Brexit: What's Next for the UK and Europe?

Please mark your calendars for a panel discussion featuring Nicholas Bloom (William Eberle Professor of Economics and Senior Fellow at SIEPR; Co-Director, Productivity, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship Program at NBER) and Christophe Crombez (Senior Research Scholar at The Europe Center; Professor of Political Economy at KU Leuven, Belgium).

Date: October 10, 2016 
Time: 12:00PM to 1:30PM 
Location: The Oksenberg Room, Encina Hall, 3rd Floor
RSVP by 5:00PM October 6, 2016.

What's next for the UK and Europe? One thing is clear: Brexit will have far-reaching political and economic consequences. Please join us for a panel discussion featuring Stanford faculty members Nick Bloom and Christophe Crombez who will lead a discussion about the future of the UK's relationship with Europe and Brexit's most important political and economic consequences. For more information about this exciting and timely event, please visit our website.

Call for Proposals: Graduate Student Grant Competition

Accepting Applications: September 26, 2016 - October 21, 2016

The Europe Center invites applications from graduate and professional students at Stanford University whose research or work focuses on Europe. Funds are available for Ph.D. candidates across a wide range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences to prepare for dissertation research and to conduct research on approved dissertation projects. The Europe Center also supports early graduate students who wish to determine the feasibility of a dissertation topic or acquire training relevant for that topic. Additionally, funds are available for professional students whose interests focus on some aspect of European politics, economics, history, or culture; the latter may be used to support an internship or a research project. For more information please visit our website.

Visiting Student Researcher: Jaakko Meriläinen

We are pleased to introduce Jaakko Meriläinen, a Visiting Student Researcher from the Institute for International Economic Studies at Stockholm University, Sweden. Jaakko is a political economist who is interested in the relationship between political representation, political participation, and economics, economic and political history, and immigration. His current research concerns political careers, economic consequences of political representation, historical development of voting behavior, and the historical impact of time-saving technologies on women's participation in the labor force and in politics. Please join us in welcoming Jaakko to Stanford.

The Europe Center Sponsored Events

October 10, 2016 
12:00PM - 1:30PM 
Nick Bloom, Department of Economics 
Christophe Crombez, The Europe Center 
Brexit: What's next for the UK and Europe? 
This event is now full.  Please write to khaley@stanford.edu if you would like to be added to the wait list.

November 10, 2016 
12:00PM - 1:30PM 
Markus Tepe, University of Oldenburg 
What's happening with Germany's party system? Exploring the emergence of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) 
CISAC Central Conference Room, Encina Hall, 2nd Floor 
RSVP by 5:00PM November 6, 2016.

Save the Date: November 14, 2016 
12:00PM - 1:30PM 
Yaniss Aiche, Sheppard, Mullin, Richter, & Hampton, LLP 
Jacques Derenne, Sheppard, Mullin, Richter, & Hampton, LLP 
The Future of Multi-National Corporate Taxation in the European Union: Impact of On-Going EU State Aid Investigations 
Reuben Hills Conference Room, Encina Hall, 2nd Floor

Save the Date: January 17, 2017 
12:00PM - 1:30PM 
Andrew Moravcsik, Princeton University 
The Oksenberg Room, Encina Hall, 3rd Floor

Save the Date: February 27, 2017 
12:00PM - 1:30PM 
Amie Kreppel, University of Florida 
CISAC Central Conference Room, Encina Hall, 2nd Floor

Save the Date: April 3, 2017 
11:30AM - 1:00PM 
Guido Tabellini, Bocconi University
Room 400 (Graham Stuart Lounge), Encina Hall West No RSVP required. 
This seminar is part of the Comparative Politics Workshop in the Department of Political Science and is co-sponsored by The Europe Center.

Save the Date: April 24, 2017 
11:30AM - 1:00PM 
Torun Dewan, London School of Economics
Room 400 (Graham Stuart Lounge), Encina Hall West No RSVP required. 
This seminar is part of the Comparative Politics Workshop in the Department of Political Science and is co-sponsored by The Europe Center.

Save the Date: June 5, 2017 
11:30AM - 1:00PM 
Daniel Stegmuller, University of Mannheim
Room 400 (Graham Stuart Lounge), Encina Hall West No RSVP required. 
This seminar is part of the Comparative Politics Workshop in the Department of Political Science and is co-sponsored by The Europe Center.

European Security Initiative Events

Save the Date: October 26, 2016 
12:00PM - 1:30PM 
John Emerson, United States Ambassador to Germany 
RSVP by 5:00PM October 23, 2016.

Save the Date:  November 10, 2016
12:00PM - 1:30PM
Sergei Kislyak, Russian Ambassador to the US
Co-sponsored by the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies

Save the Date: January 26, 2017 
12:00PM - 1:30PM 
Andrei Kozyrev, Former Minister of Foreign Affairs, Russian Federation
Co-sponsored by the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law

Save the Date: April 10, 2017 
Time TBA 
Ivan Krastev, Center for Liberal Strategies, Sofia, Bulgaria

We welcome you to visit our website for additional details.

Medieval courtship brings to mind images of chivalrous knights worshipping fair damsels, expressing their love for their ladies in refined and poetic language.

But courtship did not play out this way for all medieval knights. Neidhart von Reuental (1190-1237), a medieval German poet, composed songs about a fictional knight whose amorous pursuits were often obstructed by local peasants.

In a forthcoming book entitled Neidhart: Selected Songs from the Riedegg Manuscript, Kathryn Starkey, professor of German Studies and faculty affiliate of The Europe Center, and Edith Wenzel, professor emerita of German literature at the University of Aachen (Germany), offer the first collection of Neidhart’s songs translated into English.

During the Middle Ages, Neidhart was considered one of the Minnesänger (literally “love singers”), or German poets who, like the French troubadours, wrote songs and poems about courtly love. But drenched in slapstick humor and sexual innuendos, Neidhart’s lyrics often defied the high style of his fellow poets.

“Neidhart was the most prolific poet of his time,” Starkey said. “But he’s not well known because he has not been translated into English. And so it was important for me to make his work accessible because he’s such a canonical figure and he’s such an interesting figure.”

Although Neidhart did not criticize elite culture, he mocked it by relocating courtly motifs into the realm of ridiculous rustics. “Nothing is sacred for Neidhart,” Starkey said.

“Neidhart is so clever,” she said. “What is unique about him is his humor, parody, and the way that he takes conventions and turns them on their head and surprises us constantly by twisting expectations.”

Knights and free-thinking maidens

Many of Neidhart’s songs take place in a village where the poet imagines an unwanted encounter with local peasants. They bar access to his beloved lady. These fictive peasants also try to imitate courtiers, parading around in fine clothing or carrying swords as would noblemen. Yet they ultimately contaminate courtliness with their unruly antics, as one of the poems suggests:

Look at Engelwan [a peasant], how high he carries his head.
Whenever he struts at the dance with his sword drawn,
he is not lacking in
Flemish courtliness,
his father Batze has little to do with that.
Now, his son is a vain fool with his rough cap.
I compare his puffing himself up to a fat pigeon
perched with a full gullet on a grain box.

So why was Neidhart, by all accounts of knightly lineage, so obsessed with, and seemingly threatened by, peasants?

“That’s the million-dollar question,” Starkey said.

There is actually no historical evidence that suggests that knights of this era had this level of contact with the lower classes. For recent scholars, Neidhart’s predicaments might point to tensions between the lesser nobility and peasants.

“Neidhart was composing in upper Austria,” Starkey said, “where there were many ministerial families.”

Though noble, these families served an overlord, and were therefore not entirely free. According to Starkey, “it was important for them to continually affirm their nobility and their difference from the peasants who were also un-free, but of an entirely different social estate.”

Moreover, there were laws concerning class-specific clothing. For example, some laws permitted peasants to wear only gray, blue or black – the cheapest colors to produce.

“So we know that this was a contemporary issue in Neidhart’s period,” she said.

In his poems, Neidhart often depicts himself falling in love with a beautiful peasant woman. Perhaps this was part of a medieval male fantasy to dominate women or showcase women as sexually available, rather than virginal and unattainable.

However, Neidhart’s women could appear empowered.

“In terms of gender,” Starkey said, “he does create a space for women to express their sexual desire.”

With this, Neidhart again departs from conventions of courtly love. While traditional medieval love poems feature a male voice who objectifies his lady, some of his poems imagine maidens talking with one another about whom among the knights they like, why and what to do about it – what Starkey considers “an acknowledgement of female sexuality.”

Translation and teaching

Starkey said she believes that her translations will affect how medieval German literature is taught, given that “Neidhart’s songs are so unusual that if they were translated they could be taught in a whole host of courses that deal with medieval culture, sexuality and humor.”

Her translation has also spawned a digital humanities collaboration.

“I’ve just started a project called ‘The Medieval Sourcebook,’” Starkey said, adding, “Together with my graduate students, we are creating online parallel English translations of medieval texts to be used by teachers and students.”

The Medieval Sourcebook reflects some of the challenges Starkey faced when translating Neidhart into English. Some of the terms he uses – chiefly colloquialisms and idiomatic expressions – hinder translation, since they appear solely in Neidhart’s works.

“We don’t know exactly what some of his expressions mean. You have to look at the context and think about what the possibilities are,” Starkey said.

Reflecting on the value of her contribution, Starkey said she hopes that her translations “will get students thinking about their own language, about foreign language and about the relationship between them, as well as the tensions that arise when you try to translate a cultural document in one language into a cultural document in another.”

After working on Neidhart and with her students, Starkey realized that “we as scholars think we know texts. But when you translate them, you get a completely different understanding of them.”

Media Contacts

Chris Kark, director of humanities communication: (650) 724-8156, ckark@stanford.edu

Clifton B. Parker, Stanford News Service: (650) 725-0224, cbparker@stanford.edu

Event Recap: Networks of European Enlightenment

Conventional wisdom suggests that there were multiple enlightenments, each of which was distinctive and national in nature. Yet did the "Scottish Enlightenment," for instance, truly develop apart from the "German Enlightenment"? At the end of April, Stanford University hosted the "Networks of European Enlightenment" conference, which brought together leading scholars studying the role of transnational networks and communication in spreading knowledge throughout the enlightenment. The works presented at this conference suggest an alternative to the conventional wisdom: there was significant communication between enlightenment thinkers, resulting in a diffusion of knowledge throughout Europe.

Over the course of the conference, participants presented work ranging from theoretical and empirical approaches to studying historical networks, to the role of particular individuals and locales in the diffusion of enlightenment thought, to the ways in which religious and epistemic communities facilitated this diffusion of knowledge. The participants in this conference included scholars from Stanford University, Carnegie Mellon University, Princeton University, Queen Mary University of London, the University of Cambridge, the University of Helsinki, University of Nice Sophia-Antipolis, the University of Oxford, the University of Vienna, and Yale University.

The Networks of European Enlightenment conference was convened by Dan Edelstein, who is the William H. Bonsall Professor of French and Chair of the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages and a TEC faculty affiliate. Dan earned his Ph.D. in French from the University of Pennsylvania in 2004 and joined the faculty at Stanford in that same year. His research interests lie at the nexus of literature, history, political theory, and digital humanities and his work typically focuses on eighteenth-century France.

The Networks of European Enlightenment conference was co-sponsored by The Europe Center, Stanford Humanities Center, the French Culture Workshop, the France-Stanford Center, and the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages.

Featured Faculty Research: Amir Eshel

We would like to introduce you to some of The Europe Center’s faculty affiliates and the projects on which they are working. Our featured faculty member this month is Amir Eshel, who is the Edward Clark Crossett Professor of Humanistic Studies, Professor of German Studies and Comparative Literature, and former Director of The Europe Center.

Amir earned his Ph.D. in German Literature from Hamburg University in 1998 and joined the faculty at Stanford that same year. In his research, Amir is interested in how literary and cultural portrayals of modernity are used as commentary on contemporary philosophical, political, and ethical questions. In his current project, The Contemporary, which is supported in part by The Europe Center, Amir and his colleagues examine the cultural and political portrayals and uses of defining moments of the twentieth century, such as 1945, 1973, 1989, and 2001. This project is both interdisciplinary and global in scope and seeks to not only understand how these pivotal moments are portrayed and used, but also why and how some moments become important cultural reference points, while others do not. Throughout this academic year, The Contemporary has hosted numerous events engaging scholars from across the United States and Europe, including speakers from Uppsala University in Sweden, Goethe University in Germany, and the University of Antwerp in Belgium, among others. For more information about The Contemporary, please visit the project's website.

Featured Graduate Student Research: Suddhaseel Sen

We would like to introduce you to some of the graduate students that we support and the projects on which they are working. Our featured graduate student this month is Suddhaseel Sen (Musicology). Suddhaseel is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Music at Stanford University. Prior to beginning his doctoral studies at Stanford, Suddhaseel arranged Indian music for Western ensembles in India and Canada, in addition to doing academic research in English literature.

Suddhaseel is a musicologist who is interested in Indian music and the orchestral, chamber, and operatic repertoires of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Supported in part by The Europe Center, Suddhaseel spent summer 2015 conducting fieldwork for his dissertation, Intimate Strangers: Cross-Cultural Exchanges between Indian and Western Musicians 1880-1940. During his fieldwork, Suddhaseel spent time in the archives of the French National Library (Bibliothèque nationale de France), examining letters and writings by French composers known to have visited India and incorporated Indian themes and musical elements in their compositions. From this research, he discovered that French composers came into greater direct contact with the music of the Maghreb, on the one hand, and the music of Southeast Asia, on the other, as a result of which the musical traditions from these non-Western regions were more influential than Indian or South Asian music in France at the beginning of the twentieth century. Since completing his fieldwork in France, Suddhaseel has conducted further research in London and is currently located at Presidency University in Kolkata, India. Suddhaseel is continuing to work on his dissertation, which he hopes to defend in the 2016-2017 academic year.

For more information about The Europe Center's Graduate Student Grant program, please visit our website.

Spring 2016 Graduate Student Grant Competition Winners Announced

Please join us in congratulating the winners of The Europe Center Spring 2016 Graduate Student Grant Competition:

• Lindsay Der, Anthropology, "Animal Symbolism and Inequality at the Origins of Agriculture."
• Jane Esberg, Political Science, "Strategies of Repression: Killings, Courts, and Censorship in Military Dictatorships."
• Andre Fischer, German Studies, "Myth in German Postwar Literature, Film, and Art."
• Nicole Gounalis, Italian, "From Futurism to Neorealism: Art, Politics, and Civil Society in Italy, 1909-1959."
• Benjamin Hein, History, "Gateway to the Americas: ArcGIS and the Spatial History of Frankfurt's Financial Hinterland."
• Torin Jones, Cultural Anthropology, "Reluctant Integration: African Migrants and the New Sicilian Imagination."
• Nicholas Levy, History, "Rust Proof: Industrial Development and Urban Life in the Socialist 1970s."
• Lachlan McNamee, Political Science, "Sowing the Seeds of Conflict: The Long-Term Political Effects of the Irish Plantation Scheme."
• Fayola Neely, German Studies, "Metalinguistic Awareness in the Acquisition of German as a Third Language: The role of L2 Proficiency."
• Jessi Piggott, Theater and Performance Studies, "Political Street Theater: A Comparative History of Agitprop and Contemporary Art Activism."
• Jens Pohlmann, German Studies, "Capitalizing on the Avant-Garde? An Analysis of Adversarial Author's Marketing Strategies in the Second Half of the 20th Century."
• Justin Tackett, English, "Listening Between the Lines: Sound Technology and Poetry, 1850-1930."
• Michael Webb, Economics, "Skill-Biased Technical Change in the UK Manufacturing Sector: Does It Explain Inequality?"

Please visit our website for more information about our Graduate Student Grant program.

The Europe Center-Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe Exchange Program

Over the past month, The Europe Center has welcomed our first two visitors from the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE) as part of an exchange program agreement set last year. Both visitors are senior policy advisors - one focused on trade and the other on the budget. While at Stanford, they interacted with faculty and students to discuss the critical issues facing Europe and examine solutions for them. The other part of the exchange agreement, the Summer Internship Program with the ALDE Group, was implemented last June. Selected Stanford undergraduate interns work on policy related research projects while also learning about the legislative work of the European Parliament.

For more information about The Europe Center's Undergraduate Internship Program in Europe, please visit our website.