Society

FSI researchers work to understand continuity and change in societies as they confront their problems and opportunities. This includes the implications of migration and human trafficking. What happens to a society when young girls exit the sex trade? How do groups moving between locations impact societies, economies, self-identity and citizenship? What are the ethnic challenges faced by an increasingly diverse European Union? From a policy perspective, scholars also work to investigate the consequences of security-related measures for society and its values.

The Europe Center reflects much of FSI’s agenda of investigating societies, serving as a forum for experts to research the cultures, religions and people of Europe. The Center sponsors several seminars and lectures, as well as visiting scholars.

Societal research also addresses issues of demography and aging, such as the social and economic challenges of providing health care for an aging population. How do older adults make decisions, and what societal tools need to be in place to ensure the resulting decisions are well-informed? FSI regularly brings in international scholars to look at these issues. They discuss how adults care for their older parents in rural China as well as the economic aspects of aging populations in China and India.

News Type
News
Date
Paragraphs

Dan EdelsteinDan Edelstein earned his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania and came to Stanford in 2004. He is William H. Bonsall Professor of French, chair of the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, and director of the Summer Humanities Institute. Dan's research is focused on eighteenth-century France, with interests at the crossroads of literature, history, political theory, and digital humanities. His most recent book manuscript, On the Spirit of Rights, concerns the history of natural and human rights from the wars of religion to the age of revolution (University of Chicago Press, forthcoming 2018). Currently, Dan's two main projects are On Permanent Revolution and Digital Humanities.

On Permanent Revolution, a book-length project, explores how revolution went from being the means toward a constitutional settlement, to becoming an end in and of itself. Stretching from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, it focuses in particular on the transformation of revolutionary authority during the French Revolution; on Marx's development of the concept of a "revolution in permanence"; and finally on the relation between this new model and the political violence that has often accompanied revolutions. 

Image
Dan Edelstein, Nicole Coleman, Paula Findlen
Dan is a PI on the NEH-funded Digital Humanities project Mapping the Republic of Letters. This project, which brings together other scholars at Stanford and around the world, aims to map the correspondence and social networks of major intellectual figures. In an interview for the Stanford Report, Dan said, "We tend to think of networks as a modern invention, something that only emerged in the Age of Information. In fact, going all the way back to the Renaissance, scholars have established themselves into networks in order to receive the latest news, find out the latest discoveries and circulate the ideas of others. We've known about these correspondences for a long time – some of them have been published – but no one has been able to piece together how these individual networks fit into a complete whole, something we call the Republic of Letters." The tool-building part of this project has now been subsumed in the Humanities + Design Research Lab, of which he is the founding faculty director. The work of Dan and his colleagues on the correspondence of figures as diverse as Voltaire and Athanasius Kircher a century earlier "really reconfigures the map of Enlightenment Europe." Dan and his co-writers received another NEH grant to develop Palladio, a tool for visualizing complex historical data, and an ACLS grant to develop a new social network grap visualization, Fibra. This Lab is itself part of Stanford's Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis, or CESTA.

More recently, he has been working on the project "Writing Rights," and published an article exploring the potential of JSTOR's data portal for exploring the "great unread" of scholarship. He was also the faculty advisor for Stanford's French Revolution Digital Archive (FRDA), and collaborates regularly with the Project for American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language (ARTFL). At Stanford, Dan teaches courses on the literature, philosophy, culture, and politics of the Enlightenment; nineteenth-century novels; the French Revolution; early-modern political thought; and French intellectual culture (“Coffee & Cigarettes”).

 

Hero Image
Dan Edelstein
All News button
1
Paragraphs

"Here's what the end of globalization looks like," a headline in Business Insider thundered at the end of 2016 before laying out a doom-and-gloom scenario in the wake of the Trans-Pacific Partnership's demise. The swing away from liberalization and globalization and toward protectionism and nationalism is probably the biggest political earthquake of recent times in wealthy Western countries, and explaining it is probably the biggest intellectual challenge. Until we understand its causes, after all, we cannot address them.

All Publications button
1
Publication Type
Commentary
Publication Date
Journal Publisher
Stratfor
Authors
Ian Morris
Building 200, Room 027
Lane History Corner
Stanford University

 

0
John L. Hinds Professor of History of Science
Director, Gendered Innovations in Science, Health & Medicine, Engineering, and Environment
londa_schiebinger_image.jpg

Londa Schiebinger is the John L. Hinds Professor of History of Science in the History Department at Stanford University and Director of the EU/US Gendered Innovations in Science, Health & Medicine, Engineering, and Environment Project. From 2004-2010, Schiebinger served as the Director of Stanford's Clayman Institute for Gender Research. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Professor Schiebinger received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1984 and is a leading international authority on gender and science. Over the past thirty years, Schiebinger's work has been devoted to teasing apart three analytically distinct but interlocking pieces of the gender and science puzzle: the history of women's participation in science; gender in the structure of scientific institutions; and the gendering of human knowledge.

Londa Schiebinger presented the keynote address and wrote the conceptual background paper for the United Nations' Expert Group Meeting on Gender, Science, and Technology, September 2010 in Paris. She presented the finding at the United Nations in New York, February 2011 with an update spring 2014. The UN Resolutions of March 2011 call for "gender-based analysis ... in science and technology" and for the integrations of a "gender perspective in science and technology curricula."

In 2011-2012 and 2018-2020, Schiebinger entered into major collaborations with the European Commission and the U.S. National Science Foundation to promote Gendered Innovations in Science, Health & Medicine, Engineering, and Environment. This project draws experts from across the U.S., Europe, Canada, Asia, and was presented at the European Parliament, July 2013. For a popular overview, see Gendered Innovations: Harnessing the Creative Power of Gender Analysis.

Schiebinger has also addressed the Korean National Assembly (2014). In 2015, she addressed 600 participants from 40 countries on Gendered Innovations at the Gender Summit 6—Asia Pacific, a meeting devoted to gendered innovations in research, development, and business. She spoke at the Gender Summit 10 in Tokyo in 2017. She has given seminars at the Japanese Science and Technology Agency in Tokyo, the Japanese Science Council, at Nature magazine in London, the George Institute in Sydney, the Royal Palace in Amsterdam, L'Oréal and UNESCO in Paris, the Global Research Council in São Paulo, the German Science Foundation in Bonn, and UK Research and Innovation in London, and the EDIS Symposium on Inclusive Research and Experimental Design, Francis Crick Institute in London, among others.

Schiebinger recently moderated the launch of American Association of University Women's launch of Solving the Equation: The Variables for Women's Success in Engineering and Computing at Samsung's Mountain View Campus (2015). Schiebinger also helped launch the League of European Research Universities' major report Gendered Research & Innovation, Brussels (2015).

Her study, "Housework is an Academic Issue," with Shannon Gilmartin, Academe (Jan/Feb. 2010): 39-44, was profiled on ABC News. A 30-minute interview on gender in science can be seen on Belgian television. Recent podcasts include: Does gender diversity lead to better science? (2018), Skeleton Wars, the History of Women in Science (2018), and The Secret Cures of Slaves (2018), and The Future of Everything (2019). See also The Robots are Coming! But Should They be Gendered? Schiebinger is a member of the Faculty Planning Committee for Stanford Human-Centered AI Institute. Her work on gender in AI was featured in Nature comment: Design AI so that it's Fair.

Schiebinger's work in the eighteenth century investigates colonial science in the Atlantic World. In particular she explores medical experimentation with slave populations in the Caribbean. Her project reconceptualizes research in four areas: first and foremost knowledge of African contributions to early modern science; the historiography of race in science; the history of human experimentation; and the role of science in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world.

Londa Schiebinger has been the recipient of numerous prizes and awards, including the prestigious Alexander von Humboldt Research Prize and John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. Schiebinger has just been appointed a Distinguished Affiliated Professor at the Technische Universität, Münichen, and member of their Institute for Advanced Studies. She has also served as a Senior Research Fellow at the Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte in Berlin, the Jantine Tammes Chair in the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences at the University of Groningen, a guest professor at the Georg-August-Universität in Göttingen, and the Maria Goeppert-Meyer Distinguished Visitor, Oldenburg University. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, National Endowment for the Humanities, Rockefeller Foundation, Fulbright-Hays Commission, Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst.

Londa Schiebinger was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (2013), the Faculty of Science, Lund University, Sweden (2017), and the University of Valencia, Spain (2018); the Interdisciplinary Leadership Award from Women's Health at Stanford Medical School, 2010; Prize in Atlantic History from the American Historical Association, 2005 and the Alf Andrew Heggoy Book Prize from the French Colonial Historical Society, 2005, both for her Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World. She also won the 2005 J. Worth Estes Prize from the American Association for the History of Medicine for her article "Feminist History of Colonial Science," Hypatia 19 (2004): 233-254. This prize goes to the author of an article of outstanding scholarly merit in the history of pharmacology. Her work has been translated into thirteen languages.

Londa Schiebinger's research has been featured in Forbesthe Times Higher EducationLe MondeLa RechercheWorld Economic Forum, El PaísThe New YorkerDiscovHerEuroScientistUniversity World NewsMoneyish, the New York Times, Die Zeit, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitschrift, La Vanguardia, at the London Museum of Natural History, on NPR, and elsewhere. She speaks and consults nationally and internationally on gender in science, medicine, and engineering.

Schiebinger is currently accepting graduate students in Gendered Innovations in Science, Health & Medicine, Engineering, and Environment and the History of Science.

 

Affiliated faculty at The Europe Center
Date Label
Paragraphs

Populism is on the rise: but to understand this phenomenon, we should first clearly conceptualize it and recognize that populism takes on different forms in various historical and political contexts. These “populisms” pose a threat to modern liberal democracy. As Poland and Hungary show, populists exclude entire swathes of society from the polity, and undermine the formal institutions and the informal norms of democracy. 

All Publications button
1
Publication Type
Journal Articles
Publication Date
Journal Publisher
Slavic Review
Authors
Anna Grzymała-Busse

Encina Hall
616 Serra Street
Stanford, CA  94305-6165
 

0
scp_1.25.jpg PhD

Sarah Cormack-Patton is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Aberdeen. She is a political scientist whose research examines the politics of globalization, and particularly international migration, in the European Union and the United States. Sarah is interested in the economic and social effects of the cross-border movement of people, goods, and capital; the political coalitions that form over the cross-border movement of people, goods, and capital; the conditions under which states permit or limit the entry or exit of goods, capital, and people; and the efficacy of state policies designed to effect the entry or exit of goods, capital, and people. Her current research projects examine the ways in which varying bundles of migrant rights affect immigration policy preferences, the political coalitions that form over immigration policy, and the types of immigration policies enacted. Sarah earned her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Pittsburgh in 2015 and was a Postdoctoral Scholar at Stanford University from September 2015 to September 2017.

Visiting Scholar at The Europe Center, 2017-2018
CV
News Type
Commentary
Date
Paragraphs

Joan Ramon Resina, professor of Iberian and Latin American Cultures, and Comparative Literature, and the director of The Europe Center's Iberian Studies Program, shares his perspective on the October 1st Catalonia referendum in a recent opinion piece written for The Hill.  

Resina's article, "American influence will help Catalonia win independence", can be read on The Hill's website.

All News button
1
News Type
News
Date
Paragraphs
Rachel Midura imageOur featured graduate student this month is Rachel Midura, PhD candidate in the Department of History and fellow at the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis. Anne's research for her dissertation focuses on the postal, political, and information networks of Northern Italy from 1550 to 1720. With the support of a research grant from The Europe Center, Rachel traveled to archives in Milan, Bergamo, and London in December and January of 2016-2017 to explore their collections of notarial documents and inter-postal agreements.
 
1667. Pallavicino: Image from German translation of satirical epistolary novel ascribed to Ferrante Pallavicino 1667. Pallavicino: Image from German translation of satirical epistolary novel ascribed to Ferrante Pallavicino.
In the archives, Rachel focused on the post office of Milan in the years 1590-1620 as a hub for the Imperial, Spanish, and Venetian posts.
At the literal crossroads of the Habsburg European Empire, the post office of Milan faced a turning point with the death of Ruggiero Tasso, the last direct heir to one of the most powerful postal entrepreneurs in history, Simone Tasso. Ruggiero’s widow, with the aid of her postal lieutenant Ottavio Codogno, fought to maintain her rights and those of her minor sons, earning enmity among local political figures who dubbed her “capricious.” While only treated glancingly in the current historiography, there are hundreds of notarial documents related to this period and at least one major inter-postal agreement in 1604 with the Venetian Company of Couriers that suggest that Lucina Cataneo Tasso was an accomplished administrator in her own right. Another document of great interest is a postal itinerary that Codogno published in defiance of the prevailing culture of state secrecy. Rachel hopes to compile a comprehensive case study of the information politics navigated by postal administrators, who, despite official proscriptions, often acted as free agents, fueling local struggles between competing loyalties with potentially far-reaching consequences. Rachel will be presenting on the impact of postal infrastructure on the travel of British tourists at the Grand Tour workshop at Stanford. When she returns to her overseas research, she’ll focus on how the individual communication hubs rose and fell in prominence, and how the network as a whole survived the ravages of the Thirty Years’ War.

 

 

Hero Image
Rachel Midura image
All News button
1
Image
Rachel Midura image
Title Text
Rachel Midura image
Aria Label
Read more about Rachel Midura's GSGC experience (2017-2018)
Date Label
Display Hero Image Wide (1320px)
No
News Type
News
Date
Paragraphs
Fiona Griffths imageOur featured faculty member this month is Fiona Griffiths, Professor of Medieval European History.  Fiona earned her PhD from Cambridge University and came to Stanford in 2013, having taught previously at New York University and Smith College.  She has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities; the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation; the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study; and the Institute of Historical Research (University of London).  At Stanford, she serves as Co-Director of the Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies (CMEMS).

Illuminated manuscript image


Fiona’s research explores the cultural history of medieval religion, focusing on the experiences and interactions of religious men (priests or monks) with women (nuns and clerical wives).  Her first book, The Garden of Delights: Reform and Renaissance for Women in the Twelfth Century, argued for the involvement of medieval nuns in the scholastic debates of the twelfth century, through close examination of the female-authored Hortus deliciarum (Garden of Delights), a magnificently illuminated manuscript of theology, biblical history, and canon law.  As Fiona discovered, the nuns who created the Hortus deliciarum found support for their studies among local monks, whose libraries provided them with access to scholastic texts.  Fiona’s most recent study, Nuns’ Priests’ Tales: Men and Salvation in Women’s Monastic Life, 300-1200 (forthcoming in early 2018) takes up the question of men’s support for religious women, examining a religious vocation not often discussed in medieval scholarship—the nuns’ priest.  As she shows, nuns’ priests defied conventions of sexual segregation within the religious life, sometimes living alongside female monasteries and even professing obedience to an abbess. Nuns’ Priests’ Tales examines the arguments that nuns’ priests made in defense of their service to women, explaining how their understanding of religious women as “brides of Christ” upset traditional assumptions concerning the immutability of male clerical authority.  With Professor Kathryn Starkey (German), Fiona has recently edited a collection of essays on the medieval senses, looking at how medieval people interacted with objects (jewelry, manuscripts, tools, relics, etc) and how objects guided and shaped human experiences.  Her teaching centers on medieval religion, material culture, and gender studies.

 

Hero Image
Fiona Griffths image
All News button
1
Subscribe to Society