The Europe Center is jointly housed in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Stanford Global Studies Division.
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.
Is the Eurozone crisis undermining European democratic socialism? Why the current economic and fiscal crisis is cause for concern and opportunity, not alarm nor decline, for the future of the European Left.
This is part of the Europe Center's series on the "European and Global Economic Crisis".
Pia Olsen Dyhr was appointed Minister for Trade and Investment in October 2011. Pia Olsen Dyhr became member of the Danish Parliament (Folketing) for The Socialist People’s Party in 2007. Before joining Parliament, she worked with policy, international relations, trade, and environmental issues at the non-governmental organizations CARE Denmark and the Danish Society for the Conservation of Nature. She carries a MA in Political Science from University of Copenhagen.
CISAC Conference Room
Professor Marci Shore will discuss her project that focuses on Husserl's phenomenology, and later Heidegger's (and Sartre's) existentialism as these philosophical currents took shape in Eastern Europe, primarily but not only Czechoslovakia and Poland. The project is structured around philosophical personalities, exploring their encounters and their dialogues and relationships with one another. It's also a project about how the stakes of the questions they pose change, how epistemological questions become ontological questions and later explicitly ethical questions.
Marci Shore is associate professor of history at Yale University. She is the translator of Michał Głowiński's The Black Seasons and the author of Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation's Life and Death in Marxism, 1918-1968. Currently she is at work on a book project titled “Phenomenological Encounters: Scenes from Central Europe,” an examination of the history of phenomenology and existentialism in East-Central Europe.
Co-sponsored by the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies, Department of History, and the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages
Building 200 (History Corner)
Room 307
* NOTE: The venue has been changed to the Barnes/McDowell Rooms at the Fisher Conference Center in the Arrillaga Alumni Center.
Professor Marci Shore will be speaking on the topic of her recent book, The Taste of Ashes: The Afterlife of Totalitarianism in Easten Europe. The collapse of communism opened the archives, illuminating the tragedy of twentieth-century Eastern Europe: there were moments in which no decisions were innocent, in which all possible choices caused suffering. The Taste of Ashes is an account of the darker side of the revolutions of 1989, when the ghost of communism--no longer Marx’s “specter to come"--became a haunting presence of the past.
Marci Shore is associate professor of history at Yale University. She is the translator of Michał Głowiński's The Black Seasons and the author of Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation's Life and Death in Marxism, 1918-1968. Currently she is at work on a book project titled “Phenomenological Encounters: Scenes from Central Europe,” an examination of the history of phenomenology and existentialism in East-Central Europe.
Co-sponsored by the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies, Taube Center for Jewish Studies and the Department of History.
NOTE NEW VENUE:
The Barnes/McDowell Rooms
Fisher Conference Center
Arrillaga Alumni Center
This lecture is part of the "Iberian Studies Program Lecture Series"
Antoni Bassas (Barcelona, Catalonia, 1961) is a journalist, and graduated with his degree in journalism from the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Since June 2009, Bassas has been the chief correspondent of TV3, Television of Catalonia in the United States, based in Washington DC. This has allowed him to travel and cover major news in the US, from the Obama White House to the Oscars, from the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico to Superstorm Sandy in New York, from Immigration Law in Arizona to the last take off of the space shuttle in Florida. He has reported on political primaries, conventions and the presidential campaign, and interviews with people like Yo-Yo Ma, James Taylor, Amy Goodman, Madeleine Albright and Zbigniew Brzezinsky.
Between 1995 and 2008, Bassas was the anchor for the morning news on the Catalan public radio, achieving both outstanding levels of audience and influence in the public life of his country, and receiving some of the most distinguished radio and TV awards.
Co-sponsored by the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, and the Stanford Humanities Center
Reuben W. Hills Conference Room
In-conflict state building generates unbalanced civil-military relations in the host state due to an inevitable civil-military gap. Building civilian institutions cannot match the trajectory of progress in building military institutions. The civil-military imbalance creates structural risks to the democratization of the state. This article explains the civil-military gap and its risks, examines Iraq and in particular Afghanistan, and presents steps on how to make unbalanced civil-military relations conducive to democratization by shaping the political role of the military.
“In the fields with which we are concerned, knowledge [Erkenntnis] comes only in lightning flashes. The text is the long roll of thunder that follows,” This sentence from his Arcades-project belongs to the most fluently cited passages of Benjamin’s work. However, in contrast to many reading the lecture argues that this has not to be understood as a metaphor. Instead lightening flash and image function as words mutually replacing each other in order to describe a mode of sudden, simultaneous recognition / knowledge that is at the centre of his image-based epistemology.
This lecture argues that this epistemology is informed by (1) an intense study of paintings and other pieces of visual arts and (2) the engagement with the development of media technology in modernity. Whereas the younger Benjamin studied the perceptive mode of visual art as a site of afterlife of an epiphanic mode of insight he later, in the context of his project on modernity, turned this mode of knowledge, due to the invention of electricity and technical media, into a modern epistemology. Through a kind of breaking in of technique into iconography many of its conventional figures were turned into epistemological constellations. In this way Benjamin developed a theory of knowledge and history based in simultaneity.
Co-sponsored by the Department of German Studies, Department of Comparative Literature, Stanford Humanities Center, Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, Department of English, Program in Modern Thought and Literature, and the Interdisciplinary Working Group in Critical Theory.
Levinthal Hall
121 Pigott Hall
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305
Professor Harrison received his doctorate in Romance Studies from Cornell University in 1984, with a dissertation on Dante's Vita Nuova. In 1985 he accepted a visiting assistant professorship in the Department of French and Italian at Stanford. In 1986 he joined the faculty as an assistant professor. He was granted tenure in 1992 and was promoted to full professor in 1995. In 1997 Stanford offered him the Rosina Pierotti Chair. In 2002, he was named chair of the Department of French and Italian. In 2014 he was knighted "Chevalier" by the French Republic. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and lead guitarist for the cerebral rock band Glass Wave.
Professor Harrison's first book, The Body of Beatrice, was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 1988. It deals with medieval Italian lyric poetry, with special emphasis on Dante's early work La Vita Nuova. The Body of Beatrice was translated into Japanese in 1994. Over the next few years Professor Harrison worked on his next book, Forests: The Shadow of Civilization, which appeared in 1992 with University of Chicago Press. This book deals with the ways in which the Western imagination has symbolized, represented, and conceived of forests, primarily in literature, religion, and mythology. It offers a select history that begins in antiquity and ends in our own time. Forests appeared simultaneously in English, French, Italian, and German. It subsequently appeared in Japanese and Korean as well. In 1994 his book Rome, la Pluie: A Quoi Bon Littérature? appeared in France, Italy, and Germany. This book is written in the form of dialogues between two characters and deals with topics such as art restoration, the vocation of literature, and the place of the dead in contemporary society.
Professor Harrison's next book, The Dominion of the Dead, published in 2003 by University of Chicago Press, examines the relations the living maintain with the dead in diverse secular realms. This book was translated into German, French and Italian. Professor Harrison's book Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition appeared in 2008 with the University of Chicago Press, in French with Le Pommier, and in Italian with Fazi Editori , and in German with Hanser Verlag (it subsequently appeared in Chinese translation). His most recent book Juvenescence: A Cultural History of Our Age came out in 2014 with Chicago University Press. In 2005 Harrison started a literary talk show on KZSU radio called "Entitled Opinions." The show features hour long conversations with a variety of scholars, writers, and scientists. Robert Harrison is also the Director of Another Look, a Stanford-based book club.
This is a magisterial new account of the day-to-day practice of Russian criminal justice in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Nancy Kollmann contrasts Russian written law with its pragmatic application by local judges, arguing that this combination of formal law and legal institutions with informal, flexible practice contributed to the country's social and political stability. She also places Russian developments in the broader context of early modern European state-building strategies of governance and legal practice. She compares Russia's rituals of execution to the 'spectacles of suffering' of contemporary European capital punishment and uncovers the dramatic ways in which even the tsar himself, complying with Moscow's ideologies of legitimacy, bent to the moral economy of the crowd in moments of uprising. Throughout, the book assesses how criminal legal practice used violence strategically, administering horrific punishments in some cases and in others accommodating with local communities and popular concepts of justice.
