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.

Building 40, Room 42L
Stanford, CA 94305

(650) 725-0005
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Professor of Slavic Languages and Literature
img_5804_1000px_fleishman.jpg PhD

Lazar Fleishman came to Stanford in 1985 after a distinguished career at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has also been a Visiting Professor at UC-Berkeley, Yale, Harvard, University of Texas at Austin, the Russian State University for the Humanities in Moscow, Charles University in Prague, The University of Vienna and the University of Latvia in his native Riga. His major scholarly interests include 19th and 20th century Russian literature; Boris Pasternak; 20th century Russian emigre and Soviet culture and literary life; Russian avant-garde poetry and art; Russian-Jewish, Russian-Baltic and Russian-Polish cultural relationships; poetics; and archival research.

He is the founder and editor of the series, Stanford Slavic Studies (1987; vol. 50 is forthcoming in 2020). He organized and co-organized a number of high-profile international scholarly events on campus, including the conferences on Aleksandr Pushkin, Andrei Siniavsky, and Boris Pasternak as well as a conference of the historians of Baltic countries and edited or co-edited the collections of papers based on these conferences. His most recent monograph is devoted to the circumstances of the publication of Boris Pasternak’s novel “Doctor Zhivago” and the political storm triggered by the 1958 Nobel Prize award in literature to him.

Affiliated faculty at The Europe Center
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Building 40, Room 41E
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305

(650) 725-0006
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Professor of Slavic Languages and Literature, Emeritus
Freidin.jpg PhD

Education

  • Ph.D., Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of California at Berkeley, June,1979. Dissertation: "Time, Identity and Myth in Osip Mandelstam: 1908-1921"
  • M.A., Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of California at Berkeley, June 1974
  • Special Student, Brandeis University, 1972
  • The First State Institute of Foreign Languages, Moscow, USSR, 1969-1971
  • Secondary School, Moscow, USSR, 1964

Current courses

  • Tolstoy's War and Peace
  • Paradigms of Society and Culture in Literature and Film

Previous courses

  • The Age of Revolution
  • Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and the Social Thought of its Time
  • Proseminar in Literary Theory and Study of Russian Literature
  • Russia and the Other: A Cultural Approach
  • Russian Literature and the Literary Milieu of the NEP Period
  • Osip Mandelstam and the Modernist Paradigm

Selected publications

  • Russia at the End of the Twentieth Century: Culture and Its Horizons in Politics and Society. (Papers delivered at the Stanford University Conference, November 1998). Stanford, 2000. Ed. G. Freidin.
  • Russia at the Barricades: Eyewitness Accounts of the Moscow Coup (August 1991), ed. by Victoria Bonnell, Ann Copper and Gregory Freidin. Introduction by Victoria E. Bonnell and Gregory Freidin (M.E. Sharpe, 1994).
  • Russian Culture in Transition (Selected Papers of the International Working Group for the Study of Russian Culture, 1990-1991). Compiled, edited, and with an Introduction by Gregory Freidin. Stanford Slavic Studies 7 (1993)
  • American Federalists: Hamilton, Madison, Jay. Selections. With an Addendum of The Declaration of Independence, Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution of the United States. Translated into Russian, annotated and with an Introduction by Gregory Freidin. Leon Lipson, Consultant. Edited by V. & L. Chalidze. Benson, Vt.: Chalidze Publications, 1990.
  • A Coat of Many Colors: Osip Mandelstam and His Mythologies of Self, Presentation. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1987.
  • Khrushchev Remembers: The Last Testament. Trans. and ed. by Strobe Talbott and Gregory Freidin (anonymously). With a foreword by Edward Crankshaw and an Intro. by Jerrold Schecter. Boston: Little, Brown, 1974. (For acknowledgement of Freidin's translation see Strobe Talbott's Introduction to Khrushchev: The Glasnost Tapes [Little, Brown &Co., 1990], p. viii).

Current projects

After a long detour into Russian contemporary culture, politics and society, Gregory Freidin, has returned to his old flame, the Isaac Babel project, a critical biography - as much of Isaac Babel as of the magnetic and elusive voice animating his compact and fragmented oeuvre. He hopes to finish the manuscript, A Jew on Horseback, in a few months. As a follow-up, he is planning, along with Gabriella Safran and Stephen Zipperstein (History and Jewish Studies), an international conference on Babel for the fall of 2003. Together with the Berkeley sociologist, Victoria E. Bonnell, he has begun research on a book-lingth study, tentatively entitled Conjuring up a New Russia: Symbols, Rituals, and Mythologies of national Identit, 1991-2002.

Professional activities

  • The Humanities Institute; Modern Languages Association; American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies
  • Contributing Editor, Znamia, Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie (Moscow), 1991-6
  • Editor, Stanford Slavic Studies, 1987-
Affiliated faculty at The Europe Center
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Building 40, Room 42K
Stanford University
Stanford, CA, 94305

(650) 723-4414
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Eva Chernov Lokey Professor in Jewish Studies
Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures
Safran.jpg PhD

Education

Princeton University: Ph.D., Slavic Languages and Literatures, 1998. Dissertation: "Narratives of Jewish acculturation in the Russian Empire: Bogrov, Orzeszkowa, Leskov, Chekhov." Adviser: Caryl Emerson

Yale University: B.A., magna cum laude, with honors in Soviet and East European Studies, 1990. Senior Essay: "The descent of the raznochinets literator: Osip Mandelstam's 'Shum vremeni' and evolutionary theory." Adviser: Tomas Venclova

Columbia University/YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. Program in Yiddish Language, Literature, and Culture, Summer 1999

University of Pennsylvania. Courses in Yiddish language and culture, 1996-1998

Jagiellonian University, Cracow, Poland. Courses in Polish language, Summers 1993 and 1996

Herzen Institute, St. Petersburg, Russia. Courses in Russian language and culture, Spring 1989

Lycée Privé Gasnier-Guy, Chelles, France. Baccalauréat B (Economics and Social Sciences) with High Honors, June 1986

Previous courses

Beyond Fiddler on the Roof

Anton Chekov and the Turn of the Century

Russia and the Other: A cultural Approach

Selected publications

"Isaac Babel's El'ia Isaakovich as a New Jewish Type," Slavic Review, Vol. 61, No.2 (Summer 2002) (pp. 253-272).

"Nikolai Semenovich Leskov (M. Stebnitsky)." Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 238: Russian Novelists in the Age of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, ed. J. Alexander Ogden and Judith E. Kalb. San Francisco: The Gale Group, 2001 (pp. 160-175).

Rewriting the Jew: Assimilation Narratives in the Russian Empire. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000

"Dancing with Death and Salvaging Jewish Culture in Austeria and The Dybbuk," Slavic Review, Vol. 59, No. 4 (Winter 2000) (pp. 761-781).

"Ethnography, Judaism, and the Art of Nikolai Leskov," The Russian Review, Vol. 59 (April 2000) (pp. 235-251).

"Evangel'skii podtekst i evreiskaia drama vo 'Vladychnom sude' N. S. Leskova" [The New Testament subtext and the Jewish drama in N. S. Leskov's "Episcopal Justice"], Evangel'skii tekst v russkoi literture XVIII-XX vekov: Tsitata, reministsensiia, motiv, siuzhet, zhanr (The Gospels in eighteen- to twentieth-century Russian literature: citation, evocation, motif, subject, genre) (Vol. 2). Petrozavodsk, Russia: Izdatel'stvo petrozavodskogo universiteta, 1999 (pp. 462-470).

"Love Songs Between the Sacred and the Vernacular: Pushkin's 'Podrazhaniia' in the Context of Bible Translation." Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. 39, No. 2 (Summer 1995) (pp. 165-183).

Current projects

Gabriella Safran is the author of Rewriting the Jew: Assimilation Narratives in the Russian Empire, which received both the National Jewish Book Award (East European Studies Division) and the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Slavic Languages and Literstures in 2001. In the spring of 2001, she and History Professor Steven Zipperstein co-organized a conference on the Russian and Yiddish writer, ethnographer, and revolutionary S. Ansky; currently they are editing a collection of articles on the same topic. During the 2002-2003 academic year, Safran will be participating in a research seminar at the Center for Judaic Studies of the University of Pennsylvania, where she will be completing a literary biography of Ansky.

Professional activities

Organized "Between Two Worlds: S. An-sky at the Turn of the Century, An International Conference." Stanford University, March 17-19, 2001.

Director of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures
Chair of the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages
Affiliated faculty at The Europe Center
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Peter Schneider was born in Lubeck in 1940 and grew up in southern Germany. He has greatly contributed to the literary and cultural life of Germany over the last four decades. After finishing his studies in German, History, and Philosophy in 1964, Schneider became a central figure in the 1968 Student Protest Movements in Berlin and Turin, Italy. After completing his Staatsexamen in higher education, Schneider began his career as a writer with his novel Lenz, a retelling of Buchner's novella.

After the success of Lenz in Germany, over twenty other novels, screenplays, and volumes of journalistic essays followed, including the English translated works Der Mauerspringer (The Wall Jumper, 1984), Extreme Mittelage (The German Comedy,1990), Paarungen (Couplings, 1996), and Eduards Heimkehr (Edward's Homecoming, 2000). Schneider's screenplays were filmed by Reinhard Hauff-Messer im Kopf (Knife in the Head) and Margarethe von Trotta - Das Versprechen (The Promise).

His essays can be found in Der Spiegel, Die Zeit, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, The New York Times, Time Magazine, and Le Monde.

His most recent novel Skylla, was published in March.

Philippines Conference Room

Peter Schneider Author Speaker
Seminars

616 Serra Street E112
Stanford, CA
94305-6055

(650) 723-0145 (650) 723-4811
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Visiting Professor, Forum on Contemporary Europe
Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Graz, Austria
Hadler_Photo.jpg PhD
Markus Hadler is Assistant Professor at the Department of Sociology, University of Graz, Austria, and currently Visiting Assistant Professor at the Forum on Contemporary Europe. He also is a member of the International Social Survey Programme (www.issp.org).

His current research focuses on the political culture within Europe and the US. The main emphasis is placed on the interaction between macro level characteristics and individual attitudes and behavior. Here, a core research question is whether political attitudes are influenced stronger by modernization processes or by institutional settings. Other research topics are voting behavior, social inequality, mobility, and methods of empirical research. Most of his research is done in an international comparative view. For this purpose survey data are used and related to country characteristics by multilevel analyses.

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Following the recent elections in Germany, Heinz Bude will explain the election results and discuss the current political climate in Germany in terms of the larger historical and global perspective.

The End of '68:

One could call it a return of the vanished. After German society determined that the Federal Republic had only become a western, liberal country as a result of the Uprising of 1968, debates continue on how to view this place of remembrance of the post-war period. This is due to a surprising actualization and sobering historization of the Uprising at an exhibition at the Berliner Kunstwerke. Here, the attractiveness of 1968 is directly linked to the RAF. Not the disparateness but the unity of protest and terror represents the lure of the matter. This re-labeling of 68 as a form of "radical chic" finds its confirmation in more recent historical research that proves that no firewall exists between 68 and the RAF. The terror of the RAF did not represent an inversion of the protest of 68, but was constitutive for the entire movement. There is no innocence, no learning, only the successful disappearance of a bout of tragic political passions.

Then what was 1968? What must dismay us in retrospect, and what has taken roots in the cultural superstructure? Perhaps the unfinished debate between Jürgen Habermas and Karl Heinz Bohrer must be resumed: What about 1968 was universalistic emancipation and what was extremist surrealism?

Encina Hall
East Wing
Ground Floor E008

Heinz Bude Professor of Sociology Speaker University of Kassel
Seminars
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From the outset, the transatlantic relationship has been more than a mere marriage of convenience. It encompasses a community of states, which are committed to common values, ideals and interests. Europe and North America can look back on a common cultural and intellectual history and they are bound together by a cultural affinity.

Transatlantic relations have benefited from the conscious decision made by the US not to withdraw from Europe in 1945, as it had done after the end of the First World War but, rather, to maintain a long-term presence. This injected an element of stability into Western Europe, which made it possible to tackle the European integration project.

Naturally, there are also conflicts of interests and areas of friction within this community of values. The transatlantic community has never been a perfect community of interests. We are each other's cousins, not identical twins.

Current contentious issues are not limited to the military action by the United States against the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Europe and the U.S. also have divergent viewpoints on issues such as climate protection, the death penalty or relations with international organizations. However, leading politicians on both sides of the Atlantic know that it is in everyone's interest to deal responsibly with such differences.

The visit by President Bush to Brussels and to Germany at the start to his second term as American president has helped to refocus the transatlantic relationship.

Daniel and Nancy Okimoto Conference Room

Bernd Westphal Consul General Consulate General of Germany in San Francisco
Seminars
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The accession of Cyprus to the European Union (EU) in May of 2004 constitutes the most positive strategic development in the history of the island state since its independence in 1960. In the last two years, the Cypriot people have experienced watershed events, filled with frustrations, challenges but also opportunities. Cyprus' EU membership has extended the borders of the EU to the strategic corner of the Eastern Mediterranean and has brought the Middle East ever closer to Europe. It is hoped that Cyprus' EU membership can contribute to the expansion of peace, stability, security and prosperity in the area. Cyprus is situated at the crossroads of three continents and civilizations, where global political and economic interests, as well as international security concerns, converge. Together with its American ally and with the help of its European partners Cyprus aspires to play a positive role, and to act as a bridge of mutual understanding and the promotion of sustained and result oriented dialogue between its Middle Eastern neighbors and Europe. At the same time, Cyprus strives to achieve a just, permanent, functional and mutually acceptable solution to the Cyprus problem, an end of the Turkish military occupation, reunification and prosperity for all Cypriots within their common European home.

His Excellency Euripides L. Evriviades presented his credentials as the Ambassador of the Republic of Cyprus to the United States to President George W. Bush on 4 December 2003. He is also accredited as High Commissioner to Canada. Ambassador Evriviades served as Ambassador of Cyprus to the Netherlands from August 2000 to October 2003. Prior to his posting in The Hague, he served as the Ambassador to Israel from November 1997 until July 2000. Earlier in his career, Mr. Evriviades held positions at Cypriot embassies in Tripoli, Libya; Moscow, USSR/Russia; and Bonn, Germany.

CISAC Conference Room

H. E. Euripides L. Evriviades Ambassador of the Republic of Cyprus to the United States
Lectures
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