Bertrand de Largentaye

On November 18th, Professor Bertrand de Largentaye gave a presentation on the role of the EU in international trade negotiations in Rennes, Brittany (France). This was part of a conference series focusing on some of the main questions currently faced by the EU and each of its member states as the European institutions are currently going through a renewal phase. The various conference panels covered topics such as food and public health issues, migration issues, the financial system, international trade regulations, and the impact of the EU's diplomacy and defense in the world. This conference series was organized by Maison de l'Europe Rennes et Haute Bretagne, which is part of a European network of local information centers coordinated by the European Commission.

On October 26th-31st, Professor de Largentaye participated in an intensive professional development program in Quebec, Canada (Ecole d'Automne de l'Université Laval), focusing on the transatlantic relations of the EU. He gave four presentations during the program. One provided a wide-spectrum overview of the topic through the lens of the international competence of the EU. Two other of his presentations covered region-specific aspects, with one focusing on the EU-Mexico relations, and the other on EU-US relations in the perspective of the TTIP (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership). Finally, Professor de Largentaye participated in a roundtable on the relations between Europe and America with regard to their potentially conflicting integration models: "Les relations Europe-Amérique: vers le choc des modèles d'intégration?"

Professor de Largentaye has a forty-year experience as policy expert in the French government (Ministries of Economy and Finance, Agriculture, and Trade) and in European institutions (European Commission's Directorate-General for Economic and Financial Affairs, Directorate General for External Relations, and Minister Counselor to the Permanent Delegations of the European Commission and European Union to UNESCO and OECD). He recently joined the AGS faculty to teach the Economics course (see profile).

Prof. Nikita Harwich has been accepted as member of the Academia Europaea, a European, non-governmental association acting as an Academy. Founded in 1988 and based in London, its members include leading experts (amongst them, thirty-eight Nobel Prize Laureates, several of whom were elected to the Academia before they received the prize) from the physical sciences and technology, biological sciences and medicine, mathematics, the letters and humanities, social and cognitive sciences, economics and law.

The Academia Europaea’s aim is to promote learning, education and research, through workshops, conferences, meetings and the writing of special reports. Professor Harwich has been asigned to the “History and Archaeology Section”. Some of his historian colleagues in the Academia include Maurice Agulhon, Jean Delumeau, Emmanuel Leroy-Ladurie, Carlo Ginzburg, Sir John Elliott, Theodore Zeldin or Wolfgang Mommsen.

More on the Academia Europaea

In June, Prof. Nikita Harwich was elected Co-director of the French Research Center "Mondes Américains, Sociétés, Circulations, Pouvoirs (XVème-XXIème siècle)" (MASCIPO), which is the largest and one of the most highly regarded research centers in France concerning the history and anthropology of the Americas - both North and South. It brings together scholars the CNRS (French National Center for Scientific Research), the EHESS, the University of Paris I Pantheon-Sorbonne and the University of Paris West Nanterre, and also works in collaboration with specialists of North and South America from universities in France, Germany, the UK, Columbia and Argentina. It puts out an online journal called Nuevo Mundo Mundos Nuevos published in English, French, Spanish and Portuguese. Professor Harwich's nomination as Co-Director took effect in June and extends to a four-year mandate (2011-2015).

See more information on the MASCIPO Research Center.

On April 15th, 2009, Dr. Nikita Harwich gave a lecture in Orléans, France, on the topic "Crossed exchanges between the New and the Old World", in a series organized by the European Center for the Promotion of History.

Dr. Nikita Harwich is currently working on a revised and updated second edition of his book Histoire du Chocolat (Editions Desjonquères, Paris). The first edition, which is now out of print, has become a standard reference on the subject. The new edition will be published by the end of February 2008 and will be presented at the March 2008 'Salon du Livre' in Paris. Dr. Harwich already published several books on the subjects of : foreign investment in nineteenth and early twentieth century Latin America; the development of national identities in Latin America; trade and development in Latin America.