The Europe Center April 2014 Newsletter

Special Event: The Europe Center Lectureship on Europe and the World

The Europe Center invites you to the inaugural annual lectures in this series by Adam Tooze, Barton M. Briggs Professor of History, Yale University.

“Making Peace in Europe 1917-1919: Brest-Litovsk and Versailles”

Date: Wednesday, Apr 30, 2014

Time: 4:00 - 5:30 pm

Location: Koret Taube Room, Gunn-SIEPR

“Hegemony: Europe, America and the Problem of Financial Reconstruction, 1916-1933”

Date: Thursday, May 1, 2014

Time: 4:00 - 5:30 pm

Location: Koret Taube Room, Gunn-SIEPR

“Unsettled Lands: The Interwar Crisis of Agrarian Europe”

Date: May 2, 2014

Time: 4:00 - 5:30 pm

Location: Bechtel Conference Center

Reception: 5:30 - 6:15 pm

RSVP by Apr 23, 2014

Adam Tooze will deliver three lectures from his forthcoming book, A World Fit for Heroes. In particular, he will speak about the history of the transformation of the global power structure that followed from Imperial Germany’s decision to provoke America’s declaration of war in 1917. Tooze is the author of The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (2006) and Statistics and the German State 1900-1945: The Making of Modern Economic Knowledge (2001), among numerous other scholarly articles on modern European history.

Open Call: The Europe Center Graduate Student Grant Competition

The Europe Center invites applications from graduate and professional students at Stanford University whose research or work focuses on Europe. Funds are available for Ph.D. candidates 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. Additionally, 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.

Applications for the 2013-2014 Spring competition are currently being accepted through April 15, 2014. For additional details about the grant program, please visit our website.

Meet our Visiting Scholars: Andreas Kilcher

In each newsletter, The Europe Center would like to introduce you to a visiting scholar or collaborator at the Center. We welcome you to visit the Center and get to know our guests.

Andreas Kilcher, FSI-Humanities Center International Visitor 2013-2014, is professor of Literature and Cultural Studies at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) Zurich. Kilcher is a prominent scholar of German-Jewish literature and culture, Kabbalah, and the European tradition of esotericism. He has written and edited a range of publications on the encounters between European and Jewish cultures from the sixteenth century through the present, with a focus on the twentieth century. His publications include Geteilte Freude: Schiller-Rezeption in der jüdischen Moderne (Munich, 2006), biographies of the writers Franz Kafka (Frankfurt, 2008) and Max Frisch (Berlin 2011) and numerous other articles. Kilcher’s current project includes collaboration with colleagues at Stanford on the divergent constructions of Jewish ethnography in German-speaking and Russian-speaking territories.

Student Scholar Profile: Christof Brandtner

The Europe Center regularly sponsors the research of undergraduate and graduate students through our research grant, internship, and scholarly exchange programs. We would like to introduce you to some of the students that we support and the projects on which they are working.

Christof Brandtner, a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at Stanford, will be visiting the Vienna University of Economics and Business to present findings from his research on city rankings. Brandter’s project explores where the criteria of systematic city comparisons come from, and how they came to supplement economic power as measures of urban performance. By investigating the types and sources of variation in the evaluation of organizations, and by mapping the ways in which urban qualities are operationalized, this research sheds new light on questions related to the sustainability of global cities. Brandtner will use his visit to also conduct interviews with members of the urban development department of the City of Vienna.