Eric Beaty – Economic and Commercial Attaché

United States Consulate for Western France

 

Born in Sapulpa, Oklahoma on October 21, 1958, Eric Beaty grew up in Nacogdoches, Texas.  He graduated from Nacogdoches High School in 1976 and did his undergraduate studies at Stephen F. Austin University in Nacogdoches, earning a B.A. (Cum Laude - 1979) with a double major in French and German and a minor in history.  He went on to earn an M.A. in French literature at Rice University in Houston, Texas (1982).  Later, Beaty received an Msc. in Linguistics from Aston University in Birmingham, U.K. (1996).

Beaty began his career at the University of Rennes 2, France in 1981 as a lecturer in American studies.  He then worked as the assistant director of courses at two Chambers of Commerce in France.  In 1986, Beaty became the executive director of a bi-national center known as the Franco-American Institute, an organization created by Rennes City Hall, the U.S. Embassy in Paris and Rochester, N.Y. City Hall in 1961. 

In 1999, Beaty was instrumental in setting up the United States Consulate for Western France. He was hired in 2000 by the U.S. State Department that same year as the Economic and Commercial Attaché. 

Beaty has participated in the organization of 14 White House visits and 36 congressional delegation visits.  He has chaired the Rennes-Rochester, N.Y. sister-city relationship since 1986.   He is on the board of the University of Rennes 2.  Beaty has received 18 meritorious and superior service awards from the White House, the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Department of Commerce.  Beaty received a National Export Initiative award for his export success stories in 2011.   

"Tell me again about Europe and her pains, 

  Who's tortured by the drought, who by the rains.

  Glut me with floods where only the swine can row" -- William Empson

Europe is in crisis, deep economic and political crisis. With many member-state economies now tottering on zero-growth meltdown, professional politicians and economists persist with austerity drives and devise ideological covers for the continued plundering of public resources. Frack capitalism power-drills into the public realm, extorting value from erstwhile common property. A para-state of technocrats and Euro-bureaucrats, meanwhile, governs, "sending us rain and sunshine from above" (Marx). One big problem such professional representation poses for ordinary Europeans -- for people I shall call amateur shadow citizens -- is PARTICIPATION. Shadow citizens are disenfranchised Euro-citizens who express a citizenship waiting in the wings, a potential solidarity haunting the mainstream, floating across frontiers and through designated checkpoints. This lecture investigates the dialectic between professional austerians and shadow citizens, doing so while attempting to put a fresh spin on Henri Lefebvre's "late" ideal that the right to the city is "nothing less than a new conception of revolutionary citizenship."

Andy Merrifield, Supernumerary Fellow in Human Geography, Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge

Andy Merrifield is a writer, social theorist, and urban geographer. He has taught human geography at the University of Southampton, King's College, London, and Clark University in Massachusetts, and has been a visiting scholar at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil, the University of Manchester (as Leverhulme Visiting Professor), and the City University of New York CUNY). For a number of years, he was a freelance writer living in France, where he wrote biographies of Guy Debord and Henri Lefebvre, as well as a bestselling "existential" travelogue, The Wisdom of Donkeys. He is author of nine books; his articles, essays, and reviews have appeared in the Times, The Nation, Harper's Magazine, New Left Review, Adbusters, Harvard Design Magazine, Radical Philosophy, Monthly Review, and Dissent, amongst others.

For more information on the film series "Europe Through the Lens: a Festival of Contemporary European Films" visit http://libguides.uky.edu/eurofilm. 

For more information on the film series "Europe Through the Lens: a Festival of Contemporary European Films" visit http://libguides.uky.edu/eurofilm. 

For more information on the film series "Europe Through the Lens: a Festival of Contemporary European Films" visit http://libguides.uky.edu/eurofilm. 

For more information on the film series "Europe Through the Lens: a Festival of Contemporary European Films" visit http://libguides.uky.edu/eurofilm. 

"The Class" will be presented and discussed with / by Professor Leon Sachs of French.

For more information visit:  http://libguides.uky.edu/eurofilm