The Europe Center Graduate Student Grant Competition
Call for Spring 2015 Proposals:
The Europe Center is pleased to announce the Spring 2015 Graduate Student Grant Competition for graduate and professional students at Stanford whose research or work focuses on Europe. Funds are available for Ph.D. candidates from across a wide range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences to prepare for dissertation research and to conduct research on approved dissertation projects. The Europe Center also supports early graduate students who wish to determine the feasibility of a dissertation topic or acquire training relevant for that topic. Moreover, funds are available for professional students whose interests focus on some aspect of European politics, economics, history, or culture; the latter may be used to support an internship or a research project. Grants range from $500 to $5000. Additional information about the grants, as well as the online application form, can be found here. The deadline for this Spring’s competition is Friday, April 17th. Recipients will be notified by May 4th.
Highlights from Fall 2014:
In Fall 2014, the Center awarded grants to 10 graduate students in departments ranging from History to Economics to Musicology. We would like to introduce you to some of the students that we support and the projects on which they are working. Our featured student this month is Adriane Fresh (Political Science).
Fresh is interested in how historical political concentration---the concentration of political power within particular interest groups or families---affects long-run economic development, and how this concentration is affected by moments of formal institutional change. To look at these relationships, Fresh uses a newly assembled dataset of the individual characteristics of Members of Parliament (MP) in the British Isles from the 14th to the 19th centuries. She connects that biographical data to historical census data on economic and political development; and examines how concentration changed relative to the Glorious Revolution, the Industrial Revolution and the First Democratic Reform. Fresh requested funding from The Europe Center to purchase data on MP biographies from the 1832-1970 period in order to examine how democratization affected the composition and concentration of political elites. She also obtained land ownership data from the late 19th century to construct measures of economic inequality; digitized and transcribed these data; and coded MP biographies from text-heavy descriptions of MP careers, interests and personal relationships.
2015 Undergraduate Internship Program Winners Announced
A key priority of The Europe Center is to provide Stanford’s undergraduate student community with opportunities to develop a deep understanding of contemporary European society and affairs. By promoting knowledge about the opportunities and challenges facing one of the world’s most economically and politically integrated regions, the Center strives to equip our future leaders with the tools necessary to tackle complex problems both in Europe and in the world more broadly.
To this end, the Center recently solicited applications for the second annual The Europe Center Undergraduate Internship Program in Europe. The Center is sponsoring six undergraduate student internships with leading think tanks and international organizations in Europe in Summer 2015. Jacob (Jake) Leih (International Relations, 2016) and Eddy Rosales Chavez (International Relations, 2017) will work at The ALDE Group in the European Parliament. Ameena Tawakol (Public Policy, 2017), Eunhye (Grace) Choi (Economics, 2018), and Audrey (Hope) Sheils (International Relations, 2016) will work at Bruegel, a leading European think tank. Additionally, Kate Wilson (Public Policy, 2016) will work at the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS). The Europe Center is also actively seeking to develop ties with business, governmental, and non-governmental organizations in Europe that can participate in The Europe Center Undergraduate Internship Program in future years.
Save the Date: The Europe Center Lectureship on Europe and the World
Please mark your calendars for the second annual lectures in this series by Joel Mokyr, Robert H. Strotz Professor of Arts and Sciences, and Professor of Economics and History at Northwestern University.
Details: May 20 and May 21, 2015; 4:00 - 5:30 p.m.; Bechtel Conference Center, Encina Hall
Joel Mokyr will deliver two lectures on the topic of his forthcoming book,
Culture of Growth: Origins of the Modern Economy, to be published by Princeton University Press and Penguin in 2016. Mokyr specializes in economic history and the economics of technological change and population change. He is the author of
Why Ireland Starved: An Analytical and Quantitative Study of the Irish Economy,
The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress,
The British Industrial Revolution: An Economic Perspective,
The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy, and
The Enlightened Economy. He has authored over 80 articles and books in his field. His books have won a number of important prizes, including the Joseph Schumpeter Memorial Prize, the Ranki Prize for the Best Book in European Economic History, and the Donald Price Prize. He is currently working on the intellectual and institutional origins of modern economic growth and the way they interacted with technological elements. His current other research is an attempt to apply insights from evolutionary theory to long-run changes in technological knowledge and economic history.
Featured Research: Cécile Alduy
The Europe Center serves as a research hub bringing together Stanford faculty members, students, and researchers conducting cutting-edge research on topics related to Europe. Our faculty affiliates draw from the humanities, social sciences, and business and legal traditions, and are at the forefront of scholarly debates on Europe-focused themes. The Center regularly highlights new research by faculty affiliates that is of interest to the broader community.
Cécile Alduy recently published a new book,
Marine Le Pen prise aux mots: Décryptage du nouveau discours frontiste (Seuil 2015). Since Marine Le Pen has taken over its leadership in 2011, the far right National Front party has been on an apparently unstoppable ascent, earning up to 25% of the votes in the latest European elections last May. What is more, in a remarkable political make over, the once infamous political organization has turned almost mainstream, claiming to be the last champion of democracy and French republican values. Is that true? And how does Marine Le Pen manage to convince so many voters that it is? Using text mining software as well as minute semiotic analyses, Cécile Alduy has ciphered more than 500 speeches and texts by Jean-Marie and Marine Le Pen to pinpoint exactly how, and on what topics, the daughter’s discourse differs from that of her father. This book cracks the new National Front rhetorical code to uncover the deeper ideological structures that lie beneath the party’s recent electoral successes.
Workshop Schedules
The Europe Center invites you to attend the talks of speakers in the following workshop series:
Europe and the Global Economy
Apr 23, 2015
Christina Schneider, University of California, San Diego
“Globalizing Electoral Politics: The Domestic Politics of European Cooperation”
European Governance
Apr 9, 2015
Michael Becher, University of Konstanz
“Endogenous Credible Commitment and Party Competition Over Redistribution Under Alternative Electoral Institutions”
Apr 16, 2015
Massimiliano Onorato, Institute for Advanced Studies, Lucca
“Military Conflict and the Rise of Urban Europe”
May 7, 2015
Cliff Carrubba, Emory University
“Does Judicial Independence Matter for Judicial Influence?”
RSVP by May 4, 2015
The Europe Center Sponsored Events
Apr 7, 2015
Douglas Lute, United States Ambassador to NATO
“Wales to Warsaw: NATO and the Current State of Transatlantic Security”
Apr 8, 2015
Nicholas Crafts, University of Warwick, UK
“A Vision of the Growth Process in a Technologically progressive Economy: the United States, 1899-1941”
April 10-11, 2015
"2015 Stanford-University of Vienna Conference on Innovative Experiential Pedagogy"
Apr 13, 2015
Andrea Vindigni, IMT, Lucca Institute for Advanced Studies
“Soldiers and Rebels: Coups and Civil Wars in Weakly Institutionalized and Fragmented States”
Apr 22, 2015
Sascha Becker, University of Warwick, UK
“Religion, Division of Labour and Conflict: Anti-Semitism in German Regions over 700 Years”
Apr 23, 2015
Robert Beachy, Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea
“The Rise and Fall of Ernst Röhm: Männerbund, National Revolution, and the Coming of the Third Reich”
May 11, 2015
Ivo H. Daalder, The Chicago Council on Global Affairs
“Perspectives from Ivo H. Daalder”
May 14, 2015
Renata Salecl, Faculty of Law, University of Ljubljana
Keynote Lecture: “From Srebrenica to St. Louis: War Trauma 20 Years Later”
May 15, 2015
Conference: “Yugoslav Space Twenty Years After Srebrenica”
May 18, 2015
Laurent Cohen-Tanugi, International Lawyer
“What’s Wrong With France?”
May 20-21, 2015
TEC Lectureship on Europe and the World
“Culture of Growth: Origins of the Modern Economy”
Joel Mokyr, Robert H. Strotz Professor of Arts and Sciences, Northwestern University
Apr 15, 2015
Scott Kilner, Career Diplomat with U.S. State Department
“A Career in American Foreign Policy: Reflections of a U.S. Diplomat on Wester Europe, Turkey, and Afghanistan” (Open to Stanford Students Only)
Apr 15, 2015
Julian Weiss, King's College, London
“Between Subversion and Containment: Flavius Josephus, the Jews, and 1492” (
Additional Details)
May 1, 2015
Talk by Gérard Araud
French Ambassador to the United Sates
May 1, 2015
Seminar with Karen Dawisha
Author of Putin's Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia (2014).
We welcome you to visit our website for additional details.
