New Horizons Lecture by Prof. Eva Illouz

Tuesday, June 9, 6:00 p.m.
Alte Aula, Münzgasse 30

Moderated by Prof. Dr. Friederike Lorenz-Sinai (IRex)

Emotions play a decisive role in shaping the political culture of democracy. Israeli-French sociologist Eva Illouz has explored how fear, resentment, anxiety, disgust, and love emerge from social conditions and influence democracy in widely discussed works, including The Emotional Life of Populism: How Fear, Disgust, Resentment, and Love Undermine Democracy and Explosive Emotions: How Modern Society Shapes What We Feel. In her lecture “Guilt, liberalism and the extreme right”, she revisits this subject with a focus on guilt, exploring the ways in which guilt has been made central to the liberal democratic cultures after World War II, and examining how the extreme right has interpreted and utilized the motive of guilt in its political agenda.

Bio: Eva Illouz, born in 1961 in Fes, Morocco, is a renowned French-Israeli professor em. of sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Directrice d’Etudes at the Centre européen de sociologie et de science politique, École des hautes études en sciences sociales (CSE-EHESS) in Paris. Her research focuses on the sociology of emotions, consumer society, media culture, and capitalism. She has received numerous fellowships and awards for her work, including the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation’s Annaliese Meier International Award for Excellence in Research and the E.M.E.T Award for Social Sciences, the highest scientific distinction in Israel, as well as the 2024 Frank Schirrmacher Prize and the 2024 Aby Warburg Prize. In 2022, Academic Influence listed her among the Influential Women in Sociology From the Last 10 Years (#8). Her numerous books have been translated into numerous languages. 

Latest book publications: The Emotional Life of Populism. How Fear, Disgust, Resentment, and Love Undermine Democracy (Polity Press, 2023), Der 8. Oktober. Über die Ursprünge des neuen Antisemitismus (in German, Suhrkamp, 2025), and Explosive Emotions. How Modern Society Shapes What We Feel (Princeton University Press, 2026).

"The European Textile Industry and the ‘Invention’ of Clothing Cultures in West-Central Africa: Cultural Transformations and Transfer in Colonial Postcolonial Context”
 
  Wednesday, June 10, 2026 | 6:30 pm
  Villa Köstlin (Rümelinstraße 27), Seminar Room
 
 Abstract:
 Fashion, clothing and textiles are areas in which cultural transformations and transfers can best be observed. We can attempt to understand these cultural changes through the prism of imagination, creativity and adaptation in the context of globalization and the rapid circulation of goods. But we can also analyze them from the point of view of the “invention” of new clothing cultures in colonial and postcolonial contexts. This study emphasizes the mechanisms of production and dissemination of an ‘African’ clothing culture by the European textile industry in the context of the slave trade, but especially from the 19th century onwards during the intensive phase of colonization in Africa. The invention and production of textiles, tastes and clothing fashions for Africa did not only have disastrous consequences for local textile production and related forms of knowledge but also attest to the production of new knowledge and the invention of new cultural traditions and practices, the effects of which are still visible in African societies today. The influence and impact of the introduction of Dutch wax in West Africa as transfer from the Indonesian batik is well known. This study will focus on the cases of the Austrian textile brand Getzner and the German brand Damino, both specializing in the production of brocade/damask, to examine their meaning and impact on the transformation of fashion and clothing culture in Central and West Africa. But this presentation intends also to analyze forms of resistance to this European-imposed clothing and fashion culture as well as forms and transformations of local/indigenous knowledge and cultural practices related to textiles.