Gail K. Hart is Professor of German at the University of California, Irvine (USA) and founding chair of the Department of European Languages and Studies. She has published books on Schiller, bourgeois tragedy, and Gottfried Keller.
Anke S. Biendarra is Associate Professor of German at the University of California, Irvine (USA). Her publications are in the areas of German literature and culture of the 20th and 21st century, globalization, transnationalism, and Europeanization.

How do we as scholars envision Europe? Distinguished US scholars address the European continent, its history and culture, and its politics in essays that range from the intellectual tradition to poetics and world literature, from the air war to plurilingualism, from religious symbolism to Europe's colonial legacy.

Contents: John H. Smith: Ceci n'est pas un manifeste. Envisioning Europe and European Studies - Russell A. Berman: The European Crisis and the Idea of Unification in the German Public: Philosophical Legacies, Political Challenges - Jane O. Newman: Reich or Nation? Versions of European Statehood in the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) - Kai Evers: Gassing Europe's Capitals: Planning, Envisioning, and Rethinking Modern Warfare in European Discourses of the 1920s and 1930s - Anke S. Biendarra: The Headscarf in Germany: A Critical Reading of the Feminist Debate - Glenn S. Levine: Division as Unity: Plurilingualism and Language Education in Europe - Herschel Farbman: Tradition and the Multi-National Corporation: T.S. Eliot's Europe - Ève Morisi: European Visions in Albert Camus's Abolitionism - David T. Pan: Poetry and the Public Sphere: World Literature and European Languages - Carrie J. Noland: Aimé Césaire: Europe, the Caribbean, or Africa?

How do we as scholars envision Europe? Participants in a two-day research symposium bring a variety of disciplinary and interdisciplinary responses to this complex question. Distinguished US scholars address the European continent, its history and culture, and its politics in essays that range from the intellectual tradition to poetics and world literature, from the air war to plurilingualism, from religious symbolism to Europe's colonial legacy. These contributions comprise a portrait or vision of Europe today; the challenges it faces, and the challenges we face in confronting it as a cultural and geopolitical entity.