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.
Authorship and Responsibility: Literary Trials and the Ethics of Writing (France, 19th-21st Centuries)
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What are the limits of literary freedom? Writers' claims for autonomy have encountered legal restrictions to their freedom of speech. As suggested by Foucault, censorship has shaped the very notion of authorship. This talk will confront the diverging conceptions of the author’s responsibility in France and the beliefs in the power of writing that underlie them through the debates surrounding literary trials, including the cases of Béranger, Courier, Flaubert, Baudelaire, the naturalists, and the purge trials after World War II. In reaction to these conceptions, writers developed their own code of ethics, which contributed to the emergence of an autonomous literary field and to the construction of the figure of the public intellectual, embodied by Zola and by Sartre.
Gisèle Sapiro is Research director at the CNRS and Director of Studies at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales. She is also head of the Centre européen de sociologie et de science politique, Paris, and been a visiting professor at the University of Freiburg and at NYU, among other places. Her interests include the sociology of intellectuals, literature, publishing and translation. She is the author of La Guerre des écrivains, 1940-1953 (Fayard, 1999; forthcoming in English translation with Duke University Press), La Responsabilité de l’écrivain. Littérature, droit et morale en France (19e-20e siècles) (Seuil, 2011), and of numerous articles published in journals of sociology, history, political science, aesthetics and literature, cultural studies and French studies. She is also editor or co-editor of Pour une histoire des sciences sociales (Fayard, 2004), Pierre Bourdieu, sociologue (Fayard, 2004), Translatio. Le marché de la traduction en France à l’heure de la mondialisation (CNRS Editions, 2008), Les Contradictions de la globalisation éditoriale (Nouveau Monde, 2009), and L’Espace intellectuel en Europe (La Découverte, 2009).
Co-sponsored by: The Europe Center, Department of French and Italian, Taube Center for Jewish Studies, Center for the Study of the Novel, Department of Sociology, DLCL Research Unit on Literature and Ethics, Hebrew Literature Workshop, and the French Culture Workshop
Event Summary
Sapiro describes how writers during the inter-war period were targeted for social and political subversion, and even accused of being responsible for the French military defeat. The belief in the power of the written word, a legacy from the French Revolution, along with the Catholic fear of the dangers of reading, contributed to the perception of the printed word as a vehicle for inciting crime. Censorship was prevalent, with many prosecutions for writing and publishing carried out during the 19th century.
Sapiro traces how this repression led to the development of two competing ideas of professional ethics around writing: the idea of art for art's sake, and the political commitment of public intellectuals. She also describes the application of objective and subjective responsibility theories, ideas about criminality, and the absence of a professional ethics in writing, to the laws of free press during this period. Sapiro outlines several specific cases of prosecution against prominent authors in France, and the variety of arguments used in the defense - sometimes unsuccessfully.
A discussion session following the talk raised such questions as: How does the identity of the author relate to concepts of citizenship? Could the trials of authors be considered a form of censorship? Were there structural similarities between the trials and the public debate? Was there any reaction in the literary realm? Was there ever any criticism about the legal mechanism as the appropriate arena for discussing this moral debate? Why wasn't the debate held within the government?
CISAC Conference Room
Gisèle Sapiro
Speaker
CNRS, EHESS, Centre européen de sociologie et de science politique
Lectures
Nelly Sachs: Migration and Memory, Poetry and Context
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Reception, workshop and dramatic reading in celebration of the life, poetry and the evocative context of Nelly Sachs, winner of the 1966 Nobel Prize for Literature.
Inspired by the publication of the American edition of Nelly Sachs: Flight and Metamorphosis, the documented biography of the Nobel prize-winning poet Nelly Sachs, by author Aris Fioretos (Stanford University Press, 2012), Mr. Fioretos will be available for book signings (books will also be available for purchase.)
Seating is limited.
Co-sponsored by the Stanford Institute for Creativity and the Arts (SiCa) and the Taube Center for Jewish Studies
POST EVENT RELATED PUBLICATIONS:
"Nelly Sachs. Ever hear of her? Nobel poet finds new recognition"
AUTHOR
Cynthia Haven
PUBLISHED BY
THE BOOK HAVEN, Stanford University, March 2012
"Dust-to-Dust Song"
AUTHOR
Paul Reitter
PUBLISHED BY
JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS, Vol. 10, Summer 2012
The Bender Room
5th floor, Green Library
Stanford University
Amir Eshel
Dept of German Studies
Building 260, Room 204
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-2030
0
eshel@stanford.edu
Edward Clark Crossett Professor of Humanistic Studies
Professor of Comparative Literature
Professor of German Studies
Amir Eshel is Edward Clark Crossett Professor of Humanistic Studies. He is Professor of German Studies and Comparative Literature and as of 2019 Director of Comparative Literature and its graduate program. His Stanford affiliations include The Taube Center for Jewish Studies, Modern Thought & Literature, and The Europe Center at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. He is also the faculty director of Stanford’s research group on The Contemporary and of the Poetic Media Lab at Stanford’s Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA). His research focuses on contemporary literature and the arts as they touch on philosophy, specifically on memory, history, political thought, and ethics.
Amir Eshel is the author of Poetic Thinking Today (Stanford University Press, 2019); German translation at Suhrkamp Verlag, 2020). Previous books include Futurity: Contemporary Literature and the Quest for the Past (The University of Chicago Press in 2013). The German version of the book, Zukünftigkeit: Die zeitgenössische Literatur und die Vergangenheit, appeared in 2012 with Suhrkamp Verlag. Together with Rachel Seelig, he co-edited The German-Hebrew Dialogue: Studies of Encounter and Exchange (2018). In 2014, he co-edited with Ulrich Baer a book of essays on Hannah Arendt, Hannah Arendt: zwischen den Disziplinen; and also co-edited a book of essays on Barbara Honigmann with Yfaat Weiss, Kurz hinter der Wahrheit und dicht neben der Lüge (2013).
Earlier scholarship includes the books Zeit der Zäsur: Jüdische Lyriker im Angesicht der Shoah (1999), and Das Ungesagte Schreiben: Israelische Prosa und das Problem der Palästinensischen Flucht und Vertreibung (2006). Amir Eshel has also published essays on Franz Kafka, Hannah Arendt, Paul Celan, Dani Karavan, Gerhard Richter, W.G. Sebald, Günter Grass, Alexander Kluge, Barbara Honigmann, Durs Grünbein, Dan Pagis, S. Yizhar, and Yoram Kaniyuk.
Amir Eshel’s poetry includes a 2018 book with the artist Gerhard Richter, Zeichnungen/רישומים, a work which brings together 25 drawings by Richter from the clycle 40 Tage and Eshel’s bi-lingual poetry in Hebrew and German. In 2020, Mossad Bialik brings his Hebrew poetry collection בין מדבר למדבר, Between Deserts.
Amir Eshel is a recipient of fellowships from the Alexander von Humboldt and the Friedrich Ebert foundations and received the Award for Distinguished Teaching from the School of Humanities and Sciences.
Affiliated faculty of The Europe Center
Affiliated faculty of The Taube Center for Jewish Studies
Faculty Director of The Contemporary Research Group
Faculty Director of the Poetic Media Lab
CV
Document
amir_eshel_2020.pdf
(371.95 KB)
Aris Fioretos
Author and Professor of Aesthetics
Speaker
Humboldt University, Berlin
Deniz Göktürk
Professor of German / Film and Media
Speaker
UC Berkeley
Axel Englund
Encina Hall
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305
0
axel.englund@littvet.su.se
Anna Lindh Fellow, The Europe Center
Axel Englund is a scholar of Literature and Musicology. He completed his doctorate at Stockholm University, Sweden (April 2011), where he has also taught modernist exile literature and metrics. His dissertation, a book version of which is being published by Ashgate in 2012, focuses on the poetry of the German-speaking Holocaust survivor Paul Celan, and its interplay with music. In 2009, he was a visiting scholar at the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Columbia University. His research interests include the poetry and music of the 20th century, intermedial relations, critical musicology, hermeneutics and aesthetics. His current research addresses the poetic output of W.G. Sebald.
Anna Westerstahl Stenport
Encina Hall
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305
0
Visiting Associate Professor and Anna Lindh Fellow, The Europe Center
As a Visiting Associate Professor and Anna Lindh fellow in The Europe Center, Anna Westerstahl Stenport researches the contemporary European and Nordic film and media industries. Her interests include production studies and digital convergence culture and span investigations into aesthetics, film genre, and thematic analyses. She includes practitioner perspectives in her work and incorporates extensive interview material in her writing. Current scholarship focuses on contemporary Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish film industry culture. She is the author of a book on Swedish director Lukas Moodysson's debut feature 'Show Me Love' (University of Washington Press Nordic Film Classics Series, 2012). Current research includes film adaptations of Scandinavian crime writers Stieg Larsson, Henning Mankell, and others.
Anna also researches turn-of-the century European literature, drama, and culture with an emphasis on economic history. She has written extensively on Swedish author and playwright August Strindberg. Works include the book Locating August Strindberg's Prose: Modernism, Transnationalism, and Setting (University of Toronto Press, 2010) and numerous articles and book chapters.
A native of Sweden's Göteborg, Anna holds degrees from Uppsala University and a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. She is an Affiliate Associate Professor at the University of Gothenburg, as well as a tenured professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Leslie Morris
Professor of German
Speaker
University of Minnesota
Lucy Alford
Doctoral Candidate, Department of Comparative Literature
Speaker
Stanford University
Andrew Utter
Artistic Director
Speaker
Uranium Madhouse Theater, Los Angeles
Workshops
Stanford Interdisciplinary Conference on Conscience
Conference organizer: Nancy Ruttenburg
What is conscience, what was conscience, and what is its future?
The purpose of the conference is to examine the authority of conscience as it is presently invoked in various arenas of contemporary life—including law, medicine, journalism, and politics—and as its meaning is inflected by scholarly debates in the fields of history, literature, religious studies, psychology, and philosophy. From their various fields of expertise and interest, participants will address the central question the conference raises: in our post-Freudian and post-Nietzschean age, to what degree does conscience possess the kind of authority that an earlier and less secular age reserved for first things? This question entails a host of others. Do our invocations of conscience reveal it to be the still-vital residue of a kind of certainty linked to infallible authority from which we cannot alienate ourselves even when we’d like to? If so, is the enduring vitality of conscience a sign that the process of secularization remains incomplete, even in secular rationalists, those who might consider themselves to be exempt from the religiosity that distinguishes United States culture from those of other modern Western democracies? Do we regard conscience as a type of knowledge? Or is it possible to understand conscience ontologically, as a category of self or mind that—insofar as it speaks to all humanity by means of a "small, still voice" issuing from each human heart—bridges the gap between individual and corporate being? Whether or not underwritten by a discipline or a tradition, conscience is commonly invoked to justify a range of acts and behaviors: what relation do these invocations of moral law, even when unexamined, bear to the burgeoning interest in ethics we see across the humanities disciplines and into the legal, medical, and journalistic fields? Between the extremes of authoritarianism and anarchy, where do we place conscience in American political life and how do we understand its peculiar agency?
CONFERENCE VIDEO AND AUDIO RECORDINGS:
Please click on the panel titles and the keynote speaker's name below to view videos and listen to audios of each:
November 8, 2012
Panel 1: The Pre-Revolutionary Conscience: From Religious Burden to Natural Right (video)
Panel 2: MIA: Conscience and the First Amendment (video)
Panel 3: Roundtable: The Religious Conscience in Modernity (audio only)
Panel 4: Conscience/Ethics: The Secular Conscience (audio only)
November 9, 2012
Panel 5: Conscience and Reportage (video)
Panel 6: Roundtable: Embodied Conscience (video)
Panel 7: Roundtable: Conscientious Objection (video)
Keynote: Anne Aghion, award-winning documentary filmmaker (video)
PROGRAM AND PARTICIPANTS:
Opening Event: Wednesday, November 7, 6:00-8:30 p.m.
Screening of keynote speaker Anne Aghion’s documentary film, My Neighbor, My Killer, to be introduced by the filmmaker. Will be held in the Oksenberg Conference Room, Encina Hall Central, 3rd floor.
- 6:00 p.m. Reception
- 6:30 p.m. Screening
For more information on the film, please visit this event listing on our website by clicking <here>.
Thursday, November 8, 9:00 a.m. - 7:00 p.m:
Conscience and its Conceptual Evolution: Religion/Rights/Ethics
- 9:00 – 9:30 Opening Remarks: Nancy Ruttenburg, Organizer
Thursday Morning Panels: What Was Conscience? The American Context
- 9:30 – 11:30: The Pre-Revolutionary Conscience: From Religious Burden to Natural Right
1) Andrew Murphy, Associate Professor of Political Science, and Director of the Walt Whitman Center for the Culture and Politics of Democracy, Rutgers University, author of Conscience and Community: Revisiting Toleration and Religious Dissent in Early Modern England and America and Prodigal Nation: Moral Decline and Divine Punishment from New England to 9/11.
2) Mark Valeri, E. T. Thompson Professor of Church History, Union Presbyterian Seminary. Among the editors of the multi-volume Works of Jonathan Edwards, he is the author most recently of Heavenly Merchandize: How Religion Shaped Commerce in Puritan America.
Stanford Respondent: Caroline Winterer, Professor of History, Professor by courtesy of Classics
- 11:45 – 1:45: MIA: Conscience and the First Amendment
1) Jack Rakove, William Robertson Coe Professor of History and American Studies and Professor of Political Science at Stanford, where has taught since 1980. He is the author of six books, including Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution (1996), which received the Pulitzer Prize in History, and Revolutionaries: A New History of the Invention of America (2010), which was a finalist for the George Washington Prize. He is currently at work on Beyond Belief, Beyond Conscience: The Radical Significance of the Free Exercise of Religion, which will be part of the Oxford University Press series on Inalienable Rights.
2) Michael J. Perry, Robert W. Woodruff Professor of Law, and Senior Fellow for the Center for the Study of Law and Religion, Emory University School of Law. Author most recently of The Political Morality of Liberal Democracy; Constitutional Rights, Moral Controversy, and the Supreme Court; Toward a Theory of Human Rights: Religion, Law, Courts; and Under God?: Religious Faith and Liberal Democracy.
Stanford Respondent: Derek Webb, Fellow, Constitutional Law Center, Stanford
Thursday Afternoon Panels: What Is Conscience: The Secular/Religious Divide
- 2:45 – 4:45: Roundtable: The Religious Conscience in Modernity:
1) Nathan Chapman, Executive Director of the Stanford Constitutional Law Center who joined the Law School as a Fellow in 2010. After clerking for the Honorable Judge Gerald Bard Tjoflat on the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit Court, he practiced with WilmerHale in Washington, D.C. He graduated from Duke University School of Law and Duke Divinity School in 2007. His most recent publications include Disentangling Conscience and Religion, 2013 U. Ill. L. Rev. (forthcoming) and Due Process As Separation of Powers, 121 Yale L. J. 1672 (2012) (with Michael W. McConnell).
2) Steven Knapp, President of the George Washington University since August 2007, former Dean of Arts and Sciences and subsequently Provost at Johns Hopkins University, and Professor of English at UC Berkeley. Author most recently with Philip Clayton of The Predicament of Belief: Science, Philosophy, Faith. A specialist in Romanticism, literary theory, and the relation of literature to philosophy and religion, Dr. Knapp earned his doctorate and masters degrees from Cornell University and his Bachelor of Arts degree from Yale University.
3) Arnold Eisen, Chancellor, Jewish Theological Seminary, NYC. Author most recently of Rethinking Modern Judaism: Ritual, Commandment, Community and Taking Hold of Torah: Jewish Commitment and Community in America.
Stanford Moderator: Nancy Ruttenburg, William Robertson Coe Professor of American Literature, Professor by Courtesy of Comparative Literature and Slavic, Director, Stanford Center for the Study of the Novel
- 5:00 – 7:00: Conscience/Ethics: The Secular Conscience
1) Jay M. Bernstein, University Distinguished Professor, New School for Social Research. Author most recently of Against Voluptuous Bodies: Adorno’s Late Modernism and the Meaning of Painting; Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics; and a co-authored volume published through UC Berkeley’s Townsend Center entitled Art and Aesthetics After Adorno.
2) Kent Greenawalt, University Professor, former Editor-in-Chief of the Columbia Law Review, Columbia Law School. Author, among many other works, of Religion and the Constitution: Vol. I: Free Exercise and Fairness and Vol. II: Establishment and Fairness, as well as Does God Belong in Public Schools? and Private Consciences and Public Reasons.
Stanford Respondent: Nancy Ruttenburg, William Robertson Coe Professor of American Literature, Professor by Courtesy of Comparative Literature and Slavic, Director of Stanford Center for the Study of the Novel
Friday, November 9, 9:00 a.m. - 6:45 p.m.
Contemporary Casuistry: Cases of Conscience in Action
Friday Morning Panels: Narrating Conscience: Modes of Witnessing
- 9:00 – 11:00: Conscience and Reportage
1) Dr. Sheri Fink, M.D., Ph.D., 2010 Pulitzer Prize- and National Magazine Award-winner in investigative journalism for “The Deadly Choices at Memorial” about difficult choices made at a New Orleans hospital during the aftermath of Katrina; contributor to ProPublica who has reported globally on health, medicine, and science; senior fellow with the New America Foundation and the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative; author of War Hospital: A True Story of Surgery and Survival (2003) during the Balkan crisis, winner of the American Medical Writer’s Association special book award and finalist for PEN Martha Albrand awards.
2) Colin Dayan, Robert Penn Warren Professor in the Humanities, Vanderbilt, and expert in literary, legal, and religious studies of the Americas; books include Haiti, History, and the Gods (1998); The Story of Cruel and Unusual (2007); and, most recently, The Law is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons, selected as a Choice top-25 "outstanding academic book of 2011."
Stanford Respondent: David Palumbo-Liu, Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor, Professor of Comparative Literature, Professor by courtesy of English
- 11:15 – 1:15: Roundtable: Embodied Conscience
1) Dr. Abraham Verghese, author of the novel Cutting for Stone (2010)as well as the non-fiction works, My Own Country: A Doctor’s Story (1995)about his experience as a physician working in rural Tennessee at the beginning of the AIDS crisis, and The Tennis Partner: A Story of Friendship and Loss (1998). Currently Professor for the Theory and Practice of Medicine and Senior Associate Chair of the Department of Internal Medicine, Stanford.
2) Mark Johnson, Philip H. Knight Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Department of Philosophy, University of Oregon. Author most recently of The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought (co-authored with George Lakoff); Moral Imagination: Implications of Cognitive Science for Ethics; and a second edition of Metaphors We Live By (co-authored with George Lakoff).
3) Dr. Fady Joudah, Internal Medicine and Palestinian-American poet; former practitioner with Doctors Without Borders in Darfur, Sudan and Zambia; translator of the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish and Ghassan Zaqtan, and 2007 winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition for The Earth in the Attic (2008).
Stanford Moderator: Blakey Vermeule, Professor of English
Friday Afternoon Panels: Conscience in the World: Problems of Toleration and Intervention
- 2:30 – 4:30: Roundtable: Conscientious Objection
1) Air Force Reserve Col. Steven Kleinman, Senior Intelligence Officer, U.S. Air Force; a widely recognized subject matter expert with extensive experience in human intelligence operations, special operations, strategic interrogation, and resistance to interrogation; Senior Advisor to the Intelligence Science Board’s study “Educing Information” which issued guidelines for improving the government’s interrogation techniques. Publicly opposed “enhanced interrogation” techniques for battling the war on terror in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and the House Judiciary Committee. Authored numerous articles laying out his argument against torture published in several peer-reviewed professional journals, the law review of the City University of New York and Valparaiso University law schools, and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard.
2) Eyal Press, author of Beautiful Souls: Saying No, Breaking Ranks, and Heeding the Voice of Conscience in Dark Times and Absolute Convictions; contributor to several journals, including The Nation, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, Mother Jones, The Atlantic Monthly, and others.
3) Yusef Komunyakaa: Global Distinguished Professor of English, NYU, Vietnam veteran and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet whose collections include The Chameleon Couch, Taboo: The Wishbone Trilogy, Pleasure Dome and many others.
Stanford Moderator: Debra Satz, Associate Dean of Humanities, Marta Sutton Weeks Professor of Ethics in Society; Professor of Philosophy and by courtesy Political Science; Research Affiliate, Program on Global Justice
4:45 – 6:45: KEYNOTE ADDRESS: ANNE AGHION
For her work on the gacaca trials in post-genocide Rwanda, documentary filmmaker Anne Aghion won the UNESCO Fellini Prize, an Emmy Award, the Human Rights Watch 2009 Nestor Almendros Prize, and she was a nominee for the 2009 Gotham Award. Her feature-length documentary, My Neighbor, My Killer, was one of the few documentaries to be an Official Selection at the Cannes Film Festival.
Co-sponsored by The Europe Center, Stanford Arts Institute (formerly Stanford Institute for Creativity and the Arts), Stanford Law School, School of Humanities and Sciences, Office of the Dean of Humanities, Creative Writing Program, Stanford Humanities Center, Department of English, Taube Center for Jewish Studies, Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, Center for Ethics in Society, Department of Art & Art History, the Department of Philosophy, and the Department of History.
Please visit the conference website at: https://conscienceconference2012.wordpress.com/
Bechtel Conference Center
Conferences
History and Memory: Global and Local Dimensions
The second conference in the multi-year TEC-Van Leer Jerusalem Institute project on the reconciliation of divided regions and societies.
Conference Summary
By Roland Hsu, Associate Director, the Europe Center, and Kathryn Ciancia, (Ph.D., Stanford).
The Europe Center, with project partner the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, hosted the major international conference at Stanford University (May 17-18, 2012), dedicated to “History and Memory: Global and Local Dimensions”. This conference was aimed to deepen our understanding of disputes over history, and to find ways towards resolving conflictual memory. Participants – all leaders in their field, and representing voices from U.S., European, Israeli, Palestinian, and Arab worlds – were challenged to answer:
- What are the historians’ responsibilities in developing shared narratives about war, civil conflict, occupation, and genocide?
- How do we understand the relation between the work of professional historians and that of civic society organizations?
- How should one think about the relative importance of historical commissions and truth commissions in “coming to terms with the past”?
- How do efforts in post-conflict situations to reach accurate assessments (“truth”) of the events meet the needs of healing social, ethnic, and/or religious wounds (“reconciliation”)?
- What are the consequences and meaning of actions of forgiveness, including the formal granting of amnesty? Do these actions conflict with the writing of history?
Participants included:
Khalil, Gregory (Telos Group)
Göçek, Müge (Univ. of Michigan)
Milani, Abbas (Stanford)
Bashir, Bashir (The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute)
Barkan, Elazar (Columbia)
Karayanni, Michael (The Hebrew University)
Confino, Alon (University of Virginia)
Bartov, Omer (Brown)
Cohen, Mitchell (Baruch)
Eshel, Amir (Stanford)
Glendinning, Simon (LSE)
Motzkin, Gabriel (The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute)
Naimark, Norman (Stanford)
Penslar, Derek (Toronto)
Rouhana, Nadim (Tufts)
Uhl, Heidemarie (Austrian Academy of Sciences)
Zerubavel, Yael (Rutgers)
Zipperstein, Steven (Stanford)
Notes and Highlights
In his opening remarks, Amir Eshel, Director of The Europe Center, situated the conference within its wider context—a series under the title “Debating History, Democracy, Development, and Education in Conflicted Societies,” which began with a conference on “Democracy in Adversity and Diversity” in Jerusalem in May 2011. Eshel posed the question of why Stanford’s Europe Center should focus on issues relating to the wider Middle East, particularly the historic and ongoing conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. In answering his own question, Eshel argued that the European Union had begun to look closely at its own neighborhood, with a particular emphasis on the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership (EUROMED), which explores questions of migration, religion, and civil society in the eastern Mediterranean and North Africa. As such questions are important in both Europe and the EUROMED region, scholars who work on Europe need to think within a broader geographical context that stretches beyond Old Europe or even the European Union.
Amir Eshel also introduced some of the key ideas that informed the conference. Questions of memory and history have been central to academic discourse over the past three decades. Indeed, memory and history have taken on a crucial, even obsessive, dynamic. Where are we today in this global interdisciplinary conversation? Can the study of memory help us to understand the conflicted societies of the greater Middle East? Can the huge scholarly interest in such subjects help us to think in new ways about the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians? Can the European experience of dealing with difficult memories aid us as we try to understand Israeli and Palestinian memories of the 1948 Nakba? What is the role of historical research, on the one hand, and cultural remembrance, on the other, in promoting reconciliation and cohabitation? Since the conference aimed to focus less on the peace process in the Middle East and more on attempts at reconciliation and cohabitation, he urged participants to consider how Israelis and Palestinians might live together
In order to highlight work that had recently been undertaken, Eshel then focused on the fields of historical research and cultural discourse. Over the past few decades, he argued, narratives have become increasingly crucial in the historiography, much of the impetus coming from so-called critical historiography. For instance, the last decade has witnessed the publication of Motti Golani and Adel Manna’s Two Sides of the Coin, which presents two narratives of the Nakba of 1948. In this multi-perspective narrative, the conflict is presented as one of both territory and historical memory. Similarly, Mahmoud Yazbak and Yfaat Weiss’s Haifa Before and After 1948 was co-authored by Israelis and Palestinians and features fourteen different narratives. A further collection, entitled Zoom In: Palestinian Refugees of 1948, Remembrances, deals with contemporary memories of the Nakba. All three books were published by the Institute For Historical Justice and Reconciliation and the Republic of Letters, while the Van Leer Institute and Al-Quds University in Palestinian East Jerusalem have also published a series of schoolbooks that present similar multi-perspective narratives.
In addition to the changes in the historiography, there has been a shift in the cultural discourse, exemplified by the Israeli novelist Alon Hilu’s The House of Rajani (2012), which details the experiences of one Palestinian family and includes a map of Jaffa-Tel Aviv featuring Palestinian sites that vanished in 1948. The fact that Hilu’s novel received critical acclaim and was commercially successful indicates a new willingness on the part of Israelis to learn about the Palestinian experience. Eshel has himself just completed a book comparing post-Second World War German and Austrian cultural memory with Israeli cultural memory of 1948. Since Palestinians and Israelis are bound to live together, Eshel argued that the solutions depend on narratives of the past, with history at the center of the discussion. Throughout the conference, participants were urged to ask themselves two questions: Can we do more? Can we do better?
Video casts of select sessions of the conference are available on Stanford YouTube.
Titles of the sessions are:
- History and Memory Welcome and Introduction (Amir Eshel and Gabriel Motzkin)
- Session 1: "Memory and the Philosophy of History" (Gabriel Motzkin) and “From Rational Historiography to Delusional Conspiracies: Travails of History in Iran” (Abbas Milani)
- Session 2:“The Public and Private Erasure of History and Memory: Ottoman Empire, Turkish Republic and the Case of the Collective Violence against the Armenians (1789-2009)” (Fatma Müge Göçek) and “The Shoah and the Logics of Comparison: The place of the Jewish Holocaust in Contemporary European Memory” (Heidemarie Uhl)
- Session 4: America, Prolepsis and the 'Holy Land' (Gregory Khalil) and “Neutralizing History and Memory in Divided Societies” (Bashir Bashir)
- Session 5: "Role of Historical Memory in Conflict Resolution" (Elazar Barkan) and “I Forgive You” (Simon Glendinning)
- Session 6: "Historicizing Atrocity as a Path to Reconciliation" (Omer Bartov) and “A Memory of One’s Own: History, Political Change and the Meaning of 1977” (Mitchell Cohen)
Plans for the Next Conference
The final session involved a Round Table discussion in which participants had the opportunity to reflect on the larger themes of the conference and to suggest ways in which the dialogue could be fruitfully continued. Three of the conference organizers began with their own reflections on the conference before the discussion was opened up to all participants. Norman Naimark pointed to three key ideas that he had learned from the proceedings. The first was the concept that history and memory should not necessarily be seen as distinct entities. Second, Naimark pointed to the importance of comparative approaches, citing Derek Penslar’s presentation as a good example. While the conference did not deal with the fields of Eastern European, Russian, and German history, external scholarly interjections into these fields have made them places of stimulating debate. Finally, since there is much that we do not know about 1948, Naimark urged the creation of a history that would place those events within a much broader chronological context, just as Omer Bartov is doing for the town of Buczacz. In his remarks, Gabriel Motzkin focused on the relationship between memory and the ongoing political process in Israel. He expressed agreement with Nadim Rouhana that Jewish Israelis need to recognize Palestinian memories, but added that Palestinians have to acknowledge the Jewish religious project in which the land of Israel occupies the same place that salvation does for Christians. Finally, Amir Eshel urged participants to consider the role of the “practical past”—how do we use the past in order to engage the present and imagine the future? He suggested that there are a variety of possible political solutions, but that there is also a long list of actions that the present Israeli government could take in order to aid reconciliation, including acts of apology and acknowledgment.
The organizers express their deep appreciation to the conference participants. They also support the keen interest in continuing the work on this subject and the larger project, with follow-up programming. The next conference in this series, from the Europe Center-Van Leer Jerusalem Institute partnership, will be announced at The Europe Center website.
Landau Economics Building
Lucas Room 134(A)
Conferences
Opera After Freud
The conference will take as its point of departure two peculiar facts: that interpreting (especially German) opera with Freud’s theories in mind is not just productive, but almost imperative at a particular moment of the form’s history (in particular after Wagner); and that psychoanalysis suddenly loses at least some of that heuristic purchase in the period after the first World War. We hope to detail and interrogate the elective affinities between Freudian psychoanalysis and fin-de-siècle opera in light of the severance of that affinity later in the twentieth century. What unspoken factors subtended the uncanny felicity of Freud as a paradigm for analyzing the operas of Wagner, Pfitzner, Schreker, Zemlinsky, Braunfels, etc., and what factors fell away in the wake of Schoenberg, Wolpe, Berg, and Weill?
For full program, please visit https://www.stanford.edu/dept/DLCL/cgi-bin/web/events/opera-after-freud
Sponsored by the Office of the Associate Dean of the Humanities, the Division of Literatures, Cultures and Languages, the Stanford Humanities Center, The Europe Center, and the Department of Music
Levinthal Hall
Thomas Grey
Professor of Musicology, and by courtesy, German Studies
Moderator
Stanford
Brian Hyer
Professor of Music Theory
Panelist
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Lawrence Kramer
Professor of English
Speaker
Fordham University
Paul Robinson
Professor of History
Moderator
Stanford
Richard Leppert
Professor of Cultural Studies & Comparative Literature
Panelist
University of Minnesota
Lydia Goehr
Professor of Philosophy
Panelist
Columbia University
Peter Burgard
Professor of German
Moderator
Harvard
Jessica Payette
Assistant Professor of Musicology
Panelist
Oakland University
Charles Kronengold
Assistant Professor of Musicology
Panelist
Stanford
Heather Hadlock
Associate Professor of Musicology
Moderator
Stanford
Daniel Albright
Professor of English
Panelist
Harvard
David Levin
Professor of German Studies and Cinema and Media Studies
Panelist
University of Chicago
Mary Ann Smart
Professor of Musicology
Moderator
UC Berkeley
Gundula Kreuzer
Assistant Professor of Music History
Panelist
Yale
Ryan Minor
Professor of Music History and Theory
Panelist
Stony Brook University
Adrian Daub
Assistant Professor of German Studies
Moderator
Stanford
Bryan Gilliam
Professor of Musicology
Panelist
Duke
Stephen Hinton
Professor of Music, and by courtesy, German
Panelist
Stanford
Conferences
Emergence of Nationalism in Greece and Turkey: A Comparative Historical Account
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Greek Nationalism had an early start in late 18th century because of the preponderance of the Greek language in Balkan institutions of learning. The early enlightenment was transmitted by learned prelates before the French Revolution launched its anti-clerical onslaught. Whereas 19th-century exponents of nationalism were children of the secular enlightenment, the second half of the century was dominated by the romantic and irredentist nationalism of Konstantine Paparrigopoulos that believed in the cultural, not racial, continuity of the Greeks. Turkish Nationalism was a late comer in the Balkans. The views of the Young Ottomans constituted at first ambiguous attempt before the Young Turks and Ziya Gökalp made their nationalist mark. Ataturk evicted religion from the Gökalp blueprint and kept the other two pillars, secular nationalism and modernization. Both Greek and Turkish 20th century nationalisms were influenced by the French post-1870 prototype.
Thanos Veremis is Professor Emeritus of Political History in Department of European and International Studies at the University of Athens and Founding Member of the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy (ELIAMEP). He has held teaching and research positions at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (London), Harvard University’s Center for European Studies, Princeton University’s the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, St. Antony’s College (Oxford), the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and the Hellenic Observatory of the LSE. From 2004 to 2010, he served as President of Greece’s National Council for Education. His publications include Modern Greece: A History since 1821 (with J. Koliopoulos, 2010); The Balkans: Construction and Deconstruction of States (2005), Greece: The Modern Sequel (with J. Koliopoulos, 2002), Greece (with M. Dragoumis, 1998) and The Military in Greek Politics (1997).
Mediterranean Studies Forum, 2011-12 Greece & Turkey Lecture Series.
Co-sponsored by The Europe Center
Encina Hall West, Room 208
616 Serra Street
Thanos Veremis
Speaker
University of Athens
Lectures
International Conference on "History and Memory: Global and Local Dimensions"
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The Europe Center announces its upcoming international conference on “History and Memory: Global and Local Dimensions.” With European and Van Leer Jerusalem Institute partnership, the conference is part of the Center’s multi-year series on Reconciliation, seeking insight and answers to regional and civil conflict in today’s world of nationality, resource, and territory disputes, as well as multicultural communities and global immigration and mobility. The conference on “History and Memory: Global and Local Dimensions” is the second of the Center’s international conferences in the series; the first was on “Democracy in Adversity and Diversity.”
Details on The Europe Center’s series on “Reconciliation”, the conference on “History and Memory,” and the conference on “Democracy in Adversity and Diversity” are available at The Europe Center’s events pages.
Video and podcast presentations conference will be available soon on these pages.
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Technophilia and the New Media: Contemporary Questions of Responsible Cultural Consumption. A Call for Public Debate
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Synesis. A Journal of Science, Technology, Ethics, and Policy
Barbara Honigmann International Conference
International Conference co-sponsored by Rosenzweig-Minerva Research Center at The Hebrew University in Jerusalem, the Taube Center for Jewish Studies, the Goethe-Institut in Jerusalem, and the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung in Jerusalem.
Rosenzweig - Minerva Research Center
The Hebrew University, Jerusalem
Barbara Honigmann
Keynote Speaker
Author and Artist
Michael Mertes
Director
Speaker
the Israel Office of Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung
Reuven Amitai
Dean of the Humanities
Speaker
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Yfaat Weiss
Director of the Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center
Speaker
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Anja Siegemund
Speaker
Leo Baeck Institute Jerusalem
Bettina Bannasch
Speaker
University of Augsburg
Thomas Nolden
Panelist
Wellesley College
Carola Hilfrich
Moderator
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Lilla Balint
Panelist
Stanford University
Susanne Zepp
Panelist
Free University Berlin / Simon Dubnow Institute for Jewish History and Culture, Leipzig
Amir Eshel
Dept of German Studies
Building 260, Room 204
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-2030
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eshel@stanford.edu
Edward Clark Crossett Professor of Humanistic Studies
Professor of Comparative Literature
Professor of German Studies
Amir Eshel is Edward Clark Crossett Professor of Humanistic Studies. He is Professor of German Studies and Comparative Literature and as of 2019 Director of Comparative Literature and its graduate program. His Stanford affiliations include The Taube Center for Jewish Studies, Modern Thought & Literature, and The Europe Center at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. He is also the faculty director of Stanford’s research group on The Contemporary and of the Poetic Media Lab at Stanford’s Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA). His research focuses on contemporary literature and the arts as they touch on philosophy, specifically on memory, history, political thought, and ethics.
Amir Eshel is the author of Poetic Thinking Today (Stanford University Press, 2019); German translation at Suhrkamp Verlag, 2020). Previous books include Futurity: Contemporary Literature and the Quest for the Past (The University of Chicago Press in 2013). The German version of the book, Zukünftigkeit: Die zeitgenössische Literatur und die Vergangenheit, appeared in 2012 with Suhrkamp Verlag. Together with Rachel Seelig, he co-edited The German-Hebrew Dialogue: Studies of Encounter and Exchange (2018). In 2014, he co-edited with Ulrich Baer a book of essays on Hannah Arendt, Hannah Arendt: zwischen den Disziplinen; and also co-edited a book of essays on Barbara Honigmann with Yfaat Weiss, Kurz hinter der Wahrheit und dicht neben der Lüge (2013).
Earlier scholarship includes the books Zeit der Zäsur: Jüdische Lyriker im Angesicht der Shoah (1999), and Das Ungesagte Schreiben: Israelische Prosa und das Problem der Palästinensischen Flucht und Vertreibung (2006). Amir Eshel has also published essays on Franz Kafka, Hannah Arendt, Paul Celan, Dani Karavan, Gerhard Richter, W.G. Sebald, Günter Grass, Alexander Kluge, Barbara Honigmann, Durs Grünbein, Dan Pagis, S. Yizhar, and Yoram Kaniyuk.
Amir Eshel’s poetry includes a 2018 book with the artist Gerhard Richter, Zeichnungen/רישומים, a work which brings together 25 drawings by Richter from the clycle 40 Tage and Eshel’s bi-lingual poetry in Hebrew and German. In 2020, Mossad Bialik brings his Hebrew poetry collection בין מדבר למדבר, Between Deserts.
Amir Eshel is a recipient of fellowships from the Alexander von Humboldt and the Friedrich Ebert foundations and received the Award for Distinguished Teaching from the School of Humanities and Sciences.
Affiliated faculty of The Europe Center
Affiliated faculty of The Taube Center for Jewish Studies
Faculty Director of The Contemporary Research Group
Faculty Director of the Poetic Media Lab
CV
Document
amir_eshel_2020.pdf
(371.95 KB)
Michael Hasenclever
Panelist
Berlin
Ruth Fine
Moderator
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Yaniv Feller
Panelist
University of Toronto
Natasha Gordinsky
Panelist
Simon Dubnow Institute for Jewish History and Culture, Leipzig
Yoav Rinon
Moderator
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Karin Neuburger
Panelist
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Idan Gillo
Panelist
Stanford University
Marcus Silber
Moderator
University of Haifa
Galili Shahar
Panelist
Tel Aviv University
Galit Hasan-Rokem
Moderator
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Amir Engel
Panelist
Goethe University, Frankfurt
Conferences