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Building Community: Stanford-Vienna Interdisciplinary Workshop on Medieval Germany

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Tuesday, April 19

11:30-12:30    Introductions and Lunch

12:30-1:10      Matthias Meyer: Politics and Narration: The Entertaining Side of the Coin. On Intrigues

1:15-1:55        Sara Lehner: Catastrophes in the “Buch von Akkon”

2:00-2:40        Beatrice von Lüpke: The Apocryphal Adam and Eve-Tradition

2:40-3:10        Break

3:10-3:50        Lauren Urbont: Translation of Bodies in Ashkenaz

3:55-4:35        Lane Baker: Chronicling Romani Immigrants in the Holy Roman Empire, 1400–1450

5:00-6:20        Fiona Griffiths & Kathryn Starkey: Medieval Germany (900-1220): Cities and Urban Life

 

Wednesday, April 20

9:00-9:40        Christina Lutter: Two Sides of the Same Coin: Spiritual and Material Dimensions of Urban Community Building in Medieval Central Europe

9:45-10:25      Herbert Krammer: Sustaining Networks: Multiplex Interrelations of Urban and Spiritual Communities in Late Medieval Towns (c. 14/15)

10:30-11:10    Daniel Frey: Community Building Strategies of Political Elites in Late Medieval Austria: Kinship, Gender and Spiritual Economy (c. 15)

11:10-12:00    Lunch (Box Lunch)

12:00-1:15      CMEMS Lecture by Matthias Meyer: The Austrian Chronicle 1454-1467 and what it tells us about narrative practices and the House of Habsburg

Kathryn Starkey
Fiona Griffiths
Workshops

Sebastian Felten

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Visiting Postdoctoral Scholar, TEC 2022
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Sebastian Felten (PhD, King’s College London) is Universitätsassistent at the Department of History, University of Vienna and the author of Money in the Dutch Republic: Everyday Practice and Circuits of Exchange (Cambridge, 2022). He is a Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford’s Europe Center and was a fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science Berlin (MPIWG) between 2015 and 2018.

A collective volume on Histories of Bureaucratic Knowledge, which is the result of a working group at the MPIWG (co-convened with Christine von Oertzen), was published in December 2020. Recent publications include papers on Enlightenment ergonomics, distributed cognition in early modern mines, the revival of early modern mining culture during the Nazis' war effort, and bureaucratic rationality.

Explaining Women Party Leaders' Duration in Office in Advanced Democracies

While the number of women in political office around the world is on the rise, men continue to outnumber women at high rates in top leadership positions. There are many reasons why it remains difficult for women to reach, and keep, powerful positions within politics that cover a myriad of electoral, institutional, and individual conditions. Women often become leaders of organizations precisely when leadership conditions are most difficult, and therefore less attractive to powerful men (i.e. the glass cliff). Under these conditions, we might expect women to face greater challenges during their leadership, potentially affecting how long they are able to maintain their leadership roles. Thus, it is impossible to investigate how gender impacts leadership without accounting for selection conditions that place leaders in power. In this paper we take a holistic approach to examining the gendered nature of leadership survival. We investigate how the conditions under which party leaders are chosen, coupled with party performance while in office, impact how long men and women serve as party leaders. In order to do so, we construct a two-stage model that accounts for the endogeneity of the selection process alongside the impact of party performance on the survival of leaders. Using data from 212 leadership terms in eleven industrialized democracies between 1979 and 2018, we find that while women leaders are selected under similar conditions to men, their leadership tenure is more vulnerable to shifts in vote share. Vote share appears to be the main driver of women’s replacement. Men are less susceptible to changes in votes share than women but are also punished for poor poll performance and government loss.

 

Andrea Aldrich

Andrea S. Aldrich is a lecturer in the Department of Political Science at Yale University and her research interests are focused on political representation, gender, and comparative political institutions. Her work examines the relationship between internal political party dynamics and legislative representation. She is particularly interested in investigating the influence of internal party organization on gender equality in elections and party leadership, and her research has recently been published in JCMS: the Journal of Common Market Studies, Party Politics, and Politics & Gender. Before arriving at Yale, she was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Houston with the Political Parties Database under the direction of Dr. Susan Scarrow, a visiting scholar at Texas A&M University, and Fulbright Scholar at the University of Zagreb in Croatia.


*If you need any disability-related accommodation, please contact Shannon Johnson at sj1874@stanford.edu. Requests should be made by April 21, 2022.

 

Co-sponsored by:

Clayman Institute for Gender Research

WMware Women's Leadership Innovation Lab

Hybrid -- William J. Perry Conference Room and Online via Zoom

Dr. Andrea S. Aldrich, Yale University spealer Yale University
Seminars

Geography Is Destiny

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Geography Is Destiny: Britain and the World: A 10,000-Year History
In the wake of Brexit, Ian Morris chronicles the eight-thousand-year history of Britain's relationship to Europe as it has changed in the context of a globalizing world.

When Britain voted to leave the European Union in 2016, the 48 percent who wanted to stay and the 52 percent who wanted to go each accused the other of stupidity, fraud, and treason. In reality, the Brexit debate merely reran a script written eight thousand years earlier, when the rising seas physically separated the British Isles from the European continent. Ever since, geography has been destiny―yet it is humans who get to decide what that destiny means.

Ian Morris, the critically acclaimed author of Why the West Rules―for Now, describes how technology and organization have steadily enlarged Britain's arena, and how its people have tried to turn this to their advantage. For the first seventy-five hundred years, the British were never more than bit players at the western edge of a European stage, struggling to find a role among bigger, richer, and more sophisticated continental rivals. By 1500 CE, however, new kinds of ships and governments had turned the European stage into an Atlantic one; with the English Channel now functioning as a barrier, England transformed the British Isles into a United Kingdom that created a worldwide empire. Since 1900, however, thanks to rapid globalization, Britain has been overshadowed by American, European, and―increasingly―Chinese actors. But in trying to find its place in a global economy, Britain has been looking in all the wrong places. The eight-thousand-year story bracingly chronicled by Geography Is Destiny shows that the great question for the coming century is not what to do about Brussels; it's what to do about Beijing.

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Lauri Mälksoo

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Short-Term Research Fellow at the Stanford University Library, 2022
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Lauri Mälksoo is Professor of International Law at the University of Tartu in Estonia, member of the Institut de Droit International and of the Estonian Academy of Sciences. He has published widely on Russian and Soviet approaches to international law and human rights, including the monograph "Russian Approaches to International Law" (OUP, 2015).

Jonne Kamphorst

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Visiting Student Researcher at The Europe Center, 2022
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Jonne Kamphorst is pursuing a PhD in Political Science at the European University Institute in Florence. At Stanford, he is a Fulbright Visiting Scholar. He has earned an MPhil and MSc in politics and sociology from the University of Oxford and the London School of Economics, and he did his bachelor’s in Political Science at the University of Amsterdam. Jonne’s work focuses on voting behaviour, political parties, and political persuasion. The first part of his doctoral thesis asks why the preferences of voters have changed in advanced democracies. The second part of his thesis focuses on what politicians and parties can do to persuade radicalized, polarized, and disengaged voters to come back to the political mainstream. Jonne is thus particularly interested in the extent to which the numerous interventions against these potentially harmful phenomena are effective. He is exploring these topics using a selection of methods that employ an experimental logic, specifically (field) experiments and methods of causal inference.

Non-Recognition of Illegal Annexations: Will the Rule of International Law Hold?

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The rule in international law which prohibits forcible seizure of territory has lately come under pressure, for example when Russia seized and annexed Crimea in 2014. In the presentation, we will take a look back at the history of this rule, including the Western non-recognition of the Soviet annexation of the Baltic States in 1940-1991, of which Mälksoo has written a leading monograph. Current threats to the rule will be discussed such as the ideas that great powers are entitled to historic justice which may differ from what international law dictates or there is a regional international law dictated by the leading great power in the region. With President Putin's demands to the US and NATO, these international legal questions have again become utterly topical.

Lauri Mälksoo


Lauri Mälksoo is Professor of International Law at the University of Tartu in Estonia, member of the Institut de Droit International and of the Estonian Academy of Sciences. He has published widely on Russian and Soviet approaches to international law and human rights, including the monograph "Russian Approaches to International Law" (OUP, 2015).

 

*If you need any disability-related accommodation, please contact Shannon Johnson at sj1874@stanford.edu. Requests should be made by January 13, 2022.

Co-sponsored by Stanford University Library.

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Lauri Mälksoo Professor of International Law speaker University of Tartu in Estonia

LGBTQ rights and representation among right-wing parties

 

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How do we explain the divergence in the embrace of LGBTQ rights among right-wing European parties? In the 1990s and early 2000s, a few conservative parties started to embrace the gay rights cause, joining earlier adopters among left-wing and liberal Western European parties. Conservative parties in Scandinavia, the Netherlands, and Britain trumpeted their newly found enthusiasm for gay rights as a badge of modernity and political maturity. The embrace was driven by changing social values, the idiosyncratic agency of leadership, and declining religiosity. Today the right-wing lesbian, gay or bisexual parliamentarian is far from an exception. Since 1976, nearly 150 self-identifying LGB parliamentarians from right of center parties have taken office.
 
The position of the radical right is more complex. When it comes to gay and lesbian rights, radical right parties can be divided into two groups. Parties from the Netherlands, Belgium, and northern European countries have invoked the nationalism of gay rights as a club to beat back the Muslim immigrant. Homonationalism has become a successful electoral strategy, which blends support for gay rights with xenophobia and Islamophobia. In contrast, radical right parties in Eastern and Southern Europe have not embraced gay rights. In most of these countries, “homosexuality” is seen as a foreign threat, imposed by Western liberals or alien to Catholic culture and tradition. While the arc of the gay rights movement bends towards freedom, in most countries the T has been jettisoned from the LGB. When the left is slow to adopt, the right sees little gain in moving on the issue, nor is disposed to lead from the front.

 

Gabriele Magni
Gabriele Magni is Assistant Professor of Political Science and Director of the Global Policy Institute at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. His research examines the factors that shape political inclusion, solidarity and representation in advanced democracies. One stream of his work explores the link between economic inequality, immigration and welfare attitudes. A second stream examines LGBTQ rights and representation, focusing on LGBTQ candidates and politicians. His research has appeared in the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, and the British Journal of Political Science, among other outlets. He has also written for The Washington Post, Politico and The New Republic, and provided commentary to The New York Times, The Washington Post, FiveThirtyEight, NBC News and Reuters. Previously, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University’s Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance.


*If you need any disability-related accommodation, please contact Shannon Johnson (sj1874@stanford.edu) by February 10, 2022.

Co-sponsored by the Clayman Institute for Gender Research.

Online Zoom Webinar

Gabriele Magni Loyola Marymount University
Lectures

Desire and Imitation in International Politics

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Desire and Imitation in International Politics
Imitating the desire of others is inherent to the struggle for power in international politics. The imitation of desire is a human trait seldom recognized in International Relations studies, let alone conceptualized. The imitation of desire that takes place among entities—as opposed to being intentionally generated by them—challenges the conventional wisdom of International Relations that assumes rational autonomous individuals. This book identifies the root of Realism, pointing out its awareness of the conflicting impact of desire and imitation in a world driven by restless comparison. It subsequently demonstrates the conceptual value of mimetic theory while proposing a template of understanding international polities, starting from assumptions of disorder and violence. This volume not only contributes to the study of conflict based on the imitation of the desire of others among international polities, but also proposes in its conceptualization that it is worth looking at studies of agency and structure, normative change, peace, and reconciliation.
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Jodok Troy
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Michigan State University Press
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The United Nations Secretary-General as an International Civil Servant

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The International History Review
From the beginnings of the UN Secretariat, its Secretaries-General reached out to a wide audience, considering themselves servants of peace beyond narrow organizational tasks. The article argues that it is the Secretaries-General perception as an international civil servant which led them to endeavour a more expansive role ever since. To unfold this argument, the article, first, traces the international civil servant roots of the Secretary-General. Second, the article illustrates that the themes and rhetorical details of the Secretaries-General inaugural addresses provide a lens to detect and trace the trajectory of the Secretaries-General self-understanding as international civil servants providing the grounds to expand their role. Secretaries-General as international civil servants always embraced the ideal of serving peace, thereby seeking to gain a political role. This international civil servant trajectory illustrates that the role of the UN Secretary-General transcends historical periodization of the UN and sheds light on the evolution of the UN’s global nature and mission.

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Jodok Troy
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