Thomas König has the chair for international relations and is co-director of the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES) at the University of Mannheim, Germany. Before, he was professor at the German University Speyer and at the University of Konstanz. For his research, he was nominated for the Descartes Research Prize of the European Union and the Harrison Prize, received the Fulbright chair at Washington University St. Louis and the Karl W. Deutsch professorship at the Wissenschaftscentre Berlin, and was Marie Curie- and Heisenberg Fellow of the German National Science Foundation. König’s publications include the major scholarly journals and a variety of topics. He collaborated with a large number of scholars, including Chris Achen, Thomas Bräuninger, Ken Benoit, Daniel Finke, Simon Hug, Dirk Junge, Michael Laver, Brooke Luetgert, Bernd Luig, Lars Mäder, Sven-Oliver Proksch, Gerald Schneider, Jonathan Slapin, Heiner Schulz, Frans Stokman, Robert Thomson, Vera Tröger, George Tsebelis – just to name a few.

In his early publications in the 1990s, he studied the influence of interest groups on labor and social legislation in Germany, USA and Japan using network analysis and exchange theory. With Franz Urban Pappi and David Knoke he gathered data and extended the Coleman exchange model for modeling the institutionalized access of interest groups to political decision makers. Using spatial analysis, he also studied legislative gridlock in Germany in this period. From the mid-1990s, König devoted more attention to European integration by gathering data on EU constitutional, legislative and implementation politics. Today, König established a historical archive on EU politics containing all constitutional, legislative and implementation activities since the mid-1980s. For Germany, he also collected legislative data since the 1950s. These two topics – German and European politics – are dominating his further work, which is about the estimation of actors’ preferences. Regarding the European Union, König tested rivalry approaches on the power of the European Parliament, the impact of enlargements on Council decision making and the strategies of member states when they attempted to revise the institutional framework of the EU. In the beginning of the 2000s, he directed the DOSEI project and investigated the constitution-building process of the EU. Following, he studied the implementation process of EC directives and the power of the European Court of Justice.

All these data is used to evaluate the empirical implications of game-theoretical models with some focus on the analysis of Germany and European integration, including the constitutional, legislative and compliance level. In this regard, König also established the first EITM summer institute in Europe training young scholars in order to use sophisticated techniques for the study of politics. Recent publications include "Troubles with Transposition: Explaining Trends in Member State Notification Failure and Timelines", British Journal of Political Science 2009 (with Brooke Luetgert), "Why don’t veto players use their power?", European Union Politics 2009, "Why do member states empower the European Parliament?", Journal of European Public Policy 2008, "Bicameral Conflict Resolution in the European Union. An Empirical Analysis of Conciliation Committee Bargains", British Journal of Political Science 2007 (with Lindberg, Lechner and Pohlmeier).

Professor König was a Visiting Scholar at The Europe Center and at the Hoover Institution during Fall 2009.

Erick Arenas is a Ph.D. candidate in musicology at Stanford. His research focuses on the relationship between musical culture and ritual life in the capitals of Catholic Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Before coming to Stanford, Erick studied music history at the University of the Pacific and the University of Oregon. His master’s research dealt with the persistence of liturgical music traditions in nineteenth-century Paris and the music of Charles Gounod.

Erick’s doctoral dissertation, “Johann Michael Haydn and the Missa solemnis of Eighteenth-Century Vienna and Salzburg,” explores the style, tradition, and significance of the elaborate musical rendering of the Mass within the imperial-Viennese and archepiscopal-Salzburg contexts. He seeks to draw greater attention to the central place of sacred music in the Austrian musical legacy, a research area that has been dominated almost exclusively by concert and theatrical music scholarship. As a case study, he examines the achievements of J. M. Haydn (1737-1806), a figure once considered the preeminent composer of liturgical music within the milieu of Joseph Haydn and W. A. Mozart. By shedding light on the extent to which eighteenth-century musical life was still influenced by waning Baroque and Counter-Reformation values, Erick’s project offers one significant lens for a broader examination of the complex musical culture of the Age of Enlightenment.

In Summer 2009 Erick was awarded the FCE Advanced Graduate Student Travel Fellowship in order to study manuscript sources in Austrian music archives.

Anu Mai Kőll is Professor of Baltic History, Culture and Society and Director of the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies at Sődertőrn University in Stockholm, Sweden. She has written works on Swedish and Baltic agrarian history, economic history and the history of  Soviet repression in the Baltic countries. Her recent research focuses on the impact of persecutions and local people’s participation in repression on civil society after World War II in the Baltic countries. Another field of interest is agrarian politics 1880-1939 in the Baltic Sea Area, where the analysis of family farming, agrarian cooperation and land reforms has been conducted in comparative perspective. She has also studied economic nationalism in the Baltics, with other Central and Eastern European economies. Her publications include Economic Nationalism and Industrial Growth. State and Industry in Estonia 1934-39, Studia Baltica Stockholmiensia SBS no 19, 1998 with J. Valge, The Baltic States under Occupation 1939-91, SBS 23, Stockholm 2003, Kommunismens ansikten, Repression övervakning och svenska reaktioner [The Faces of Communism] Eslöv:Symposion 2005