Stanford University

Culture

Andreas Kilcher

Stanford Humanities Center
424 Santa Teresa Street
Stanford, CA

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Bliss Carnochan International Visitor, 2013-2014
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Andreas Kilcher is professor of Literature and Cultural Studies at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) Zurich. Kilcher is a prominent scholar of German-Jewish literature and culture, Kabbalah, and the European tradition of esotericism. He has written and edited a range of publications on the encounters between European and Jewish cultures from the sixteenth century through the present, with a focus on the twentieth century. His publications include Geteilte Freude: Schiller-Rezeption in der jüdischen Moderne (Munich, 2006), biographies of the writers Franz Kafka (Frankfurt, 2008) and Max Frisch (Berlin 2011) and numerous articles on German-Jewish literature, Kabbalah in modern Europe, and the relationship between knowledge and literature. Kilcher’s current project includes collaboration with colleagues at Stanford on the divergent constructions of Jewish ethnography in German-speaking and Russian-speaking territories. He was nominated by the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, and the Europe Center.

 

Innovative leaders bridging diversity in Sweden and the West

Authors
Roland Hsu
News Type
News
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The Europe Center, through its Program on Sweden, Scandinavia, and the Baltic Region, has forged partnerships with those who bring visionary solutions to the challenge of diversity and reconciliation in our increasingly globalized world.   “Harbor of Hope:  a special evening celebrating Sweden’s diverse cultures” held on May 6th is the latest effort by the Europe Center to disseminate this new way of thinking.  The participation of Sweden’s leading documentary filmmaker Magnus Gertten, and Sweden’s cultural entrepreneur Ozan Sunar, resulted in an unprecedented pairing and an evening of motivating insight for a large public audience.  The program included the screening of Gertten’s documentary “Harbour of Hope”, a multi-media presentation by Sunar and an opportunity for the audience to engage in discussion with both of these special guests.

The evening opened with a welcome by the Europe Center’s director, Professor Amir Eshel, who highlighted the support of the Barbro Osher Pro Suecia Foundation for making possible the Europe Center’s Sweden Program and this research.  The center’s Associate Director, Dr. Roland Hsu then framed the thinking behind inviting these particular two guest speakers, Gertten and Sunar.

“This evening”, said Hsu,  “we gather for a special look at the challenge to meet and embrace difference.  In today’s globalized world, market economies, and educational opportunities, but also war and persecution send unprecedented numbers of peoples across borders, away from home cultures, and into new host neighborhoods. 

In the US and in Europe we share the concern and opportunity to learn what drives people far from home.  Tonight, we focus our gaze on the city of Malmo, a city whose neighborhoods contain extraordinary diversity.  Such diversity has a history, which we shall see on film, and it has a future, thanks in large part to the cultural programing we will learn about after the film. 

Our challenge is to learn from the experience of families, fathers, brothers, mothers, sisters, and children, displaced from the familiar, and replaced in new settings.  e will look at this challenge through the eyes of two visionary artists who have touched us with their works, and who are bridging divides across competing memories, and across growing diversity of today’s mobile and global West.” 

Hsu’s introduction of Magnus Gertten and Gertten’s documentary film “Harbour of Hope” included a line from a NY Times review of Gertten’s art which he felt echoed throughout the evening’s program:  “it seems as if the past is intruding on and sometimes overwhelming the present.”  “Harbour of Hope” includes footage from the original archival film shot on April 28, 1945, the day that 30,000 survivors of German concentration camps arrived in Malmo, Sweden to begin their lives over again.  This powerful and unforgettable film is about the life stories of 3 of the survivors seen on this footage:  Irene Krausz-Fainman, Ewa Kabacinska Jansson and Joe Rozenberg. 

Following the viewing of “Harbour of Hope”, Hsu introduced the next guest Ozan Sunar by saying “In Mr. Sunar’s cultural programming, we may see not the past overwhelming the present, but instead the present clearing the way for its future.” Sunar, with a long career in the fields of arts, media and integration politics, blazed a path for those seeking new ways to include artistic values from diverse origins into Sweden’s contemporary culture.  He is currently the founding and artistic director of the international cultural house Moriska Paviljongen in Malmo.  Sunar’s presentation and the subsequent discussion on his work uniting heretofore communities in conflict through culture were both inspiring and provocative.


Harbor of Hope:  a special evening celebrating Sweden's diverses cultures; May 6, 2013, Stanford University:

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Harbor of Hope: A special evening celebrating Sweden’s diverse cultures

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This event celebrating Sweden's diverse cultures began with a reception at 5pm, followed by the showing of the award winning film Harbour of Hope (2011, Sweden / Poland / Germany / Norway / Denmark; Dir. Magnus Gertten; 76 min) with filmmaker Magnus Gertten. Ozan Sunar, the artistic director of Moriska Paviljongen (also known as "Moriskan"), rounded out the evening with a multi-media presentation on bridging communities through culture.

The Koret-Taube Conference Center
Room 130, Gunn-SIEPR Building

Magnus Gertten Swedish filmmaker Speaker
Ozan Sunar Artistic Director Speaker Moriska Paviljongen ("Moriskan")
Conferences

Politics, Journalism and Public Broadcasting Service: Lost in the Labyrinth

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In our current societies, the media are backbone institutions of social life, a tool through which we can strength or deteriorate our democracy. Each society decides if it works exclusively for the market or if it conditions business goals to preserve collective responsibility. The media are nuclear tools to accomplish the right balance between the two.  Unfortunately, nowadays such balance is neither a priority of public media sector nor a private one. The speech of the media has shifted, with consent and complicity of all the stakeholders, and has diminished responsibility criteria and installed partisanship and special interest and business. Reversing this process is an emergency, but the absence of imminent danger, unlike what it happens with the economic crisis, has not forced us to assume our obligations. Consequently, without being aware of it, we are marginalizing media content that can contribute to public service. The dependence between politicians and journalists makes them forget that they must serve the public interest. They are too involved in their own fight to survive and as a result subject the law, subsidies and news to their own interests. This lecture will analyze the mechanisms and trends through which the mass media stabilize irresponsibility and encourage a sensationalist discourse that, in turn, distance the citizen from public affairs.


Mònica Terribas was born in Barcelona (1968). She is a journalist and has been teaching at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra since 1993. She obtained her degree of Journalism at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (1991) and a doctoral fellowship by the British Council and La Caixa to study the links between the concept of public sphere and national identity in the media (Ph.D,  University of Stirling, Scotland, 1994). She combined her studies with her professional career as a journalist in the radio news services in 1986 and continued in 1988 in TV3 - Televisió de Catalunya- as a screenwriter, coordinator, editor and presenter of several television programs, among which the late night news program, La Nit al Dia (2002-2008).  In May 2008 she was appointed General Manager of TV3, responsible for the six public channels of the Catalan media corporation up to April 2012.  Since August 2012, she is the editor and CEO of ARA, which includes a newspaper and the net news leader platform. Among other awards, she received the National Award of Journalism and National Award of Culture.

This event is part of The Europe Center's Iberian Studies Program lecture series and the Journalism and Literature series presented by the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, the Stanford Humanities Center and The Europe Center.

Reuben W. Hills Conference Room


Mònica Terribas Journalist, Assistant Professor at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, and editor and CEO, <em>Ara</em> Speaker
Seminars

Sebastian Weirauch

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Visiting Student Researcher, The Europe Center, 2013
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Sebastian Weirauch studied literature and sociology at the RWTH Aachen and creative writing at the German Literature Institute in Leipzig. He wrote his dissertation on Elfriede Jelinek.

Among other things, Weirauch worked as a youth worker, radio journalist and as a supervisor in a home for the disabled.

From 2014 to 2018 he worked as a lecturer and employee at the RWTH-Aachen in the field of European-Jewish literary history and from 2018 to 2020 at the University of Leipzig as part of the digitalization and edition project about the GDR`s Institute for Literary Writing 'Johannes R. Becher' (1955-1993). He also worked as a scientific advisor for the Saxon Academy of Sciences in Leipzig and for the Georg Eckert Institute for International Schoolbook Research.

Since 2022 he has been working as an editor for social studies.

His publications include scientific and literary texts. Recent publications include:

"Gegen Ironie sind sie machtlos" A media-critical investigation of Elfriede Jelinek's subversive rhetoric at Königshausen&Neumann (Reviewed in Austrian Studies Vol. 27).

"Experimentierfeld Schreibschule": Texts from the Literature Institute of the GDR "Johannes R. Becher" 1955-1993 in Wallstein-Verlag (reviewed a. o. in Kreuzer and on Literaturkritik.de)

"Von den Elementen. Poems" in the Poetenladen-Verlag (chosen among the 4 best poetry debuts of the house for poetry in Berlin, nominated for the Leonce & Lena Prize and reviewed a. o. in literaturkritik.de)

“Migrant Tastes and Formation of Popular Culture: The Case of Turkey”

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In societies with continuous in-and-out migration in relatively short periods the formation of dominant culture comes into shape as "popular". Continental theories for defining people's culture mostly assume some permanent structures (cultural preferences of elites or classes) in modern societies, yet not so successful for explaining the rise of popular cultures in societies like the USA. Turkey, as a country of migratory waves from its birth, is a pristine example of such a process and unique for its elites' interventions into the cultural sphere. The talk is broadly concerns with three dynamics on the formation of Turkish popular culture - demographic transition, elitist cultural policies, and partly oppositional character of people's taste.

Orhan Tekelioğlu is Chair of Department of New Media at Bahçeşehir University (Istanbul, Turkey) and Visiting Scholar at the University of Pennyslvania’s Annenberg School of Communication.  He is a scholar of cultural sociology including such research fields as media consumption, the history of Turkish popular music, the sociological features of Turkish literature, and the cultural politics of the Republican period. He received his Ph.D. in Sociology from the Middle Eastern Technical University (Ankara, Turkey) and his Magisterartium degree in Sociology from the University of Oslo. He taughted in Departments of Political Science and Turkish Literature at the Bilkent University in Ankara, in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at Ohio State University, and acted as Acting Dean of the Faculty of Communication at the Izmir University of Economics. Dr. Tekelioğlu conducts field studies on popular television dramas and reality shows, and history of jazz and popular music in Istanbul. He has published articles in Turkish and in English and submitted papers to numerous national and international congresses. Among his publications are Pop Ekran [Pop Screen, 2013], Pop Yazılar, [Pop Essays, 2006], Foucault Sosyolojisi [Sociology of Foucault, 2003], Şerif Mardin’e Armağan, [A Festschrift for Şerif Mardin, 2005), "Modernizing reforms and Turkish music in the 1930s"  (Turkish Studies, 2001), and “Two Incompatible Positions in the Challenge Against the Individual Subject of Modernity” (Theory& Psychology, 1997).

Co-sponsored by the Mediterranean Studies Forum, Program on Urban Studies, the Europe Center, and Turkish Students Association

Encina Hall West
2nd floor, Room 208

Orhan Tekelioğlu Professor and Chair of the Department of New Media at Bahçeşehir University (Istanbul, Turkey) and Visiting Scholar Speaker the University of Pennyslvania’s Annenberg School of Communication.
Seminars

The Emigrant as a Symptom, or the Representation of Emigration in Basque Literature

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This lecture is part of the "Iberian Studies Program Lecture Series"

Co-sponsored by the Iberian Studies Program and the Center for Latin American Studies (CLAS)

Bolivar House
583 Alvarado Row

Mari Jose Olaziregi Associate Professor of Basque literature at the University of the Basque Country-Spain and Director of the Language and Universities Department Speaker Etxepare Basque Institute
Seminars

Partitions: Towards Transnational History of Twentieth Century Territorial Separatism

 

Please note that only Day 1 is open to the public.  
Day 2 is open only to Stanford University faculty and students.


Day 1:  "Partitions in/and Literature"
Thursday, April 18th
4:15pm - 6:00pm
Free and open to the public

Chair and commentator:  Vered K. Shemtov (Stanford University)

Speaker: Hannan Hever (Hebrew University)
"Zionist Literature: The impossibility of the Rhetoric of Partition"

 

Day 2:  "Partitions in History:  Genealogy and Implementations of a Political Idea"
Friday, April 19th
10:00am - 6:00pm
Open to Stanford University faculty and students only

PLEASE SEE THE ATTACHED WORKSHOP PROGRAM FOR PANEL TITLES AND PARTICIPANTS

 

Sponsored by:
The Europe Center, Taube Center for Jewish Studies, Stanford Humanities Center, Hebrew Literature and Culture Project, Stanford Department of History (Kratter Fund), The Sohaib and Sara Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies, Center for East Asian Studies and the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages

 

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April 18th: Levinthal Hall, Stanford Humanities Center (Open to the public)
April 19th: The Board Room, Stanford Humanities Center (Open to Stanford faculty and students only)

Hannan Hever Keynote Speaker Hebrew University
Vared K. Shemtov Commentator Stanford University

Edith Sheffer

Department of History 200-120

(650) 724-0074
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Former Assistant Professor of Modern European History
Former Assistant Professor, by courtesy, of German Studies
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Edith Sheffer joined the History Department faculty in 2010, having come to Stanford as an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in the Humanities in 2008.  Her first book, Burned Bridge: How East and West Germans Made the Iron Curtain (Oxford University Press, 2011), challenges the moral myth of the Berlin Wall, the Cold War’s central symbol. It reveals how the barrier between East and West did not simply arise overnight from communism in Berlin in 1961, but that a longer, lethal 1,393 kilometer fence had been developing haphazardly between the two Germanys since 1945.

Her current book, Soulless Children of the Reich: Hans Asperger and the Nazi Origins of Autism, investigates Hans Asperger’s creation of the autism diagnosis in Nazi Vienna, examining Nazi psychiatry's emphasis on social spirit and Asperger's involvement in the euthanasia program that murdered disabled children. A related project through Stanford's Spatial History Lab, "Forming Selves: The Creation of Child Psychiatry from Red Vienna to the Third Reich and Abroad," maps the transnational development of child psychiatry as a discipline, tracing linkages among its pioneers in Vienna in the 1930s through their emigration from the Third Reich and establishment of different practices in the 1940s in England and the United States. Sheffer's next book project, Hidden Front: Switzerland and World War Two, tells an in-depth history of a nation whose pivotal role remains unexposed--yet was decisive in the course of the Second World War.

Affiliated faculty at The Europe Center
Edith Sheffer Commentator
Reece Jones Panelist University of Hawaii, Manoa
Lucy Chester Panelist University of Colorado, Boulder

Priya Satia

History Department
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-2024

(650) 723-9534
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Raymond A. Spruance Professor of International History
Professor of History
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Priya Satia specializes in modern British and British empire history.

Prof. Satia is a cultural historian of the material and intellectual infrastructure of the modern world in the age of empire. Her work examines the origins of state institutions, military technologies, ideas and practices of development, and the anti-colonial responses they inspired in order to understand how the imperial past has shaped the present and how the ethical dilemmas it posed were understood and managed.

Prof. Satia has explored these questions in studies of British policing of the Middle East in the era of World War One, the invention of radio during the Boer War, the British Indian development of Iraq, state secrecy in mass-democratic Britain, the gun-making exploits of a Quaker family during the industrial revolution, the Partition of British India, the imperial consequences of the historical discipline itself, and other projects. Her work on aerial policing has also informed her analysis of American drone use in the Middle East. An essay on her formation as a historian is available here in the H-Diplo series "Learning the Scholar's Craft."

Her first book Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain's Covert Empire in the Middle East (OUP, 2008) won the 2009 AHA-Herbert Baxter Adams Book Prize, the 2009 AHA-Pacific Coast Branch Book Award, and the 2010 Pacific Coast Conference on British Studies Book Prize.

Her second book, Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution (Penguin Press/Duckworth, 2018) won the 2019 Pacific Coast Conference on British Studies Book Prize, the Wadsworth Prize in Business History, and the AHA's Jerry Bentley Prize in world history. It was also a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize in History and shortlisted for the Laura Shannon Prize in Contemporary European Studies and the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize.

Prof. Satia's third book, Time's Monster: How History Makes History (Belknap HUP/Penguin Allen Lane, 2020) won the 2021 Pacific Coast Conference on British Studies Book Prize  and the 2021 Bronze Prize in History (World) from the Independent Publisher Book Awards. It was also listed in BBC History Magazine Books of the Year (2020) and the New Statesman's Best Books of the Year (2020).

Her work has also appeared in the American Historical Review, Past and Present, Technology and Culture, Humanity, Annales, History Workshop Journal, and other scholarly journals, as well as edited volumes across a range of fields (e.g. environmental history, Middle Eastern history, the Indian Ocean world, British politics, aerospatial theory, humanitarianism), and mainstream media (e.g. the Financial Times, the Nation, Times Literary Supplement, the Washington Post, Time Magazine, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Aeon, the Tribune, Slate.com, CNN.com, and more).

Prof. Satia is working on a new book project, The Lake of Liberation, on British colonialism in Punjab and its legacies.

Affiliated faculty at The Europe Center
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Arie M. Dubnov

450 Serra Mall, Bldg. 200
Stanford, CA 94305

(650) 723-1585 (650) 804-6932
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Arie Dubnov is an Acting Assistant Professor at Stanford University’s Department of History. Dubnov holds a BA, an MA, and a Ph.D. from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and is a past George L. Mosse Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His fields of expertise are modern Jewish and European intellectual history, with a subsidiary interest in nationalism studies. He is the author, most recently, of Isaiah Berlin: The Journey of a Jewish Liberal (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). In addition, Dubnov has published essays in journals such as Nations & Nationalism, Modern Intellectual History, History of European Ideas, The Journal of Israeli History and is the editor of the collection [in Hebrew] Zionism – A View from the Outside (The Bialik Institute, 2010), seeking to put Zionist history in a larger comparative trajectory. At Stanford Dubnov teaches courses in European intellectual history alongside Jewish and Israeli history.

 

Arie M. Dubnov Panelist
Motti Golani Panelist University of Haifa
Gershon Shafir Commentator UC San Diego
Adi Gordon Panelist University of Cincinnati / Amherst College
Joel Beinin Panelist Stanford University
Robert Crews Commentator Stanford University
Faisal Devji Panelist St. Anthony's, Oxford
Leena Dellashah Panelist Columbia University
Conferences
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