New assistant director of the Forum on Contemporary Europe
The Forum on Contemporary Europe is pleased to announce the hire of Dr. Roland Hsu as Assistant Director. Dr. Hsu is responsible for the Forum's daily operations, and works closely with the Forum's Director, Professor Amir Eshel, and Program Assistant Nancy Easterbrook on strategic planning and research and public dissemination program designs. Dr. Hsu is also Lecturer in the Introduction to Humanities Program at Stanford University. Dr. Hsu has been brought on board to develop the Forum's ambitious plans to expand its programs, to identify and coordinate international research teams, and to support flexible, interdisciplinary projects that respond in practical terms to the dynamics of European studies.
Founded in 1997, the Forum at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) has created a program for new thinking about Europe in the new millennium. The increasingly complex challenges facing Europe and its global relations - including labor migration, strains on welfare economies, local identities, globalized cultures, expansion and integration, and threats of terrorism, coupled with Europe's recent struggle to ratify a single constitution, underline the need at this point to build on the Forum's success and utilize Dr. Hsu's faculty research and senior administrative experience to shape the growth of the Forum as a sustained and dynamic inter-disciplinary program.
The directors' plans for the Forum's growth include sustained research residencies, a visionary teaching program, and an influential publication series. The plans aim to make the program address the most pressing issues facing Europe and its trans-Atlantic and global relations at the start of the 21st century. Along with the affiliated research programs at FSI, the Forum will also play an important part in advancing the agenda of Stanford's International Initiative - the campus-wide effort, based in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, to bring together faculty, researchers and students to address the global challenges of peace and security, governance, and human well-being. The Forum's scholars will analyze models for answers to these challenges in case studies of Western and Eastern European, Scandinavian, and European Union histories and policy initiatives.
Before coming to Stanford Dr. Hsu was Assistant Professor of Modern European History at the University of Idaho, and Senior Associate Director of Undergraduate Advising and Research at Stanford, as well as Academic Advisor in the College of the University of Chicago. At Chicago Dr. Hsu earned his doctorate in Modern European History, and taught in the Humanities and also served as Assistant Director of the University Writing Programs. His research and teaching explore the relationship between politics, art, and memory. Dr. Hsu wrote his dissertation on modern European intellectual and cultural history at the University of Chicago. His most recent work on post-Revolutionary France reconsiders the use of the analytic category of memory in historical interpretation. The book manuscript in progress: Troubling Memory: Making Monuments, Tourists, and a Collective Past in Nineteenth-Century France engages scholarly literature on collective memory by reintroducing gender, work, and neighborhood network identities to differentiate the "collectivities" of collective memory.