At 11am on November 11, 1918, the armistice that effectively ended the First World War was signed. What came to be known as “The Great War” had a profound and lasting impact on the cultural fabric of the nations involved: as Paul Fussell wrote, “its dynamics and iconography proved crucial to the political, rhetorical, and artistic life of the years that followed; while relying on inherited myth, war was generating new myth.” Over the course of the 20th century, the concept of war evolved beyond historically traceable moments and events to include the consideration of war as site and influence shaping every aspect of lived experience. This conference seeks to examine ways in which literature and the arts have taken up and taken apart war and the myths surrounding it -- grappling with it both as subject and context while also considering the ways in which the experience of war molded, mutilated, and morphed artistic forms. Though the word “centennial” often rings of monolithic celebration, it is equally an opportunity to highlight the attempts of writers and artists to contain, contend, or survive war and to question and problematize preconceptions and existing views of war by investigating their inherently bipolar nature.

November 9, 2018 (Day 1)
SCHEDULE:

• 4 – 4.30pm – OPENING REMARKS
• 4.30 - 7pm - 1st PANEL

Chair: Russell Berman (Stanford University, Professor)

• Greg Chase (College of the Holy Cross, Lecturer)
• ‘Death is not an event of life’: How Wittgenstein’s War Experience Re-Shaped His Philosophy
• Victoria Zurita (Stanford University, PhD Student)
• Ironic prospects: hope in Jean Giono’s To the Slaughterhouse
• André Fischer (Auburn University, Assistant Professor)
• Politics by other means: War photography in the work of Ernst Jünger
• Nicholas Jenkins (Stanford University, Associate Professor)

For more info,  please email: massucco@stanford.edu

Sponsored by:  the Division of Literatures, Languages, and Cultures;  Stanford Department of Art and Art History; Theater and Performance Studies; Stanford Humanities Center; The Europe Center; Dept. of French and Italian; Dept. of History; Dept. of German Studies; and the Dean's Office of Humanities and Sciences.
 

INF Public Panel Discussion

President Trump announced on October 20 that the United States will withdraw from the 1987 Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. That will end one of two agreements that constrain U.S. and Russian nuclear force levels, the other being the New START Treaty. What does the president’s decision mean for arms control, for European security and for an already troubled U.S.-Russia relationship?

SPEAKER

Steven Pifer
William J. Perry fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies

Steven Pifer is a William J. Perry fellow at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), where he is affiliated with FSI’s Center for International Security and Cooperation and Europe Center.  He is also a nonresident senior fellow with the Brookings Institution. Pifer’s research focuses on nuclear arms control, Ukraine, Russia and European security. A retired Foreign Service officer, his assignments included deputy assistant secretary of state, U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, and special assistant to the President and senior director for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia on the National Security Council. He also served at the U.S. embassies in Warsaw, Moscow and London as well as with the U.S. delegation to the intermediate-range nuclear forces negotiations in Geneva.

COMMENTATORS

Kristin Ven Bruusgaard
MacArthur Postdoctoral Fellow, CISAC

Kristin Ven Bruusgaard is a MacArthur Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Fellow at CISAC. Her research focuses on Russian nuclear strategy and on deterrence dynamics. Dr. Bruusgaard has previously been a research fellow at the Norwegian Institute for Defence Studies (IFS), a senior security policy analyst in the Norwegian Armed Forces, a junior researcher at the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (FFI), and an intern at the Congressional Research Service (CRS) in Washington, D.C., and at NATO HQ. She holds a Ph.D in Defence Studies from Kings College London, an M.A. in Security Studies from Georgetown University, and a B.A. (Hons) from Warwick University. Her work has been published in Security Dialogue, U.S. Army War College Quarterly Parameters, Survival, War on the Rocks, Texas National Security Review and Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

Michael McFaul
Director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Director of the Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy

Michael McFaul is the Ken Olivier and Angela Nomellini Professor of International Studies in Political Science, Director and Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and the Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, all at Stanford University. He was also the Distinguished Mingde Faculty Fellow at the Stanford Center at Peking University from June to August of 2015. He joined the Stanford faculty in 1995. He is also an analyst for NBC News and a contributing columnist to The Washington Post. McFaul served for five years in the Obama administration, first as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Russian and Eurasian Affairs at the National Security Council at the White House (2009-2012), and then as U.S. Ambassador to the Russian Federation (2012-2014).

Kathryn E. Stoner
Deputy Director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Deputy Director of the Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy

Kathryn Stoner is the Deputy Director at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University and a Senior Fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, as well as the Deputy Director of the Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy at Stanford University. She teaches in the Department of Political Science at Stanford, and in the Program on International Relations, as well as in the Ford Dorsey Program. Prior to coming to Stanford in 2004, she was on the faculty at Princeton University for nine years, jointly appointed to the Department of Politics and the Woodrow Wilson School for International and Public Affairs. At Princeton she received the Ralph O. Glendinning Preceptorship awarded to outstanding junior faculty. She also served as a Visiting Associate Professor of Political Science at Columbia University, and an Assistant Professor of Political Science at McGill University. She has held fellowships at Harvard University as well as the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC.