Stanford University

Culture

"The Anschluss" in the Rear View Mirror: Austrian Historical Memories in Debate and Transformation, 1938-2008

-
Oliver Rathkolb is the director of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for European History and the Public Sphere, and professor of contemporary history at the University of Vienna.

Professor Rathkolb is the co-founder of a scientific quarterly, "Medien und Zeit" (Media and Time), focusing on interdisciplinary questions of contemporary history and communications/media history, and is managing editor of "Zeitgeschichte" (Contemporary History). Since 1980, Professor Rathkolb has regularly presented papers at conferences and universities in the U.S. and Europe, including the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, American Political Science Association, German Studies Association, UC Berkeley, Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford University, and has been a visiting professor at the University of Chicago. He has published more than 100 articles on Austrian, European contemporary political, and cultural history, as well as international affairs and business history.

This presentation will analyze the most important changes in historical political terms that have taken place in the Austrian debate on the causes and consequences of the National Socialist takeover of power in 1938. At the same time, the results, which take into account recent research on communicative and cultural memory, will be enriched and widened in scope through a consideration of how the Anschluss is perceived by the international community of historians.

Download pdf

Building 200, History Corner
Room 307

Oliver Rathkolb Director of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute of European History and Public Spheres: Culture, Democracy and Media; Professor of the Institute for Contemporary History, University of Vienna (2005-2007) Speaker
Seminars
Austria in the Postwar World

From Republican Barcelona to Pre-Nazi Berlin: Nudism, Sexuality, and National Identity in Laura Brunet's 'Desnudismo Integral' (1931)

-

Maite Zubiaurre is Assistant Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of California, Los Angeles. She has a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Columbia University, and has taught Spanish literature at a variety of distinguished institutions including Columbia University, the University of Texas, Austin, the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, and the University of Southern California, among others. Dr. Zubiaurre's research interests include twentieth-century Peninsular literature; European and Latin American Realism; comparative literature; gender studies; urban studies; cultural studies; Latin American women's fiction; and Latina and Chicana fiction.

Download pdf
Download pdf

Encina Ground Floor Conference Room

Maite Zubiaurre Assisant Professor Speaker UCLA
Seminars

Labeling Products of Food Biotechnology: Panacea or Hidden Trade Barrier?

In the debates surrounding genetically modified organisms in the food supply, the issue of labeling has become ever more salient. The EU is developing regulations to require labeling and traceability for all foods containing or derived from GMOs. Other countries, including Australia, Brazil, Japan, New Zealand, Russia, South Korea and Thailand are also in the process of developing voluntary labeling guidelines. In January of 2000, 130 countries adopted the Cartagena Protocol on Bio-safety which calls for bulk shipments of GMO commodities, such as corn or soybeans that are intended to be used as food, feed or for processing, to be accompanied by documentation stating that such shipments "may contain" living modified organisms and are "not intended for intentional introduction into the environment." Will these labeling systems prevent trade disruptions and enhance the international trading system established by the WTO? Or will they act as non-tariff barriers that obfuscate consumer decisions and lead to greater expense, confusion and ultimately to new trade wars?

Any GMO labeling debate must take into consideration the political, economic, legal, operational and administrative aspects of such labeling. The political considerations include the maintenance of confidence in the food system and how policy makers balance the demands of domestic constituencies against their various international obligations, such as under WTO Technical Barriers to Trade Agreement. The economic questions focus on a cost/benefit analysis of segregation and identity-preservation and whether labels provide information or capture a premium for producers. The legal issues include the possible challenge of discrimination in trade and the extent of liability under domestic law for misleading or incorrect labels. Operational adn administrative questions center on whether to make labels mandatory, whether to take a product or process approach, how feasible and costly are particular approaches and whether it is necessary it is necessary to require full traceability.

The workshop will be hosted by the European Forum of the Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. The goal of the workshop is to make a significant contribution to the ongoing policy debate. Participants will include academic, government and private sector specialists and bring expertise in economics, law and political science.

Seminars

The Long Way West: A Farewell to the German Question

-

Professor Winkler portrays the 'German Question" through the lens of history in the past 150 years. He examines a variety of key issues that have arisen throughout German history and acknowledges that this 'German Question' period has come to an end. Professor Winkler also looks to Germany's future in Europe.

Synopsis

To Prof. Winkler, the reunification of Germany in 1990 resolved the ‘German Question.’ However, he argues that it has been a question not just since World War I but since the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806. Prof. Winkler believes that this event was not simply a struggle for territory but also involved striving for unity and freedom. These two key values, which Prof. Winkler emphasizes throughout his lecture, can be characterized by a constitutional nation-state. Prof. Winkler explains that although the 1848 Revolution was a failure, it was a step forward in that Germany realized that Austria was not going to be part of this nation-state when it would be created. Prof. Winkler cites that in creating the Prussian nation-state in 1871, Bismarck took care of the unity aspect. However, “parliamentization,” as he Prof. Winkler puts it, only occurred in 1918. He argues that this democratization of post-World War I Germany helped Hitler’s rise to power and then collapsed once Hitler started taking control of the government.

However, Prof. Winkler explains that Hitler’s fall initiated a learning process for the German people that was even more severe than after 1918, but this time not all had the chance to turn to democracy. Although many Germans longed to be reunited with their compatriots, a new mission for European integration of West Germany arose in as early as the late 1940s. Prof. Winkler explains it was an intellectual movement, primarily advanced by Catholic conservatives, which gradually shifted more to the middle and left. By 1986, this movement had shifted thoroughly left, at a time where many Germans had come to feel that the separation of East and West Germany was necessary, pointing to Auschwitz to support their point.

Prof. Winkler argues that once the Berlin Wall fell, the post-national identity that West Germany had created still remained. This created issues with many desiring European integration before German reunification. However, Prof. Winkler explains this notionwas argued down by notables such as Willy Brandt, who felt the guilt of World War II could not fade through indefinite division. Prof. Winkler argues that once Germany was reunified, although post-war guilt still remained, it had finally achieved unity and freedom, thus resolving the ‘German Question.’ Prof. Winkler finishes by revealing his belief in the uniqueness of German history in that while it belonged to the West, it had continually rejected the democratic enlightenment. Prof. Winkler emphasizes his belief that it is time for Germany to understand its history in order to know where ti stands now and how it can contribute to Europe. He argues that the way Germany confronts its history will be “crucial” to Europe as well.

About the speaker

Heinrich August Winkler studied history, philosophy, and public law in Tubingen, Heidelberg, and Munster. He was associate professor at the Freie Universitat in Berlin in 1970-72 and then professor of modern history in Freiburg until 1991. He has been at the Humboldt-Universitat in Berlin since 1992, and has been a visiting scholar in Princeton, at the Wilson Center in Washington, at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Berlin, and at the Historisches Kolleg in Munich. He is the author of numerous works including "Germany: The Long Road West," for which he won the Friedrich Schiedel Prize for Literature in 2002.

Download pdf

Encina Ground Floor Conference Room

Heinrich August Winkler Speaker
Seminars

An Evening with Orhan Pamuk

-

Orhan Pamuk was born in Istanbul in 1952 and grew up in a large family similar to those which he describes in his novels Cevdet Bey and His Sons and The Black Book, in the district of Nisantasi. As he writes in his autobiographical book Istanbul, from his childhood until the age of 22 he devoted himself largely to painting and dreamed of becoming an artist. After graduating from the American Robert College in Istanbul, he studied architecture at Istanbul Technical University for three years, but abandoned the course when he gave up his ambition to become an architect and artist. He went on to graduate in journalism from Istanbul University, but never worked as a journalist. At the age of 23 Pamuk decided to become a novelist, and giving up everything else retreated into his flat and began to write.

His first novel Cevdet Bey and His Sons was published seven years later in 1982. The novel is the story of three generations of a wealthy Istanbul family living in Nisantasi, Pamuk's own home district. The novel was awarded both the Orhan Kemal and Milliyet literary prizes. The following year Pamuk published his novel The Silent House, which in French translation won the 1991 Prix de la découverte européene. The White Castle (1985) about the frictions and friendship between a Venetian slave and an Ottoman scholar was published in English and many other languages from 1990 onwards, bringing Pamuk his first international fame. The same year Pamuk went to America, where he was a visiting scholar at Columbia University in New York from 1985 to 1988. It was there that he wrote most of his novel The Black Book, in which the streets, past, chemistry and texture of Istanbul are described through the story of a lawyer seeking his missing wife. This novel was published in Turkey in 1990, and in French translation won the Prix France Culture. The Black Book enlarged Pamuk's fame both in Turkey and internationally as an author at once popular and experimental, and able to write about past and present with the same intensity. In 1991 Pamuk's daughter Rüya was born. That year saw the production of a film Hidden Face, whose script by Pamuk was based on a one-page story in The Black Book.

His novel The New Life, about young university students influenced by a mysterious book, was published in Turkey in 1994 and became one of the most widely read books in Turkish literature. My Name Is Red, about Ottoman and Persian artists and their ways of seeing and portraying the non-western world, told through a love story and family story, was published in 1998. This novel won the French Prix Du Meilleur Livre Etranger, the Italian Grinzane Cavour (2002) and the International IMPAC Dublin literary award (2003). Snow, which he describes as 'my first and last political novel,' was published in 2002. In this book set in the small city of Kars in northeastern Turkey he experimented with a new type of 'political novel,' telling the story of violence and tension between political Islamists, soldiers, secularists, and Kurdish and Turkish nationalists. In 1999 a selection of his articles on literature and culture written for newspapers and magazines in Turkey and abroad, together with a selection of writings from his private notebooks, was published under the title Other Colours.

Pamuk's most recent book, Istanbul, is a poetical work, combining the author's early memoirs up to the age of 22, and an essay about the city of Istanbul, illustrated with photographs from his own album, and pictures by western painters and Turkish photographers.

Pamuk was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006. The press release read "who in the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city has discovered new symbols for the class and interlacing of cultures."

http://www.orhanpamuk.net/

Sponsored by the Mediterranean Studies Forum, the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies' S.T. Lee Lecture, the Division of International Comparative & Area Studies, the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies, and the Forum on Contemporary Europe.

Memorial Auditorium
Stanford University
551 Serra Mall
Stanford, CA 94015

Orhan Pamuk 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature Winner Speaker
Lectures

Jean-Marie Apostolidès

Department of French and Italian
Pigott Hall, Rm 106
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-2010

(650) 723-4460
0
William H. Bonsall Professor of French, Emeritus
Professor of Theater and Performance Studies, Emeritus
1943-2023
apostolides.jpg

Jean-Marie Apostolidès is the William H. Bonsall Professor in French at Stanford University. He has served as chair of the Department of French and Italian and as executive editor of the Stanford French Review and the Stanford Literature Review.

Professor Apostolidès was educated in France, where he received a doctorate in literature and the social sciences. He taught psychology in Canada for seven years and sociology in France for three years. In 1980 he came to the United States, teaching at Harvard and then Stanford, primarily French classical literature (the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) and drama. He is also a playwright, whose work has been staged in Paris, Montreal, and New York.

His literary criticism focuses on the place of artistic production in the French classical age and in modern society. Whether it be the place of court pageantry during the reign of King Louis XIV (Le Roi-Machine, 1981), or the role of theater under the ancien régime (Le Prince Sacrificié, 1985), or even the importance of mass culture in the 1950s (Les Métamorphoses de Tintin, 1984), in each case Professor Apostolidès analyzes a specific cultural product both in its original context and in the context of the contemporary world. His most recent books are Les Tombeaux de Guy Debord in 1999, L'Audience in 2001, Traces, Revers, Ecarts in 2002, Sade in The Abyss in 2003, Héroïsme et victimisation in 2003, Hergé et le mythe du Surenfant in 2004. The tools required for such analysis are borrowed from literary criticism and from the social sciences, particularly psychoanalysis, anthropology, and sociology.

In his books, Professor Apostolidès interprets the works of the past as witnesses of our intellectual and emotional life. His examination of the distant or near past seeks to make us more sensitive to the social changes that are taking place now, in order to improve our understanding of the direction in which contemporary society is moving.

Affiliated faculty at The Europe Center
Hide publication sections
Off
Date Label

More than a Club in the World

-

"More than a Club in the World" has long been the slogan of the largest and perhaps greatest soccer club in the world. FC Barcelona was one of the first soccer clubs to be founded in Spain. It became a haven for Catalan sentiment when Catalan self-government and Catalan culture were proscribed during the dictatorship. It has since become a global enterprise with global commitments, while continuing to identify Europe's largest and most developed non-state culture.

About the Speaker

Joan Laporta is the president of Football Club Barcelona. He has a law degree from the University of Barcelona. He specializes in civil and trading law, and has his own firm, Laporta & Arbós Advocats Associats.

Mr. Laporta became president of FC Barcelona on June 15, 2003 and won a second presidential term in summer 2006. Under his leadership, the club has striven to promote the values that have traditionally been associated with Barça: Catalan nationalism, civilian duty, and universality. FC Barcelona has since become a club with an enormous public resonance. Their recent partnership with UNICEF is a statement of the club's continuing efforts to be at the forefront of solidarity projects with a global reach.

Sponsored by the Iberian Studies Program, Forum on Contemporary Europe, the Office of the Provost, Department of Athletics, and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies

 

Event Synopsis:

Mr. Laporta details the early leadership of the club and the political challenges the club has faced, including the shooting of the club's president by Franco's troops during the Spanish Civil War, the opening of police files on the club when it did not support the regime, and attempts to change the club's name to "Espana." He emphasizes the club's strong history of integration, international spirit, and defense of rights and liberties. He explains that FC Barcelona survived the many obstacles of the 20th century because it is "more than a club" - it defends Catalan rights in Catalonia, democratic rights in Spain, and human rights worldwide. The club's social commitments include donating 7% of revenue to a foundation aimed at furthering the Millennium Development Goals, and partnering with UNICEF on development initiatives. 

With more than 4% of the population (247 million people) involved in soccer around the world, and more countries affiliated with FIFA than with the United Nations, FC Barcelona aims to adapt to a global environment while preserving its Catalan identity. Its players recognize that they are role models to fans across the world, and the club recognizes that its sporting, economic, and social facets work together to make the club successful. Mr. Laporta concludes by asserting that FC Barcelona today is in one of the best positions of the club's history.

 

Download pdf

Kissick Auditorium
Arrillaga Family Sports Center
Stanford University
641 Campus Drive
Stanford, CA 94305-6150

Joan Laporta President, Futbol Club Barcelona Speaker
Lectures

French Presidential Election Roundtable

-

Beyond selecting the new President, the second and final round of the 2007 French Presidential election will raise many questions about the meaning of the results for France, and for the EU and trans-Atlantic relations. This roundtable event is scheduled to follow soon after the election to give the benefit of review. Panelists from wide-ranging disciplines will each comment on what can be learned from the campaigns, the final voting patterns, and prospects for French and Francophone politics, culture, and society.

About the Panelists

Patrick Chamorel has been a visiting fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution since 2005. He is currently based at the Stanford Center in Washington, D.C., and will soon be the Center's Resident Scholar. He has written extensively on U.S. and European politics and U.S.-European relations. As a political scientist, Chamorel has taught and done research on comparative U.S. and European politics on both sides of the Atlantic. He is currently focusing on French politics on the eve of the 2007 presidential election.

Margaret Cohen is the Andrew B. Hammond Professor of French Language, Literature, and Civilization, and director of the Center for the Study of the Novel at Stanford University. She is author of Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution and The Sentimental Education of the Novel. Her research interests involve rethinking the literature and culture of modernity from the vantage point of its waterways. She is currently working on a book concerning how the history and representation of global ocean travel informed the development of the modern novel.

Jean-Pierre Dupuy is professor of French and political science at Stanford University and social and political philosophy at Ecole Polytechnique, Paris. He is author of The Mechanization of the Mind: On Origins of Cognitive Science and Self-Deception and Paradoxes of Rationality. His current research projects are: the paradoxes of rationality or the classical philosophical problem of the antinomies of Reason at the age of rational choice theory, analytics philosophy, and cognitive science; the ethics of nuclear deterrence and preemptive war; the philosophy of risk and uncertainty; and the philosophical underpinnings and the future of societal and ethical impacts of the convergence of nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, and cognitive science.

Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi is professor of French and Comparative Literature at Stanford University. She is also director of the Program in Modern Thought and Literature and the Undergraduate Studies in French program. She is author of Beyond Dichotomies: Histories, Identities, Culture, and the Challenge of Globalization and Remembering Africa. Her research interests include cultural relations between Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean; literature, intellectuals, and society; and women writers.

Tyler Stovall is professor of history at University of California, Berkeley. He is author of Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light and The Rise of the Paris Red Belt. He is coeditor, with Sue Peabody, of The Color of Liberty: Histories of Race in France. He has written numerous articles on French history and has been president of the Western Society for French History. His work on African Americans living in Paris is of special importance to contemporary understanding of both French and American culture.

Sponsored by Stanford University's Forum on Contemporary Europe, History Department, Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, and France-Stanford Center for Interdisciplinary Studies

Oksenberg Conference Room

Patrick Chamorel Visiting Fellow at Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and Resident Scholar Speaker Stanford Center, Washington, D.C.

Margaret Cohen

107 Pigott Hall
Stanford, CA 94305-2031

(650) 724-0106
0
Andrew B. Hammond Professor in French Language, Literature, and Civilization
Professor of Comparative Literature
Professor of English
Professor, by courtesy, of French and Italian
cohen_web_profile_0.jpg PhD

Margaret Cohen is the Andrew B. Hammond Professor of French Language, Literature and Civilization at Stanford University, where she is appointed in English and directs the Center for the Study of Novel. Her current fields of research include the novel and narrative as well as interdisciplinary oceanic studies. In her most recent book, The Novel and the Sea (2010), she revealed the impact of the ship’s log and the history of writing about work at sea on the development of the modern novel. The Novel and the Sea received the Louis R. Gottschalk Prize from the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, the George and Barbara Perkins Prize from the International Society for the Study of the Narrative, and an honorable mention from the American Comparative Literature Association.

In The Sentimental Education of the Novel (1999), co-winner of the MLA’s 2000 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for French and Francophone Studies, she recovered forgotten sentimental fiction by women writers important to the emergence of French realism. Other books include Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution (1993), as well as co-edited collections, most recently The Aesthetics of the Undersea (2019) with Killian Quigley, and a Norton critical edition of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (2004). Professor Cohen has been awarded fellowships from the Fulbright Commission, the ACLS, NYU’s International Center for Advanced Studies, the NEH, the John Carter Brown Library’s Alexander O. Vietor Memorial Fund, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Current projects include a book on the history of underwater film and editingThe Age of Empire for the six-volume A Cultural History of the Sea (Bloomsbury), for which she is general editor as well.

Affiliated faculty at The Europe Center
Hide publication sections
Off
Margaret Cohen Andrew B. Hammond Professor of French Language, Literature, and Civilization and Director of the Center for the Study of the Novel Speaker Stanford University
Jean-Pierre Dupuy Professor of French and Political Science at Stanford University and Social and Political Philosophy Speaker Ecole Polytechnique, Paris

Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi

111 Pigott Hall
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305

(650) 723-1947
0
Professor of Comparative Literature, Emerita
Professor of French and Italian, Emerita
Boyi.jpg PhD

Professor Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi is affiliated with both the French & Italian and Comparative Literature departments. Her teaching and research interests include cultural relations between Europe, Africa and the Caribbean; literature, intellectuals and society; and women writers. Before coming to Stanford in 1995, Professor Boyi taught at universities in the Congo and Burundi, as well as Haverford College and Duke University. She was a Visiting Professor in the French Department of the Graduate Center, CUNY in 1994 and in 1995 a Professeur Invité at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. In 1999-2000 Professor Boyi was a Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center. In 2002-2003 Professor Boyi was the president of the African Literature Association, a non-profit society of scholars dedicated to the advancement of African Literary Studies. She served as a member of the Executive Council of the Modern Language Association, where she represents the field of French (2003-2006), and as the Director of the interdisciplinary Program in Modern Thought and Literature at Stanford (2005-2008).

Publications

Among Mudimbe-Boyi's publications are Jacques-Stephen Alexis: une écriture poétique, un engagement politique (1992); "Post-Colonial Women Writing in French (1993);"  Beyond Dichotomies: Histories, Identities, Culture, and the Challenge of Globalization (2002); Remembering Africa (2002); Essais sur les cultures en contact: Afrique, Amériques, Europe (2006). Her latest book is Empire Lost: France and Its Other Worlds (2009).

Affiliated faculty at The Europe Center
Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi Professor of French and Comparative Literature and Director of the Program in Modern Thought and Literature and the Undergraduate Studies in French Program Speaker Stanford University
Tyler Stovall Professor of History Speaker University of California, Berkeley
Panel Discussions
Subscribe to Culture