Spaces, history and future 16 March 2009, Royal Chapel of Santa Àgata, Monumental Ensemble of the Plaça del Rei Barcelona History Museum Conference: "Urban imaginaries across borders" "Globalization has primarily been discussed as an economic, social, and technological process. This lecture will ask: what can cultural globalization mean and what is the role of locality and heritage in it? Cities have come to play a significant part in redefinitions of nation, state, and citizenship in our increasingly connected world. A comparative analysis of urban imaginaries across the modern world may help us to better understand the conflicts and prospects of our age." Andreas Huyssen, Villard Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Columbia University (The conference will be delivered in Spanish) Andreas Huyssen (Düsseldorf, 1942) is a professor of German and comparative literature at Columbia University, where he was the founding director of the Centre for Comparative Literature and Society (1998-2003). The head of Columbia’s Germanic Languages Department in diverse periods, Professor Huyssen is also one of the founding editors of New German Critique, the leading journal of German studies published in the United States, and he is a member of the editorial boards of October, Constellations, Germanic Review, Transit, Key Words (United Kingdom) and Critical Space (Tokyo). In 2005 he was granted the Mark Van Doren Award, in recognition of his work as a teacher. Both the research which he conducts and the classes which he teaches are focused on the German culture and literature of the 18th to the 20th centuries, international modernism, the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, Postmodernism, the cultural memory of historical traumas in transnational contexts and, more recently, the urban culture and globalisation. Professor Huyssen has published numerous studies in German and in English, and his work has been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish, Danish, Turkish, Japanese and Chinese. He is the author, among other titles, of Drama des Sturm und Drang (1980), After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (1986), Postmoderne: Zeichen eines kulturellen Wandels (edited with Klaus Scherpe, 1986), Modernity and the Text: Revisions of German Modernism (edited with David Bathrick, 1989), Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (1995), Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (2003), and a volume devoted to the culture of non-Western cities entitled Other Cities, Other Worlds: Urban Imaginaries in a Globalizing World (2008), which is soon to be published.