Celebrating Oktoberfest: Across the Cornfields Edition

by Reneé Gordon Holley Every September, millions of people flock to Munich, Germany, eager to take part in the annual Oktoberfest celebration. Tourists and locals alike overrun the city, spending hours in festival tents, sipping fine brews specially formulated for the occasion, and consuming innumerable pretzels and pork shanks. Among the smells of people, beer, meat and sweets, listeners are treated to traditional folk bands, which blast Bavarian classics and entice children to dance. For those...

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Newcastle University Conference Explores Options for a Sustainable Countryside

The Newcastle Institute for Research on Sustainability and the Newcastle University Law School hosted a conference to address emerging challenges to rural areas, including responding to climate change, food security, renewable energy, and changes to crop and livestock production systems.  EU Center Director A. Bryan Endres served as the opening speaker, presenting a talk on sustainable bioenergy and legal approaches to ecological protection.  Specifically, the presentation discussed the...

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New Course on the Changing Arctic

A new study abroad course entitled "Environment and Society in a Changing Arctic" is now available for University of Illinois students. The six-week course, supported in part by the EUC's European Union Center of Excellence grant, will take students of any discipline first to KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden for a five-week introduction to the political, social, historical, and cultural issues of climate change, and then north to the Arctic Circle for ten days...

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40 Years of Exchange with Austria

This year, the Austria-Illinois Exchange Program, one of the University of Illinois' oldest study abroad programs, is celebrating its 40th anniversary. To commemorate the occasion, AIEP is holding the Change through Exchange conference, which is co-sponsored by the European Union Center. The two-day conference will include discussions, films and lectures by speakers like Thomas Schnöll, Consul General of Austria and Josef Haslinger, Austrian author and professor at the University...

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