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Edward Clark Crossett Professor of Humanistic Studies
Professor of German Studies
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Kathryn Starkey is the Edward Clark Crossett Professor of Humanistic Studies and professor of German in the Department of German Studies. Her primary research interests are medieval and early modern German literature and culture with an emphasis on visuality, material culture, language, performativity, and the history of the book.

She is the author of Reading the Medieval Book: Word, Image, and Performance in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s “Willehalm” (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004), and A Courtier’s Mirror: Cultivating Elite Identity in Thomasin's "Welscher Gast" (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013). She also co-authored (with Edith Wenzel) and edition, translation, and commentary of songs by the medieval poet Neidhart (ca. 1210-1240) entitled Neidhart: Selected Songs from the Riedegg Manuscript. Professor Starkey also co-edited (with Horst Wenzel) Imagination und Deixis: Studien zur Wahrnehmung im Mittelalter (Stuttgart: Hirzel, 2007), and Visual Culture and the German Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave Press, 2005). Together with Ann Marie Rasmussen and Jutta Eming, she conducted a three-year research project funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation TransCoop Program on “Tristan and Isolde and Cultures of Emotion in the Middle Ages.” This project culminated in the co-edited volume Visuality and Materiality in the Story of Tristan (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012).

Prof. Starkey has been the recipient of fellowships from the National Humanities Center, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the UNC Institute for the Arts and the Humanities, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Before joining the faculty at Stanford in 2012 she taught in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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Through a new translation of medieval songs, Stanford German studies Professor Kathryn Starkey reveals an unconventional take on romance.

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

 

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Globalization has led to new forms, and dynamics, of migration and mobility. What are the consequences of these changes for the processes of reception, settlement and social integration, for social cohesion, institutional practices and policies? The essays collected in this volume discuss these issues with reference to recent research on migration and mobility in Europe, the US, North and East Africa and South and Southeast Asia. The twenty authors are leading migration researcher from different academic fields such as sociology, geography, political science and cultural studies.

This research was originally presented at the Migration and Integration: Global and Local Dimensions conference, sponsored by The Europe Center and co-sponsored by the University of Vienna, the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, and the Center for International Security and Cooperation.

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Roland Hsu

"Os Gatos não Têm Vertigens" (Cats Don’t Have Vertigo) is a 2014 Portuguese film directed by Antonio Pedro Vasconcelos. It tells the stories of two vastly different people - one an abandoned 18-year old boy (Job, played by John Jesus) and the other a 73-year old widow and retired professor (Rosa, played by Maria do Céu Guerra). After Job takes refuge on the rooftop terrace of Rosa's Lisbon building, instead of calling the police, Rosa offers Job the affection he's never had, and an unlikely but unforgettable friendship develops.

"Os Gatos não Têm Vertigens" is the last film in the annual SGS Summer Film Festival running from July 13th to September 7th. The film will be presented with English subtitles. This year's festival features nine films from around that world that focus on the theme of “Youth Culture in Global Cinema.” For more information on the film festival, please visit SGS Summer 2016 Film Festival.

The Geology Corner (Bldg. 320), Room 105
450 Serra Mall

Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Iberian and Latin American Cultures Moderator
Film Screenings

Room N349, Neukom Building
Stanford Law School
Stanford, CA  94305

(650) 723-0146 (650) 725-0253
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Judge John W. Ford Professor of Dispute Resolution
Professor of Law
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Deborah R. Hensler is the Judge John W. Ford Professor of Dispute Resolution and Associate Dean for Graduate Studies Emerita at Stanford Law School, where she teaches courses on complex and transnational litigation, the legal profession, and empirical research methods. She co-founded the Law and Policy Laboratory at the law school with Prof. Paul Brest (emeritus). She is a member of the RAND Institute Civil Justice Board of Overseers and the Berkeley Law Civil Justice Initiative Advisory Board. From 2000-2005 she was the director of the Stanford Center on Conflict and Negotiation.

Prof. Hensler has written extensively on mass claims and class actions and is the lead author of Class Actions in Context: How Economics, Politics and Culture Shape Collective Litigation (2016) and Class Action Dilemmas: Pursuing Public Goals for Private Gain (2000) and the co-editor of The Globalization of Class Actions (2009). Prof. Hensler has taught classes on comparative class actions and empirical research methods at the University of Melbourne (Australia) and Catolica Universidade (Lisboa) and held a personal chair in Empirical Legal Studies on Mass Claims at Tilburg University (Netherlands) from 2011-2017. In 2014 she was awarded an honorary doctorate in law by Leuphana University (Germany). Prior to joining the Stanford faculty, Prof. Hensler was Director of the RAND Institute for Civil Justice (ICJ). She is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences. Prof. Hensler received her A.B. in political science summa cum laude from Hunter College and her Ph.D. in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Affiliated faculty at The Europe Center
Associate Dean for Graduate Studies at the Stanford Law School
Director at the Law and Policy Lab
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Event Recap: Networks of European Enlightenment

Networks of European EnlightenmentConventional 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 EshelAmir 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 SenSuddhaseel 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 DerAnthropology, "Animal Symbolism and Inequality at the Origins of Agriculture."
  • Jane EsbergPolitical Science, "Strategies of Repression: Killings, Courts, and Censorship in Military Dictatorships."
  • Andre FischerGerman Studies, "Myth in German Postwar Literature, Film, and Art."
  • Nicole GounalisItalian, "From Futurism to Neorealism: Art, Politics, and Civil Society in Italy, 1909-1959."
  • Benjamin HeinHistory, "Gateway to the Americas: ArcGIS and the Spatial History of Frankfurt's Financial Hinterland."
  • Torin JonesCultural Anthropology, "Reluctant Integration: African Migrants and the New Sicilian Imagination."
  • Nicholas LevyHistory, "Rust Proof: Industrial Development and Urban Life in the Socialist 1970s."
  • Lachlan McNameePolitical Science, "Sowing the Seeds of Conflict: The Long-Term Political Effects of the Irish Plantation Scheme."
  • Fayola NeelyGerman Studies, "Metalinguistic Awareness in the Acquisition of German as a Third Language: The role of L2 Proficiency."
  • Jessi PiggottTheater and Performance Studies, "Political Street Theater: A Comparative History of Agitprop and Contemporary Art Activism."
  • Jens PohlmannGerman Studies, "Capitalizing on the Avant-Garde? An Analysis of Adversarial Author's Marketing Strategies in the Second Half of the 20th Century."
  • Justin TackettEnglish, "Listening Between the Lines: Sound Technology and Poetry, 1850-1930."
  • Michael WebbEconomics, "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.

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This paper explores the influence of the Indian nationalist movement on the formation of British social history by highlighting the intellectual and social bonds between key nationalists and the Thompson family (Edward Thompson and his sons Frank and E. P. Thompson). A twentieth-century preoccupation with Byron, whose Romantic views of freedom and nation were shaped by the period of colonial conquest, hangs over the joint intellectual and political history of Indian nationalism and British socialism. Besides the Thompsons, Mohandas Gandhi, T. E. Lawrence, George Orwell, Rabindranath Tagore, and Jawaharlal Nehru are key figures in this web of influences and homages. Tracing this intellectual inheritance exposes the fundamentally anti-historical nature of Perry Anderson’s recent critique of the ‘Indian Ideology’, particularly of its religiosity. The study reveals how the colonial and orientalist context in which Romanticism, nationalism, and the historical discipline took shape continues to colour our ideal and expectations of ‘secular modernity’.

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  • Winner of the Paul Birdsall Prize from the American Historical Association
  • Winner of the Fraenkel in Contemporary History from the Wiener Library, London
  • Winner of the Keller-Sierra Prize from the Western Association of Women’s Historians  

 

The building of the Berlin Wall in 1961 shocked the world. Ever since, the image of this impenetrable barrier between East and West, imposed by communism, has been a central symbol of the Cold War.

Based on vast research in untapped archival, oral, and private sources, Burned Bridge reveals the hidden origins of the Iron Curtain, presenting it in a startling new light. Historian Edith Sheffer's unprecedented, in-depth account focuses on Burned Bridge-the intersection between two sister cities, Sonneberg and Neustadt bei Coburg, Germany's largest divided population outside Berlin. Sheffer demonstrates that as Soviet and American forces occupied each city after the Second World War, townspeople who historically had much in common quickly formed opposing interests and identities. The border walled off irreconcilable realities: the differences of freedom and captivity, rich and poor, peace and bloodshed, and past and present. Sheffer describes how smuggling, kidnapping, rape, and killing in the early postwar years led citizens to demand greater border control on both sides--long before East Germany fortified its 1,393 kilometer border with West Germany. It was in fact the American military that built the first barriers at Burned Bridge, which preceded East Germany's borderland crackdown by many years. Indeed, Sheffer shows that the physical border between East and West was not simply imposed by Cold War superpowers, but was in some part an improvised outgrowth of an anxious postwar society.

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Event Recap: German Minister of Defense Ursula von der Leyen Visits Stanford

Ursula von der LeyenUrsula von der Leyen, Minister of Defense, Federal Republic of Germany

In her March visit to Stanford University, Ursula von der Leyen, Minister of Defense for the Federal Republic of Germany, spoke to members of the Stanford community about the consequences of current international security challenges for Germany and for Europe. In recent months, some in Germany have advocated border closures as a solution to the ongoing migration crisis. Von der Leyen was highly critical of such measures because they necessitate closing intra-European Union borders thereby limiting the freedom of movement within the European Union, something she heralds as one of the greatest achievements of European integration.

As an alternative to the simplistic border closure approach, von der Leyen advocated a more nuanced approach, consisting of four broad steps. First, she said that the EU member states must clarify the meaning of “asylum,” and that those wishing to migrate to Germany or some other European country but who are not fleeing persecution must go through the regular migration process. Second, she stated that in order to maintain border-free travel across the Schengen area, the member states must reinforce external borders in an effort to combat human smuggling, human trafficking, and organized crime. The third step in von der Leyen’s approach was to enhance multilateral cooperation. She highlighted increased NATO naval patrols in the Mediterranean, the EU-NATO-Turkey summit meeting, and commitment to raising funds to feed and shelter refugees as examples of such cooperation. Finally, she said that Europe and its allies must deal with the root causes of the refugee flows by bringing peace and stability to both Iraq and Syria and by stopping ISIS. Doing so, she argued, will require military means, at least initially, and also requires increased coordination among the many disparate actors currently involved in the conflict. In order to successfully deal with the ongoing crisis, she argued, people must have a viable future in their own countries.

A medical doctor by training, von der Leyen spoke fondly of the time that she and her family spent at Stanford in the nineties. She became a member of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in 1990 and became active in politics shortly after returning to Germany from Stanford. Since that time, she has served at the local, lander, and federal levels of government and was first appointed to the cabinet in 2005. Prior to her 2013 appointment as Minister of Defense, von der Leyen served as the Minister of Family Affairs and Youth (2005-2009) and as the Minister of Labour and Social Affairs (2009-2013).


The Europe Center Undergraduate Internship Program in Europe

Please join us in congratulating the students selected to participate in The Europe Center’s summer 2016 Undergraduate Internship Program in Europe:

The Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE) 
Christine Cavallo
Joshua Petersen

Bruegel
Nafia Chowdhury 
Max Morales 
Andrea Villarreal

The Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS)
Amanda Jaffe

The International Center for Defense and Security (ICDS)
Caitlyn Littlepage
Sarah Manney

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


Featured Faculty Research: Ken Scheve

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 Ken Scheve, who is a Professor of Political Science and Director of The Europe Center.

Taxing the RichKen earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2000 and joined the faculty at Stanford University in 2012. Ken's research interests are in the fields of international and comparative political economy and comparative political behavior with particular interest in the behavioral foundations of the politics of economic policymaking. An example of this research is his recent book, Taxing the Rich: A History of Fiscal Fairness in the United States and Europe, which he co-authored with David Stasavage of New York University. In this book, Scheve and Stasavage tackle a subject of considerable political conflict: taxes on the richest members of society. There has been a great deal of debate about what government should do in this area, but we know far less about the reasons why some governments actually do tax the rich and others do not. Scheve and Stasavage address this question by examining income, inheritance, and other taxes from 1800 to the present in a set of twenty countries.

The core argument of the book is that countries tax the rich when the public thinks the state has failed to treat citizens as equals and in so doing has privileged the rich. Scheve and Stasavage begin with the premise that debates about taxation revolve around self-interest (no one likes paying taxes), economic efficiency, and fairness. They argue that fairness considerations center on what it means for the state to treat citizens as equals in income tax policy. Historically, they demonstrate that there are three main fairness arguments that have been used for or against taxing the rich. Equal Treatment arguments claim that everyone should be taxed at the same rate just like everyone has one vote. Ability to Pay arguments contend that states should tax the rich at higher rates because they can better afford to pay when compared with everyone else. Compensatory arguments suggest that it is fair to tax the rich at higher rates when it compensates for unequal treatment by the state in some other policy area. They argue that over the last two centuries compensatory arguments have been the most powerful arguments in favor of taxing the rich.

Examining the history of income taxation, Scheve and Stasavage find that compensatory arguments were important in the early development of income tax systems in the 19th century when it was argued that income taxes on the rich were necessary to compensate for heavy indirect taxes that fell disproportionately on the poor and middle class. But the most significant compensatory arguments over the last two centuries have been arguments to raise taxes on the rich to preserve equal sacrifice in wars of mass mobilization. These conflicts, particularly World War I and World War II, led states to raise large armies, often through conscription, and citizens and politicians alike adopted compensatory fairness arguments to justify higher taxes on income and wealth. Mass war mobilization led governments of both left and right to tax the rich.

Scheve and Stasavage show that governments have neither taxed the rich just because inequality is high, nor have they done so simply because the poor and middle classes outnumber the rich when it comes to voting. The main occasion when governments have moved to tax the rich is during times of mass mobilization for war, especially in democracies in which the norm of treating citizens as equals is held more strongly. They demonstrate that the real watershed for taxing the rich for many countries came in 1914. The era of the two world wars and their aftermath was one in which governments taxed the rich at rates that would have previously seemed unimaginable.

Throughout the book, Scheve and Stasavage show that when countries shift from peace to war, or the reverse, there has also been a big shift in the type of fairness arguments made in favor of taxing the rich. During times of peace, debates about whether it is fair to tax the rich center on competing equal treatment and ability to pay arguments. During times of war, supporters of taxing the rich have also been able to make compensatory arguments. If the poor and middle classes are doing the fighting, then the rich should be asked to pay more for the war effort. If some with wealth benefit from war profits, then this creates another compensatory argument for taxing the rich. These compensatory arguments had the biggest impact in democracies that are founded on the idea that citizens should be treated as equals. The fact that war had a much bigger impact on taxes on the rich in democracies than in autocracies also suggests that the rich weren’t being taxed out of simple necessity. It was because war determined what types of fairness arguments could be made.

The findings in Taxing the Rich have implications for the future of income taxation: Don’t expect high and rising inequality to necessarily lead to a return to the high top tax rates of the post-war era. What really matters is what people believe about how inequality is generated in the first place. If it is clear that inequality has risen because the government has failed to treat citizens as equals in the first place, then there is room for convincing compensatory arguments. Today, in an era where military technology favors more limited forms of warfare — drones rather than boots on the ground — the wartime compensatory arguments of old are no longer available. Absent new compensatory arguments, Scheve and Stasavage expect some to argue for taxing the rich based on ability to pay, but this probably won’t suffice to produce radically higher tax rates. More politically plausible reforms include those that involve increasing taxes on the rich by appealing to the logic of equal treatment to remove deductions, exemptions, and cases of special treatment. For more information about this research, please visit the book's website.

Publication Details: Scheve, Kenneth F., and David Stasavage. 2016. Taxing the Rich: A History of Fiscal Fairness in the United States and Europe. Princeton, NJ and New York, NY: Princeton University Press and the Russell Sage Foundation.


Featured Graduate Student Research: Melissa Kagen

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 Melissa Kagen (German Studies). Melissa is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of German Studies at Stanford University. Prior to beginning her doctoral studies at Stanford, Melissa earned an MA in Humanities from the University of Chicago and a BA in Literary Arts from Brown University.

Melissa KagenMelissa's research interests include nineteenth and twentieth century German and Austrian opera and fiction, Jewish studies, and performance studies, as well as digital humanities. In her dissertation, Melissa examines the concept of "Wandering" - an important theme since Wagner's work - in modernist German opera. She considers the distinctive conceptions of German and Jewish wanderers in four operas written by German-speaking Jews prior to World War II. These operas include Der Ferne Klang (1912) by Franz Schreker, Die Tote Stadt (1920) by Erich Wolfgang, Moses und Aron (1933) by Arnold Schoenberg, and The Eternal Road (1937) by Kurt Weill. Supported by The Europe Center, Melissa conducted research in Germany and Austria during summer 2015. During this time, she traveled to libraries and archives to access works related to her dissertation research. A highlight of her research trip was seeing a performance of Der Ferne Klang in Manheim. Because this opera is rarely performed and is not available on DVD, this was the first time Melissa had ever seen a performance of Der Ferne Klang. Another crucial outcome of her archival work was the realization that in Die Tote Stadt, the protagonist himself does not wander, but rather the spaces wander around him. This realization was crucial to her novel discussion of this work. Melissa will be presenting her completed project in May and graduating in June. She hopes to return to Europe this summer to work on a related project.

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


Stanford Student Sarah Flamm Participates in Model WTO

Model WTOModel WTO Participants at the University of St. Gallen

In April Stanford University student Sarah Flamm traveled to Switzerland to participate in the 19th annual Model World Trade Organization program. Here is Sarah’s description of her experience:

I had the pleasure of representing the delegation of the United States at the 19th annual Model World Trade Organization (WTO) this April. With the generous support of SIEPR and The Europe Center at the Freeman Spogli Institute, I traveled to Switzerland to join 60 graduate and undergraduate students from different parts of the world to deliberate over the Government Procurement Agreement (GPA). The simulation took place at the University of St. Gallen and the WTO headquarters in Geneva. Over the course of an intense week, we delegates negotiated and drafted amendments to the GPA to reflect changing national and international priorities and values.

Government procurement refers to purchases of goods and services made by government agencies with public money for public purposes. This topic is more interesting and polemical than one might initially suspect. Federal procurement represents a huge market ($530 billion in the United States), making its impact quite consequential. The goal of the GPA is to facilitate and to open trade opportunities and to ensure that governments follow the principles of non-discrimination, transparency, and procedural fairness in procurement. It is one of the few agreements where the United States has allowed itself to be subject to international arbitration, favoring the benefits of market access. Government procurement is also symbolically important as it reflects how nations choose to spend their money and whom they decide to support.

I represented the delegation of the United States, along with four others students from Belgium, Switzerland, China, and Hong Kong. We were each assigned to represent the United States on different committees, which included Green Procurement, Anti-corruption, African Participation, Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), and Social Issues. I served on the Social Issues Committee, which addressed priorities in government procurement as they relate to labor standards, minority rights and discrimination, among others. On the Social Committee I had two main negotiation goals: 1) insert the term "social issues" into the GPA text in order to empower governments to explicitly take social responsibility into account when awarding government contracts, and 2) define "social issues" to mean meeting minimum labor standards, notably to comply with two International Labour Organization conventions - Convention 105 on the Abolition of Forced Labour and Convention 182 on the Worst Forms of Child Labour. Over the course of six moderated negotiation rounds, we discussed these as well as priorities raised by other countries. The negotiations varied from meticulous arguments over text, to practical discussions on how to create allowances for developing countries that currently rely on child and cheap labor, making them presently unable to meet the requirements of developed countries in order to compete for contracts.

Amidst negotiations, our delegation consulted with David Bisbee, who is the Attaché at the U.S. Mission to the WTO. He advised on negotiations and strategy, and upon conclusion of the negotiations we met with him in person at the U.S. embassy in Geneva. It was interesting to represent a country that is not very enthusiastic about multilateral bodies such as the WTO. In reality, the United States would likely have abstained from voting to include the Social Issues language that we had promoted because of the fear that it would open the door to discrimination. At the end of the week, we met with lawyers from the WTO Secretariat in Geneva who gave us detailed feedback on the new GPA text we had created. This provided an opportunity to better understand whether our results were realistic and how they compared to real negotiation outcomes. We also learned about the procedure for ratification of the amended document.

Simulations like Model WTO differ from reality in that country representatives are often more willing to compromise than they would in reality, but this also allowed for an expanded policy space for our countries to come up with workable solutions. This experience has piqued my interest in one day representing the labor and trade priorities of the United States on the global stage.


The Europe Center Sponsored Events

April 28, 2016 
12:00PM - 1:30PM 
Pauline Schnapper, Université Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle 
Is Britain Going to Leave the EU? The Referendum Campaign and the Crisis of British Democracy 
CISAC Central Conference Room, Encina Hall 
RSVP by 5:00PM April 25, 2016.

Save the Date: April 28-29, 2016 
9:00AM - 5:00PM 
Conference: Networks of European Enlightenment 
Levinthal Hall, Stanford Humanities Center 
This conference is co-sponsored by The Europe Center, the French Cultural Workshop, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages.

Save the Date: April 29-30, 2016 
Symposium: Adjudicating Across Borders: Contemporary Challenges in International Adoption 
Stanford Law School Room 290 
RSVP required. 
This conference is co-sponsored by The Europe Center

May 9, 2016 
11:30AM - 1:00PM 
Monica Martinez-Bravo, Centro de Estudios Monetarios y Financieros (CEMFI), Madrid 
Workshop Title TBD 
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: April 28, 2016 
4:15PM - 5:45PM 
John Bass, United States Ambassador to Turkey

Save the Date: May 3, 2016 
Steve Sestanovich, Professor of International Diplomacy at Columbia University

 

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How do democratic societies respond to acts of terror? More precisely, what are the political consequences of the "Charlie Hebdo" attacks and the November 13 rampage in 2015 in Paris? Past research has examined the impact of threatening events on attitudes toward ethnic and religious minorities, as well as its influence on the endorsement of authoritarian policies. However, up until now, the impact of terrorist events on political participation has not been examined. This talk aims to assess the influence of fear and anger evoked by threat on the propensity to take part in various political activities, drawing on two representative surveys conducted in the aftermath of the January and November 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris.

Martial Foucault is a professor of political science at Sciences Po in Paris, director of the CEVIPOF (CNRS) and associate researcher within the Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire d’Evaluation des Politiques Publiques (LIEPP).

 

RSVP to Minjia Zhong at mzhong2@stanford.edu by Monday April 11.

For more information contact Cécile Alduy at alduy@stanford.edu

This lecture is co-sponsored by the French and Italian Department, The Europe Center, Stanford University Library, the France-Stanford Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, the Division of Literatures, Cultures and Languages, and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law.

 

German Library, Room 252
Building 260

Martial Foucault Professor of Political Science speaker Institute of Political Science (Sciences Po), Paris
Lectures
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