Stanford University

Society

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

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

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

Remembering the Gulag: Varlam Shalamov's Poetics of Memory

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In the Soviet Union speaking about the Gulag was forbidden until the period of perestroika. Nevertheless survivors of the Stalinist concentration camps wrote about the Stalinist practices of terror against the official politics of forgetfulness. Varlam Shalamov’s (1907-1982) prose, especially his “Kolyma Tales”, must be named along with Primo Levi or Jorge Semprun. But his texts rested unpublished for a long time and his aesthetic position is not as well-known as Solshenicyn.

Shalamov understood his own writing as an effort to find a new aesthetic after Kolyma, Auschwitz and Hiroshima. From his point of view, the author should be like Pluto, who came out of the Hades and told the truth about the fragility of man and civilization. The seminar will discuss Shalamov’s strategy of literary memory.

Dr. Franziska Thun-Hohenstein is a researcher at the Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung (ZfL, Centre for Literary and Cultural Studies), Berlin. Since 2008, she has been head of the East Europe department at ZFL, and manager of projects on "The Topography of Europe's Plurale Cultures in View of its Eastward Shift," and "Aporias of Forced Modernization: Figurations of the National in the Soviet Empire." Her research topics include memory and autobiographical writing in 20th century Russian literature, cultural topographies, secularization and resacralization between East and West, and figurations of the national in the Soviet Empire. Dr. Thun-Hohenstein studied Russian language and literature at Lomonossow University Moscow.

Her publications include Gebrochene Linien: Autobiographisches Schreiben und Lagerzivilisation (Broken lines: Autobiographical writing and camp-civilisation, Berlin Kadmos 2007). She is editor of the Collected Works of Varlam Shalamov; and, with W. St. Kissel, of Exklusion: Chronotopoi der Ausgrenzung in der russischen und polnischen Literatur des 20. Jahrhunderts (München 2006).

German Studies Library
Pigott Hall, Building 260
Room 252

Franziska Thun-Hohenstein Researcher, Center for Literature and Culture, Berlin Speaker
Seminars

New Forum on Contemporary Europe research project on History, Memory and Reconciliation

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In spring 2009, the Forum on Contemporary Europe (FCE) and the Division on Languages, Civilizations and Literatures (DLCL) delivered the first part of its multi-year research and public policy program on Contemporary History and the Future of Memory.  The program explored how communities that have undergone deep and violent political transformations try to confront their past.

Despite vast geographical, cultural and situational differences, the search for post-conflict justice and reconciliation has become a global phenomenon, resulting in many institutional and expressive responses. Some of these are literary and aesthetic explorations about guilt, commemoration and memorialization deployed for reconciliation and reinvention.  Others, especially in communities where victims and perpetrators live in close proximity, have led to trials, truth commissions, lustration, and institutional reform. This series illuminates these various approaches, seeking to foster new thinking and new strategies for communities seeking to move beyond atrocity.

Part 1: Contemporary History and the Future of Memory

In 2008-2009, this multi-year project on “History and Memory” at FCE and DLCL was launched with two high profile conference and speaker series: “Contemporary History and the Future of Memory” and “Austria and Central Europe Since 1989.”  For the first series on Contemporary History, the Forum, along with four co-sponsors (the Division of Literatures, Civilizations, and Languages, principal co-sponsor; the department of English; The Center for African Studies; Modern Thought and Literature; the Stanford Humanities Center), hosted internationally distinguished senior scholars to deliver lectures, student workshops, and the final symposium with Stanford faculty respondents.

Part 2: History, Memory and Reconciliation

In 2009-2010, we launch part 2 of this project by adding “Reconciliation” to our mission.  We are pleased to welcome the Human Rights Program at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law as co-sponsor of this series.  This series will examine scholarly and institutional efforts to create new national narratives that walk the fine line between before and after, memory and truth, compensation and reconciliation, justice and peace. Some work examines communities ravaged by colonialism and the great harm that colonial and post-colonial economic and social disparities cause.   The extent of external intervention creates discontinuities and dislocation, making it harder for people to claim an historical narrative that feels fully authentic.  Another response is to set up truth-seeking institutions such as truth commissions. Historical examples of truth commissions in South Africa, Peru, Chile, Argentina, Morocco inform more current initiatives in Canada, Cambodia, Colombia, Kenya, and the United States.  While this range of economic, social, political and legal modalities all seek to explain difficult pasts to present communities, it is not yet clear which approach yields greater truth, friendship, reconciliation and community healing.  The FCE series “History, Memory, and Reconciliation” will explore these issues.

The series will have its first event in February 2010. Multiple international scholars are invited.  Publications, speaker details, and pod and video casts will be accessible via the new FSI/FCE, DLCL, and Human Rights Program websites.

Series coordinators:

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History, Memory and Reconciliation Project Addresses Communal Memories of Loss

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Mankind has regularly witnessed the immense destruction wrought by natural disasters. Similarly destructive to human life are man-made atrocities, like war and genocide. Those who are lucky enough to have survived either type of cataclysmic event must then begin the process of confronting and reconciling the memories of the catastrophe that befell them.  Public commemorations of these events have run the gamut from poetry and works of art to government sponsored “truth commissions” and institutional reform.

The ways in which people chose to memorialize hardship, whether organized by a group or expressed by an individual, offer illuminating insights into the human psyche and post-conflict justice and also provide valuable information about a society, government or culture.

Several Stanford groups are sponsoring a series of events and research projects designed to explore the many facets of the human phenomena called ‘memory’. Scholars participating in the endeavor, entitled “Contemporary History and the Future of Memory,” represent a broad spectrum of disciplines, but share a common objective: to analyze the range of ways that people have coped with adversity in the past so that future communities may benefit their experience. Attention to the role that memory plays in helping people move beyond tragedy is especially pertinent now as citizens of Chile and Haiti transition from survival to recovery after the devastating earthquakes that took place in each country.

“Contemporary History and the Future of Memory” began in the spring of 2008 with the launch of a multi-year research and public policy program sponsored by Stanford’s Forum on Contemporary Europe (FCE) and the Division of Literature, Cultures, and Languages (DLCL.) The aim of that program, as described on the DLCL website, is to investigate “how communities that have undergone deep and violent political transformations try to confront their past.”

In the fall of 2009 the Program on Human Rights at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law joined the initiative, bringing with them expertise in reconciliation, a fundamental phase in the cycle of memory.  The series title was amended to “History, Memory & Reconciliation” in recognition of their contribution. This year’s events featured a visit by Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak, the internationally renowned scholar of comparative literature from Columbia University, who addressed the subject of cultural and linguistic memory. During the spring quarter human rights and memory will be addressed in separate events by two guest scholars. Cambridge Anthropologist Harri Englund gave a talk on April 6th and University of Chile Law professor José Zalaquett will take part in several events on April 22nd and 23rd, including a lecture on Post-Conflict International Human Rights: Bright Spots, Shadows, Dilemmas.

Four Stanford scholars co-chair “History, Memory & Reconciliation.” They are French Professor Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi, Assistant Professor of English Saikat Majumdar, Law School lecturer and FSI fellow Helen Stacy, and Roland Hsu, Assistant Director of FSI’s Forum on Contemporary Europe.

Professors Majumdar and Boyi answered a few questions about the value of delving into memory and how humanities research informs the broader dialogue. Read the full interview here.

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Daniel Weidner

Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung
Schützenstr. 18
D 10117 Berlin

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Associate Director, Center for Literacy and Cultural Research
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Daniel Weidner is associate director of the Center for Literary and Cultural Research, Berlin and teaches at the Freie Universität Berlin. His main areas of research are German and Comparative literature, the relation of religion and literature, literary theory and its history, and German-Jewish Literature, he is member of the board of the International Walter Benjamin Society and Consultant of the Encyclopedia of the Bible and its reception.

After his Dissertation on Gershom Scholem (published 2003), he worked on the idea of secularization and its political, narrative, and rhetoric implications. He edited several volumes on the afterlife of religion, on the Bible as Literature, on Johann Gottfried Herder, and Walter Benjamin and wrote a second book on the Bible and Literature around 1800 which will be published in 2010.

Stalin, Soviet Policy, and the Consolidation of a Communist Bloc in Eastern Europe, 1944-1953

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Soviet policy in Eastern Europe during the final year and immediate aftermath of World War II had a profound impact on global politics. By reassessing Soviet aims and concrete actions in Eastern Europe from the mid-1940s through the early 1950s, Kramer’s essay touches on larger questions about the origins and intensity of the Cold War. The essay shows that domestic politics and postwar exigencies in the USSR, along with Iosif Stalin’s external ambitions, decisively shaped Soviet ties with Eastern Europe. Stalin’s adoption of increasingly repressive and xenophobic policies at home, and his determination to quell armed insurgencies in areas annexed by the USSR at the end of the war, were matched by his embrace of a harder line vis-à-vis Eastern Europe. This internal-external dynamic was not wholly divorced from the larger East-West context, but it was, to a certain degree, independent of it. At the same time, the shift in Soviet policy toward Eastern Europe was bound to have a detrimental impact on Soviet relations with the leading Western countries, which had tried to avert the imposition of Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe. The final breakdown of the USSR’s erstwhile alliance with the United States and Great Britain was, for Stalin, an unwelcome but acceptable price to pay.

Mark Kramer is Director of the Cold War Studies Program at Harvard University and a Senior Fellow of Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies. He has taught at Harvard, Yale, and Brown Universities and was formerly an Academy Scholar in Harvard's Academy of International and Area Studies and a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University.

Professor Kramer is the author of Crisis in Czechoslovakia, 1968: The Prague Spring and the Soviet Invasion; Soldier and State in Poland: Civil-Military Relations and Institutional Change After Communism; Crisis in the Communist World, 1956: De-Stalinization, the Soviet Union, and Upheavals in Poland and Hungary; The Collapse of the Soviet Union; and Income Distribution and Social Transfer Policies in the Post-Communist Transition: Changing Patterns of Inequality. He is completing another book titled From Dominance to Hegemony to Collapse: Soviet Policy in East-Central Europe, 1945-1991, which, like his earlier books on the Soviet bloc, draws heavily on new archival sources from the former Communist world.

Co-sponsored by the Forum on Contemporary Europe and the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies.

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CISAC Conference Room

Mark Kramer Director of the Cold War Studies Program at Harvard University; Senior Fellow of Harvard's Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies Speaker
Seminars

Post-Conflict International Human Rights: Bright Spots, Shadows, Dilemmas

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José Zalaquett is a Chilean lawyer and legal scholar known for his work defending human rights in Chile during the regime of General Pinochet. During Chile's transition to democracy, he served on the National Truth and Reconciliation Commission where he investigated and prosecuted human rights violations committed by the military regime. He has served as President of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and as the head of the International Executive Committee of Amnesty International. He currently co-directs the Human Rights Centre at the University of Chile, serves on the board of the International Centre for Transitional Justice, and is a member of the International Commission of Jurists. He has been awarded UNESCO's Prize for Human Rights Education and Chile's National Prize for Humanities and Social Sciences.

Video recording of the event is available here.

Event co-sponsored by the Stanford International Law Society, Departments of English, History, and Comparative Literature; the Program in Modern Thought and Literature; the Center for African Studies; the Stanford Humanities Center; and the Center for South Asia

History, Memory, and Reconciliation futureofmemory.stanford.edu is sponsored by the Research Unit in the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages at Stanford University.

Stanford Law School
Rm 280A

Jose Zalaquett Professor Speaker Universidad de Chile
Terry L. Karl Professor, Political Science, Stanford Commentator
James Campbell Professor, History, Stanford Commentator
Lectures
History, Memory and Reconciliation

Richard Saller

Stanford University
450 Serra Mall, Building One
Stanford, CA 94305-2070

(650) 723-9784
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Kleinheinz Family Professor of European Studies
Professor of History and Classics
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Richard Saller is the Kleinheinz Family Professor of European Studies at Stanford University. Previously he was Dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences here at Stanford University as well as Provost and Dean of the Social Sciences Division at the University of Chicago. He taught at Swarthmore College and held visiting professorships and fellowships at the University of California, Berkeley and Jesus College, Cambridge. His research focuses on Roman social and economic history, in particular, patronage relations, the family, and the imperial economy. 

He uses literary, legal, and epigraphic materials, as well as computer simulations, to investigate issues of social hierarchy, gender distinctions, and economic production. His publications include The Cambridge Economic History of Greco-Roman World (2007); Patriarchy, Property, and Death in the Roman Family (1994); Personal Patronage under the Early Empire (1982); and The Roman Empire: Economy, Society and Culture (2nd, expanded ed. 2014), which has been translated into French, Italian, German, Greek, and Spanish. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005.

The Aesthetic of Human Rights Claims: Broadcasting African Poverty

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Harri Englund is the Churchill Fellow and reader in social anthropology at the University of Cambridge. He is the author most recently of Prisoners of Freedom: Human Rights and the African Poor (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006) in which he investigates how ideas of freedom and human rights have impeded struggles against poverty and injustice in Africa's emerging democracies.

Event co-sponsored by the Departments of English, History, and Comparative Literature;
the Program in Modern Thought and Literature; the Center for African Studies;
the Stanford Humanities Center; and the Center for South Asia

History, Memory, and Reconciliation is sponsored by the Research Unit in the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages at Stanford University.

futureofmemory.stanford.edu

Terrace Room (426),
Margaret Jacks Hall (Building 460)

Harri Englund University of Cambridge Speaker
Lectures
History, Memory and Reconciliation
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