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.
Harbor of Hope: A special evening celebrating Sweden’s diverse cultures
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This event celebrating Sweden's diverse cultures began with a reception at 5pm, followed by the showing of the award winning film Harbour of Hope (2011, Sweden / Poland / Germany / Norway / Denmark; Dir. Magnus Gertten; 76 min) with filmmaker Magnus Gertten. Ozan Sunar, the artistic director of Moriska Paviljongen (also known as "Moriskan"), rounded out the evening with a multi-media presentation on bridging communities through culture.
The Koret-Taube Conference Center
Room 130, Gunn-SIEPR Building
Magnus Gertten
Swedish filmmaker
Speaker
Ozan Sunar
Artistic Director
Speaker
Moriska Paviljongen ("Moriskan")
Conferences
Presidents, Nuclear Reductions and the Senate
News Type
Commentary
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President Barack Obama desires to further reduce nuclear arsenals below the levels set in the 2010 New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) and Republicans and former officials of the George W. Bush administration assert that this can only be done through a new treaty. Steven Pifer, director of the Brookings Arms Control Initiative, in his blog posting Presidents, Nuclear Reductions and the Senate, points out that nuclear reduction efforts have not always been accomplished through treaties requiring ratification by the senate. History shows that past presidents, including Republicans, have used alternative methods that did not require a 2/3 majority vote by the Senate.
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Politics, Journalism and Public Broadcasting Service: Lost in the Labyrinth
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In our current societies, the media are backbone institutions of social life, a tool through which we can strength or deteriorate our democracy. Each society decides if it works exclusively for the market or if it conditions business goals to preserve collective responsibility. The media are nuclear tools to accomplish the right balance between the two. Unfortunately, nowadays such balance is neither a priority of public media sector nor a private one. The speech of the media has shifted, with consent and complicity of all the stakeholders, and has diminished responsibility criteria and installed partisanship and special interest and business. Reversing this process is an emergency, but the absence of imminent danger, unlike what it happens with the economic crisis, has not forced us to assume our obligations. Consequently, without being aware of it, we are marginalizing media content that can contribute to public service. The dependence between politicians and journalists makes them forget that they must serve the public interest. They are too involved in their own fight to survive and as a result subject the law, subsidies and news to their own interests. This lecture will analyze the mechanisms and trends through which the mass media stabilize irresponsibility and encourage a sensationalist discourse that, in turn, distance the citizen from public affairs.
Mònica Terribas was born in Barcelona (1968). She is a journalist and has been teaching at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra since 1993. She obtained her degree of Journalism at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (1991) and a doctoral fellowship by the British Council and La Caixa to study the links between the concept of public sphere and national identity in the media (Ph.D, University of Stirling, Scotland, 1994). She combined her studies with her professional career as a journalist in the radio news services in 1986 and continued in 1988 in TV3 - Televisió de Catalunya- as a screenwriter, coordinator, editor and presenter of several television programs, among which the late night news program, La Nit al Dia (2002-2008). In May 2008 she was appointed General Manager of TV3, responsible for the six public channels of the Catalan media corporation up to April 2012. Since August 2012, she is the editor and CEO of ARA, which includes a newspaper and the net news leader platform. Among other awards, she received the National Award of Journalism and National Award of Culture.
This event is part of The Europe Center's Iberian Studies Program lecture series and the Journalism and Literature series presented by the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, the Stanford Humanities Center and The Europe Center.
Reuben W. Hills Conference Room
Mònica Terribas
Journalist, Assistant Professor at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, and editor and CEO, <em>Ara</em>
Speaker
Seminars
“Migrant Tastes and Formation of Popular Culture: The Case of Turkey”
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In societies with continuous in-and-out migration in relatively short periods the formation of dominant culture comes into shape as "popular". Continental theories for defining people's culture mostly assume some permanent structures (cultural preferences of elites or classes) in modern societies, yet not so successful for explaining the rise of popular cultures in societies like the USA. Turkey, as a country of migratory waves from its birth, is a pristine example of such a process and unique for its elites' interventions into the cultural sphere. The talk is broadly concerns with three dynamics on the formation of Turkish popular culture - demographic transition, elitist cultural policies, and partly oppositional character of people's taste.
Orhan Tekelioğlu is Chair of Department of New Media at Bahçeşehir University (Istanbul, Turkey) and Visiting Scholar at the University of Pennyslvania’s Annenberg School of Communication. He is a scholar of cultural sociology including such research fields as media consumption, the history of Turkish popular music, the sociological features of Turkish literature, and the cultural politics of the Republican period. He received his Ph.D. in Sociology from the Middle Eastern Technical University (Ankara, Turkey) and his Magisterartium degree in Sociology from the University of Oslo. He taughted in Departments of Political Science and Turkish Literature at the Bilkent University in Ankara, in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at Ohio State University, and acted as Acting Dean of the Faculty of Communication at the Izmir University of Economics. Dr. Tekelioğlu conducts field studies on popular television dramas and reality shows, and history of jazz and popular music in Istanbul. He has published articles in Turkish and in English and submitted papers to numerous national and international congresses. Among his publications are Pop Ekran [Pop Screen, 2013], Pop Yazılar, [Pop Essays, 2006], Foucault Sosyolojisi [Sociology of Foucault, 2003], Şerif Mardin’e Armağan, [A Festschrift for Şerif Mardin, 2005), "Modernizing reforms and Turkish music in the 1930s" (Turkish Studies, 2001), and “Two Incompatible Positions in the Challenge Against the Individual Subject of Modernity” (Theory& Psychology, 1997).
Co-sponsored by the Mediterranean Studies Forum, Program on Urban Studies, the Europe Center, and Turkish Students Association
Encina Hall West
2nd floor, Room 208
Orhan Tekelioğlu
Professor and Chair of the Department of New Media at Bahçeşehir University (Istanbul, Turkey) and Visiting Scholar
Speaker
the University of Pennyslvania’s Annenberg School of Communication.
Seminars
The Emigrant as a Symptom, or the Representation of Emigration in Basque Literature
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This lecture is part of the "Iberian Studies Program Lecture Series"
Co-sponsored by the Iberian Studies Program and the Center for Latin American Studies (CLAS)
Bolivar House
583 Alvarado Row
Mari Jose Olaziregi
Associate Professor of Basque literature at the University of the Basque Country-Spain and Director of the Language and Universities Department
Speaker
Etxepare Basque Institute
Seminars
Partitions: Towards Transnational History of Twentieth Century Territorial Separatism
Please note that only Day 1 is open to the public.
Day 2 is open only to Stanford University faculty and students.
Day 1: "Partitions in/and Literature"
Thursday, April 18th
4:15pm - 6:00pm
Free and open to the public
Chair and commentator: Vered K. Shemtov (Stanford University)
Speaker: Hannan Hever (Hebrew University)
"Zionist Literature: The impossibility of the Rhetoric of Partition"
Day 2: "Partitions in History: Genealogy and Implementations of a Political Idea"
Friday, April 19th
10:00am - 6:00pm
Open to Stanford University faculty and students only
PLEASE SEE THE ATTACHED WORKSHOP PROGRAM FOR PANEL TITLES AND PARTICIPANTS
Sponsored by:
The Europe Center, Taube Center for Jewish Studies, Stanford Humanities Center, Hebrew Literature and Culture Project, Stanford Department of History (Kratter Fund), The Sohaib and Sara Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies, Center for East Asian Studies and the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages
April 18th: Levinthal Hall, Stanford Humanities Center (Open to the public)
April 19th: The Board Room, Stanford Humanities Center (Open to Stanford faculty and students only)
Hannan Hever
Keynote Speaker
Hebrew University
Vared K. Shemtov
Commentator
Stanford University
Edith Sheffer
Department of History 200-120
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esheffer@stanford.edu
Former Assistant Professor of Modern European History
Former Assistant Professor, by courtesy, of German Studies
Edith Sheffer joined the History Department faculty in 2010, having come to Stanford as an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in the Humanities in 2008. Her first book, Burned Bridge: How East and West Germans Made the Iron Curtain (Oxford University Press, 2011), challenges the moral myth of the Berlin Wall, the Cold War’s central symbol. It reveals how the barrier between East and West did not simply arise overnight from communism in Berlin in 1961, but that a longer, lethal 1,393 kilometer fence had been developing haphazardly between the two Germanys since 1945.
Her current book, Soulless Children of the Reich: Hans Asperger and the Nazi Origins of Autism, investigates Hans Asperger’s creation of the autism diagnosis in Nazi Vienna, examining Nazi psychiatry's emphasis on social spirit and Asperger's involvement in the euthanasia program that murdered disabled children. A related project through Stanford's Spatial History Lab, "Forming Selves: The Creation of Child Psychiatry from Red Vienna to the Third Reich and Abroad," maps the transnational development of child psychiatry as a discipline, tracing linkages among its pioneers in Vienna in the 1930s through their emigration from the Third Reich and establishment of different practices in the 1940s in England and the United States. Sheffer's next book project, Hidden Front: Switzerland and World War Two, tells an in-depth history of a nation whose pivotal role remains unexposed--yet was decisive in the course of the Second World War.
Affiliated faculty at The Europe Center
Reece Jones
Panelist
University of Hawaii, Manoa
Lucy Chester
Panelist
University of Colorado, Boulder
Priya Satia
History Department
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-2024
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psatia@stanford.edu
Raymond A. Spruance Professor of International History
Professor of History
Priya Satia specializes in modern British and British empire history.
Prof. Satia is a cultural historian of the material and intellectual infrastructure of the modern world in the age of empire. Her work examines the origins of state institutions, military technologies, ideas and practices of development, and the anti-colonial responses they inspired in order to understand how the imperial past has shaped the present and how the ethical dilemmas it posed were understood and managed.
Prof. Satia has explored these questions in studies of British policing of the Middle East in the era of World War One, the invention of radio during the Boer War, the British Indian development of Iraq, state secrecy in mass-democratic Britain, the gun-making exploits of a Quaker family during the industrial revolution, the Partition of British India, the imperial consequences of the historical discipline itself, and other projects. Her work on aerial policing has also informed her analysis of American drone use in the Middle East. An essay on her formation as a historian is available here in the H-Diplo series "Learning the Scholar's Craft."
Her first book Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain's Covert Empire in the Middle East (OUP, 2008) won the 2009 AHA-Herbert Baxter Adams Book Prize, the 2009 AHA-Pacific Coast Branch Book Award, and the 2010 Pacific Coast Conference on British Studies Book Prize.
Her second book, Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution (Penguin Press/Duckworth, 2018) won the 2019 Pacific Coast Conference on British Studies Book Prize, the Wadsworth Prize in Business History, and the AHA's Jerry Bentley Prize in world history. It was also a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize in History and shortlisted for the Laura Shannon Prize in Contemporary European Studies and the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize.
Prof. Satia's third book, Time's Monster: How History Makes History (Belknap HUP/Penguin Allen Lane, 2020) won the 2021 Pacific Coast Conference on British Studies Book Prize and the 2021 Bronze Prize in History (World) from the Independent Publisher Book Awards. It was also listed in BBC History Magazine Books of the Year (2020) and the New Statesman's Best Books of the Year (2020).
Her work has also appeared in the American Historical Review, Past and Present, Technology and Culture, Humanity, Annales, History Workshop Journal, and other scholarly journals, as well as edited volumes across a range of fields (e.g. environmental history, Middle Eastern history, the Indian Ocean world, British politics, aerospatial theory, humanitarianism), and mainstream media (e.g. the Financial Times, the Nation, Times Literary Supplement, the Washington Post, Time Magazine, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Aeon, the Tribune, Slate.com, CNN.com, and more).
Prof. Satia is working on a new book project, The Lake of Liberation, on British colonialism in Punjab and its legacies.
Affiliated faculty at The Europe Center
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Arie M. Dubnov
450 Serra Mall, Bldg. 200
Stanford, CA 94305
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dubnov@stanford.edu
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Arie Dubnov is an Acting Assistant Professor at Stanford University’s Department of History. Dubnov holds a BA, an MA, and a Ph.D. from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and is a past George L. Mosse Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His fields of expertise are modern Jewish and European intellectual history, with a subsidiary interest in nationalism studies. He is the author, most recently, of Isaiah Berlin: The Journey of a Jewish Liberal (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). In addition, Dubnov has published essays in journals such as Nations & Nationalism, Modern Intellectual History, History of European Ideas, The Journal of Israeli History and is the editor of the collection [in Hebrew] Zionism – A View from the Outside (The Bialik Institute, 2010), seeking to put Zionist history in a larger comparative trajectory. At Stanford Dubnov teaches courses in European intellectual history alongside Jewish and Israeli history.
Motti Golani
Panelist
University of Haifa
Gershon Shafir
Commentator
UC San Diego
Adi Gordon
Panelist
University of Cincinnati / Amherst College
Joel Beinin
Panelist
Stanford University
Robert Crews
Commentator
Stanford University
Faisal Devji
Panelist
St. Anthony's, Oxford
Leena Dellashah
Panelist
Columbia University
Conferences