Birgit Lodes explores how women inspired and performed, enabled and transformed Beethoven's music and legacy.

Beethoven dedicated printed works to sixty-three individuals––twenty-three of them women–– mostly from the high nobility or the “second society” that shaped Viennese musical life and patronage around 1800. Nearly all knew the composer personally and shared his enthusiasm for a refined ideal of music that functioned as social and symbolic capital in the Bourdieusian sense. Beethoven’s dedications thus can offer a window into the social conditions of composition, early performance practices, and the meanings attached to these works. The pieces Beethoven dedicated to women—chiefly songs and piano compositions—not only reflect the gendered norms of musical education and salon culture central to his professional life, but, as I will argue, were often specifically crafted to suit the individual tastes and abilities of these women. 

Several of these works might never have existed without the inspiration and engagement of these female patrons and performers. Shifting the focus from the composer’s public “heroic” oeuvre to works reflecting his artistic and social engagements within these circles reveals a different Beethoven: one deeply embedded in the musical, cultural, and sociological networks of his time. Reconsidering these contexts challenges long-standing nationalist and bourgeois-masculine narratives and highlights the active, formative role of aristocratic women as patrons, performers, and mediators of Beethoven’s art in Habsburg Vienna.

Birgit Lodes studied in Munich, at UCLA, and at Harvard University. Since 2004, she has been Professor of Historical Musicology at the University of Vienna and currently serves as Distinguished Visiting Austrian Chair at Stanford University. She is a corresponding member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and editor-in-chief of the series Denkmäler der Tonkunst in Österreich. Her research focuses on musical life in Central Europe around 1500 (https://musical-life.net/en), as well as on Beethoven, Schubert, and their circles.

Rosamund Johnston charts how, during the Cold War, arms production shaped interactions between different groups in communist Czechoslovakia and underlay the country’s relationship with the rest of the world.

Czechoslovakia, rarely thought of as one of the Cold War's major players, was perhaps the biggest exporter of small arms to Africa throughout the 1960s. And lurking in the background of Cold War crises—from Guatemala and Suez in the 1950s to Angola and Afghanistan in the 1980s—were Czechoslovak weapons.

In this talk, I follow the flow of commodities from the Czechoslovak provinces to the Cold War's flashpoints, excavating the role played by Czechoslovak arms in shaping global conflict in the twentieth century. Conversely, I show how global conflict shaped class configurations and gender relations on the factory floor. Rather than a top-down tale of politics and diplomacy, I focus in turns on the state's leaders, arms dealers, munitions workers, international students, and the general public to demonstrate the complex web of interactions upon which Czechoslovakia's international arms trade relied. To do so reveals both the sovereignty of Soviet "satellite" states during the Cold War and socialist internationalism's shifting forms.

Rosamund Johnston is the Principal Investigator of Linking Arms: Central Europe's Weapons Industries, 1954-1994 at the Research Center for the History of Transformations (RECET), University of Vienna. She is the author of the award-winning Red Tape: Radio and Politics in Czechoslovakia, 1945-1969 which appeared with Stanford University Press in 2024. She has also written for Central European History, The Journal of Cold War Studies, East Central Europe, Harvard Ukrainian Studies, Scottish newspaper The National, and public broadcaster Czech Radio. Johnston is the main editor of The Routledge Handbook of 1989 and the Great Transformation (to be published in January 2026), and has authored one book of public history, Havel in America: Interviews with American Intellectuals, Politicians, and Artists, released by Czech publisher Host in 2019.

REDS: RETHINKING EUROPEAN DEVELOPMENT AND SECURITY

The REDS Seminar Series aims to deepen the research agenda on the new challenges facing Europe, especially on its eastern flank, and to build intellectual and institutional bridges across Stanford University, fostering interdisciplinary approaches to current global challenges.

REDS is organized by The Europe Center and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, and co-sponsored by the Hoover Institution and the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies.

Learn more about REDS and view past seminars here.

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REDS: RETHINKING EUROPEAN DEVELOPMENT AND SECURITY

The REDS Seminar Series aims to deepen the research agenda on the new challenges facing Europe, especially on its eastern flank, and to build intellectual and institutional bridges across Stanford University, fostering interdisciplinary approaches to current global challenges.

REDS is organized by The Europe Center and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, and co-sponsored by the Hoover Institution and the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies.

Learn more about REDS and view past seminars here.

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Why do low-income, lower-educated voters vote against their economic interests by supporting conservative and radical right parties and candidates? I propose a new explanation arguing that these voters' misperceptions of the policy priorities of economically progressive parties drive them to parties on the right. In two population surveys in the Netherlands and Unites States, I show that many low-income, lower-educated voters believe that economic issues are not a policy priority for the left, and that holding such perceptions influences vote intention for the left. Using `prior-updating' survey experiments, I test the effect of presenting voters with the actual policy priorities of the (Social) Democrats, as measured in an original survey with Dutch politicians and based on US House roll calls. The results indicate that updating misperceptions of the salience of economic issues to the left can significantly alter voting patterns.

Jonne Kamphorst is a Postdoctoral Scholar at Stanford University’s Politics and Social Change Lab and the Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence Institute. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the European University Institute (EUI) in 2023. In January 2026, he will join Sciences Po in Paris as an Assistant Professor of Political Science and Quantitative Social Science Methods.

His research focuses on the politics and societies of advanced democracies, lying at the intersection of comparative politics and political behavior. Two questions guide his research agenda: (1) What are the origins of contemporary political divisions? and (2) How can democracy be strengthened by re-engaging voters and bridging political divides? He explores these questions using quantitative methods that employ an experimental logic, including field and survey experiments, causal inference, and novel computational approaches leveraging large language models. Alongside his substantive research, he studies the use of large language models in social-scientific research methods. His work has been published in PNAS, the American Political Science Review, and the Journal of Politics, among other outlets.

As part of Stanford Democracy Day, several Stanford scholars share their perspectives on domestic and comparative erosion of democracy, providing context for current elections in the United States and around the world.

Speakers:

Christophe Crombez, Senior Research Scholar at The Europe Center at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Professor of Political Economy at the Faculty of Economics and Business at KU Leuven in Belgium. His research focuses on EU institutions and their impact on policies, EU institutional reform, lobbying, party politics, and parliamentary government.

Anna Grzymała-Busse, Professor in the Department of Political Science, the Michelle and Kevin Douglas Professor of International Studies, senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the director of The Europe Center. Her research interests include political parties, state development and transformation, informal political institutions, religion and politics, and post-communist politics.

Hakeem Jefferson, Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science, faculty affiliate with the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity and the Stanford Center for American Democracy. His research focuses primarily on the role identity plays in structuring political attitudes and behaviors in the U.S., with a special interest in understanding how stigma shapes the politics of Black Americans, particularly as it relates to group members’ support for racialized punitive social policies. 

Hesham Sallam, Senior Research Scholar at CDDRL, where he serves as Associate Director for Research. He is also Associate Director of the Program on Arab Reform and Development. Sallam is co-editor of Jadaliyya ezine and a former program specialist at the U.S. Institute of Peace. His research focuses on political and social development in the Arab World. Sallam’s research has previously received the support of the Social Science Research Council and the U.S. Institute of Peace.

Kathryn Stoner, Mosbacher Director of the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), and a Senior Fellow at CDDRL and the Center on International Security and Cooperation at FSI. From 2017 to 2021, she served as FSI's Deputy Director. She is Professor of Political Science (by courtesy) and teaches in the Program on International Relations, as well as in the Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy Program. She is also a Senior Fellow (by courtesy) at the Hoover Institution.