Stanford University

Culture

Albert Serra: Paradigms of Change in Contemporary Cinema

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Claiming that Contemporary Cinema is currently in its most interesting creative moment since the 60s, laureate Catalan filmmaker Albert Serra will discuss its evolution throughout the 21st Century in terms of form, methodology and perception, as well as its future possibilities.

Catalan Cultural Festival. Sponsored by the Iberian Studies Program at The Europe Center, Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, Department of Iberian and Latin American Cultures, Modern Thought & Literature, and The Stanford Catalan Association.

Pigott Hall - Room 252

Building 260, 450 Serra Mall

Lectures

Story of My Death: Film Screening

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Famous lover Casanova, now long past his prime, meets Count Dracula during a journey to Transylvania. Story of my Death is a dark and erotic retelling of their encounter , the Enlightenment ceding to Romanticism, akin to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò.

Story of My Death poster

Catalan Cultural Festival. Sponsored by the Iberian Studies Program at The Europe Center, Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, Department of Iberian and Latin American Cultures, Modern Thought & Literature, and The Stanford Catalan Association.

Pigott Hall - Room 113

Building 260, 450 Serra Mall

Film Screenings

Art and Power: Patronage and Politics in Europe from the Old Regime to the Present

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This conference examines the history of state arts patronage in Europe and its ramifications in the present. Presentations on literature, music, theater, and the visual arts will provide an interdisciplinary examination of the origins and the tensions underlying the European model of state arts funding, along with a contemporary perspective on how and why European governments seek to support the arts today by the Cultural Counselor of the French Embassy in the United States. The panels will address questions such as: How have the arts been used to secure domestic political legitimacy or project power internationally at different times? What kinds of art are deemed worthy of support, and what artistic forms have been excluded from such patronage? What are the different historical genealogies of this state patronage, and what do they tell us about why European governments remain committed to funding the arts when such support is controversial in the United States?

RSVP to andreip@stanford.edu


Conference schedule

Breakfast served at 8:45am

Introduction: 9am (Dan Edelstein)

Panel 1: Representations of Power in the Old Regime (9:15-10:45am)

  • Sarah Grandin (Harvard), “’To Preserve and Augment’: Printing the Cabinet du Roi, c. 1670”
  • Chandra Mukerji (UCSD), “Meaning vs. Imagination in the Art of the Sun King: Sculpture, themes, and political possibility”
  • Gerardo Tocchini (Università Ca’ Foscari, Venice), “The Aristocratic Romance: Greuze’s ‘Bourgeois’ Scenes”

Coffee break (10:45-11am)

Panel 2: Patronage, Circulation, and Institutions (11am-12:30pm)

  • Rahul Markovits (École Normale Supérieure), “Actors of soft power: French theatre and the paradoxes of cultural grandeur in eighteenth-century Europe”
  • Audrey Calefas-Strebelle (Mills College), “Turkish and French delights: From Turkish origin to French manufacture, the circulation of artefacts and savoir faire in French-Ottoman cultural diplomacy”
  • Andrei Pesic (Stanford), “Patronage on the Cheap: Monopolies and Enlightenment Cultural Markets”

Lunch (12:30pm-2pm)

Art and Power Today: France’s Cultural Policy. Presentation and Discussion (2-3:00pm)

  • Bénédicte de Montlaur (French Embassy in the U.S.) and Matthew Tiews (Stanford Arts Initiative)

Coffee break (3-3:15pm)

Panel 3: After the Revolution: Rethinking Art and Power in the New Regime (3:15-4:45pm)

  • Robert Morrissey (U. of Chicago), “Enlightenment and Liminality: Mme de Staël, Victim as Arbiter of Taste and Glory”
  • Anne Higonnet (Barnard College of Columbia University), “Sumptuary law failure, fashion magazine success”
  • Heather Hadlock (Stanford), “Verdi’s Aida from Italian tourist to French resident: Paris, 1876-1880”

 

Conference Organizers: Dan Edelstein and Andrei Pesic

Sponsored by The Europe Center of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, the Stanford Department of French and Italian, and the Stanford Humanities Center.

 

Art and Power Conference Poster
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France's Cultural Policy Presentation and Discussion flyer
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Levinthal Hall
Stanford Humanities Center
 

Conferences

The German-Hebrew Dialogue: Studies of Encounter and Exchange (Perspectives on Jewish Texts and Contexts)

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In the wake of World War II and the Holocaust, it seemed there was no place for German in Israel and no trace of Hebrew in Germany — the two languages and their cultures appeared as divergent as the directions of their scripts. Yet when placed side by side on opposing pages, German and Hebrew converge in the middle. Comprised of essays on literature, history, philosophy, and the visual and performing arts, this volume explores the mutual influence of two linguistic cultures long held as separate or even as diametrically opposed. From Moses Mendelssohn’s arrival in Berlin in 1748 to the recent wave of Israeli migration to Berlin, the essays gathered here shed new light on the painful yet productive relationship between modern German and Hebrew cultures. 　

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Book Event | The Mystery of the Kibbutz: Egalitarian Principles in a Capitalist World

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This event is now full. Please send an email to sj1874@stanford.edu if you would like to be added to the wait list.

 

Image of the book cover for The Mystery of the Kibbutz: Egalitarian Principles in a Capitalist World.

 

How the kibbutz movement thrived despite its inherent economic contradictions and why it eventually declined.

The kibbutz is a social experiment in collective living that challenges traditional economic theory. By sharing all income and resources equally among its members, the kibbutz system created strong incentives to free ride or—as in the case of the most educated and skilled—to depart for the city. Yet for much of the twentieth century kibbutzim thrived, and kibbutz life was perceived as idyllic both by members and the outside world. In The Mystery of the Kibbutz, Ran Abramitzky blends economic perspectives with personal insights to examine how kibbutzim successfully maintained equal sharing for so long despite their inherent incentive problems.

Weaving the story of his own family’s experiences as kibbutz members with extensive economic and historical data, Abramitzky sheds light on the idealism and historic circumstances that helped kibbutzim overcome their economic contradictions. He illuminates how the design of kibbutzim met the challenges of thriving as enclaves in a capitalist world and evaluates kibbutzim’s success at sustaining economic equality. By drawing on extensive historical data and the stories of his pioneering grandmother who founded a kibbutz, his uncle who remained in a kibbutz his entire adult life, and his mother who was raised in and left the kibbutz, Abramitzky brings to life the rise and fall of the kibbutz movement.


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Ran Abramitzky is Associate Professor of Economics at Stanford University. His research is in economic history and applied microeconomics, with focus on immigration and income inequality. He is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. He is the vice chair of the economics department, and the co-editor of Explorations in Economic History. He was awarded an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, as well as National Science Foundation grants for research on the causes and consequences of income inequality and on international migration. He has received the Economics Department’s and the Dean’s Awards for Distinguished Teaching. He holds a PhD in economics from Northwestern University.

 

Copies of the book will be available for sale at the event.

William J Perry Conference Room
Encina Hall Central, 2nd floor
616 Serra Street

Ran Abramitzky

579 Serra Mall
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-6072

(650) 723-9276
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Associate Professor of Economics
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Ran Abramitzky is a Professor of Economics at Stanford University and incoming Senior Associate Dean for the Social Sciences. His research is in economic history and applied microeconomics, with focus on immigration and income inequality. He is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. He is the vice chair of the economics department, and the co-editor of Explorations in Economic History. He was awarded an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, as well as National Science Foundation grants for research on the causes and consequences of income inequality and on international migration. His book, The Mystery of the Kibbutz: Egalitarian Principles in a Capitalist World (Princeton University Press, 2018) was awarded by the Economic History Association the Gyorgi Ranki Biennial Prize for an outstanding book on European Economic History. He has received the Economics Department’s and the Dean’s Awards for Distinguished Teaching. He holds a PhD in economics from Northwestern University. 

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Lectures

Beyond Engaged Literature: Samir El-Youssef's The Illusion of Return

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A feature of contemporary politics is the tendency to focus primarily onnarratives , as if the story lines were more important than the events. One often finds, for example, that news reports themselves become the news, rather than the conflicts, interests, or power struggles that purportedly make up the content. This sort of self-referentiality of the narrative producers may serve the media well, even if it impoverishes the reporting provided to the public. This narrative turn would be worthy of close scrutiny: is it part of the postmodern condition or is it symptomatic of somedeeper problem?
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Saumitra Jha

Graduate School of Business 655 Knight Way Stanford, CA 94305
(650) 721 1298
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Associate Professor of Political Economy, GSB
Associate Professor, by courtesy, of Economics and of Political Science
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Along with being a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Saumitra Jha is an associate professor of political economy at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and convenes the Stanford Conflict and Polarization Lab. 

Jha’s research has been published in leading journals in economics and political science, including Econometrica, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the American Political Science Review and the Journal of Development Economics, and he serves on a number of editorial boards. His research on ethnic tolerance has been recognized with the Michael Wallerstein Award for best published article in Political Economy from the American Political Science Association in 2014 and his co-authored research on heroes with the Oliver Williamson Award for best paper by the Society for Institutional and Organizational Economics in 2020. Jha was honored to receive the Teacher of the Year Award, voted by the students of the Stanford MSx Program in 2020.

Saum holds a BA from Williams College, master’s degrees in economics and mathematics from the University of Cambridge, and a PhD in economics from Stanford University. Prior to rejoining Stanford as a faculty member, he was an Academy Scholar at Harvard University. He has been a fellow of the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance and the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at Princeton University, and at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. Jha has consulted on economic and political risk issues for the United Nations/WTO, the World Bank, government agencies, and for private firms.

 

Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Dan C. Chung Faculty Scholar at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research
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Featured Graduate Student Research: Simeon Ehrlich

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Simeon Ehrlich
Simeon Ehrlich is a PhD candidate in the Department of Classics and, concurrently, J.E.A. Crake Doctoral Fellow in Classics at Mount Allison University. His dissertation research focuses on the organizational principles of urban plans in the cities of the Greeks, Romans and contemporary Mediterranean cultures c. 800 BCE-600 CE. With the support of a graduate student grant from The Europe Center, Simeon undertook a program of research at the libraries of the American Academy in Rome and the American School of Classical Studies at Athens from January-March 2017. This allowed him access to a wealth of archaeological site plans, excavation reports, and conference proceedings not readily available in North America.

In Rome and Athens, Simeon’s research focused on ascertaining the relationship of the forms of archaic (8th-6th centuries BCE) and classical (5th-4th centuries BCE) Greek settlements to those of settlements of the contemporary Italic Etruscan culture. The traditional view holds grid planning to be a Greek innovation, adopted by the Etruscans only once their southward expansion down the Italian peninsula brings them into contact with the cities founded by the Greeks expanding northwards up the peninsula. Whereas such models are often predicated on the notion of a strict dichotomy of grid planned sites and unplanned sites, Simeon’s research draws on ideas from recent studies of comparative urbanism and conceives, instead, of grid planning as the culmination of a series of organizing principles that order the urban space to various degrees.

Through analysis of the plans of more than one hundred sites during his time abroad, he was able to trace concurrent developments in the organization of Greek and Etruscan sites, in terms of the coordination, alignment, and orthogonality of the buildings, streets, and blocks that comprise their plans. On this basis, he was able to develop an argument positing that grid planning is indeed the culmination of a series of organizational principles affecting urban plans, that grid planning only emerges under certain topographic conditions, and that the Greeks found settlements on sites meeting these conditions at an earlier date than the Etruscans. Thus, he finds that the Etruscans did not copy the grid plan from the Greeks; rather, they had the potential to implement it all along, they simply lacked for an opportunity to do so. This research serves as the basis for a history of grid planning in Classical antiquity and is complemented by case studies showing the weakening of the conditions sustaining grid planning during the Roman empire and the removal of these conditions in late antiquity.

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Stanford Primary Source Symposium 2017

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"Movements of Objects and Textual Mobilities"

Following on the successful 2016 “Reformations” conference, the 2017 Primary Source Symposium will focus on cultural exchange through the movement of objects (gifts, textiles, booty, books, spices, animals, etc.). The goal of the symposium is to understand better the ways in which objects served as agents of cultural translation across linguistic, political, religious, geographic or gendered “borders.”

 

For the symposium schedule, please visit:

https://cmems.stanford.edu/primary-source-symposium

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Free and open to the public

Please contact Lora Webb at loraw@stanford.edu with any questions about this event.

Co-sponsored by:

The Stanford Humanities Center, The Europe Center, the Department of History, the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, the Department of Religious Studies, the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, the Center for South Asia and the Department of Art and Art History

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The Stanford Humanities Center
424 Santa Teresa Street
Stanford, CA 94305

Symposiums

Elaine Treharne

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Roberta Bowman Denning Professor of Humanities
Robert K. Packard University Fellow in Undergraduate Education
Professor of English, and, by courtesy, of German Studies and of Comparative Literature
Senior Associate Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education (VPUE)
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I’m a Welsh medievalist with specializations in manuscript studies, archives, information technologies, and early British literature. I teach core courses in British Literary History, on Text Technologies, and Palaeography and Archival Studies. I supervise honors students and graduate students working in early literature, Book History, and Digital Humanities and I am committed to providing a supportive and ethical environment in all my work. My current projects focus on death and trauma, on manuscripts and on the history of writing systems. I’m currently completing new research on Neil Ripley Ker, his Catalogue of Manuscripts containing Anglo-Saxon, and his methods as a manuscript scholar. I recently published Disrupting Categories, 1050 to 1250: Rethinking the Humanities through Premodern Texts (ARC Humanities Press, 2024); Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts: The Phenomenal Book with OUP in 2021; A Very Short Introduction to Medieval Literature (OUP, 2015); Living Through Conquest: The Politics of Early English (OUP, 2012). Also recently published is the two part issue 13 (2024) of Digital Philology on “Fragmentology” (with Ben Albritton and Shiva Mihan); and the Cambridge Companion to British Medieval Manuscripts, co-edited with Dr Orietta Da Rold for CambridgeUP in 2020.

I am the Director of Stanford Text Technologies (https://texttechnologies.stanford.edu), and, with Claude Willan, published Text Technologies: A History in 2019 (StanfordUP). Other projects include “Digital Ker”—an online digitization and updating of Neil R. Ker’s 1957 Catalogue of Manuscripts containing Anglo-Saxon, together with newly published archival materials of Ker’s. I am also PI of CyberText Technologies (https://digitalker.stanford.edu); on a project investigating the complex subject of personal archives—SOPES; and Medieval Networks of Memory with Mateusz Fafinski, which analyzes two thirteenth-century mortuary rolls. Text Technologies' initiatives include a regular Collegium: the first, on “Distortion” was published as Textual Distortion in 2017; the fourth was published by Routledge as Medieval Manuscripts in the Digital Age in 2020. I am the Principal Investigator of the NEH-Funded 'Stanford Global Currents' (https://globalcurrents.stanford.edu/) and Co-PI of the AHRC-funded research project and ebook, The Production and Use of English Manuscripts, 1060 to 1220 (Leicester, 2010; version 2.0 https://em1060.stanford.edu/). With Benjamin Albritton, I run Stanford Manuscript Studies; and with Thomas Mullaney and Kathryn Starkey, I co-direct SILICON (https://silicon.stanford.edu/).

In 2024-2025, I’m delighted to be a Stanford Impact Labs Design Fellow, developing archival tools and guidelines. I’m also the President of the Teachers of Old English in Britain and Ireland (TOEBI). I have been an American Philosophical Society Franklin Fellow, a Princeton Procter Fellow, and a Fellow of the Stanford Clayman Institute for Gender Studies. I'm a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries; a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society; an Honorary Lifetime Fellow of the English Association (and former Chair and President); and a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales.

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