976.
Basil Kerski studied political science and Slavic studies at the Free University of Berlin. From 1991, he worked at the transatlantic Aspen Institute Berlin, the Research Institute of the German Council on Foreign Relations, the German Bundestag and the Social Science Research Centre Berlin.
Basil Kerski is the author and editor of over 40 German, Polish, English and Ukrainian books on historical, political and cultural topics. He is a regular commentator on European topics on Deutschlandfunk Kultur. Together with the Mayor of Gdansk, Paweł Adamowicz, Basil Kerski was the initiator of the English-language magazine “New Eastern Europe”.
He was a lecturer at the Otto Suhr Institute of the Free University of Berlin, at Humboldt University and Gdansk University. He has been visiting scholar at numerous European and American universities, including the Sorbonne in Paris, Georgetown University in Washington DC and Columbia University in New York.
Basil Kerski is a member of the board of the Polish PEN Club. In Brussels, he is responsible for the activities of the House of European History as Vice-Chairman of the Academic Advisory Board. He is also Chairman of the Academic Advisory Board of the Leipzig Forum for Freedom and Civil Rights, a member of the Board of Trustees of the Allianz Foundation, a member of the Advisory Board of the Berlin Wall Foundation and a member of the Advisory Board of the Foundation Places of German Democratic History.