The Europe Center Newsletter November 2017
The Europe Center is jointly housed in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Stanford Global Studies Division.
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.
Elaine’s research is focused on medieval British manuscripts from c.600CE to 1450CE. Numerous publications—including The Old English Life of St Nicholas and Wiley-Blackwell’s Old and Middle English: An Anthology (which is about to be published in its fourth edition)—present edited and translated texts, ranging from sermons and religious poetry to extracts from Beowulf and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Other books and articles concern the prestige of the vernacular and the transmission of works in English from the late Anglo-Saxon period into the thirteenth century. This research has overturned previous scholarly opinion that held there to be little or nothing of value written in English between the Norman Conquest and the thirteenth century. In Living Through Conquest: The Politics of Early English, Elaine discussed the significant corpus of manuscripts that survive from this period, and highlighted the contemporaneity and political functionalism of many of the works copied by English scribes.
Elaine’s teaching focuses on Text Technologies, Medieval English Literature, and the study of the Handwritten Book.
I spent my adolescence around maps of places that didn’t exist. An older cousin read The Lord of the Rings over the course of a hot summer when I was nine, and I watched in fascination as he traced the Fellowship’s progress across the foldout map that came with the book in those days. This, I decided, had to be what grown-up reading looked like.
"Here's what the end of globalization looks like," a headline in Business Insider thundered at the end of 2016 before laying out a doom-and-gloom scenario in the wake of the Trans-Pacific Partnership's demise. The swing away from liberalization and globalization and toward protectionism and nationalism is probably the biggest political earthquake of recent times in wealthy Western countries, and explaining it is probably the biggest intellectual challenge. Until we understand its causes, after all, we cannot address them.
Londa Schiebinger is the John L. Hinds Professor of History of Science in the History Department at Stanford University and Director of the EU/US Gendered Innovations in Science, Health & Medicine, Engineering, and Environment Project. From 2004-2010, Schiebinger served as the Director of Stanford's Clayman Institute for Gender Research. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Professor Schiebinger received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1984 and is a leading international authority on gender and science. Over the past thirty years, Schiebinger's work has been devoted to teasing apart three analytically distinct but interlocking pieces of the gender and science puzzle: the history of women's participation in science; gender in the structure of scientific institutions; and the gendering of human knowledge.
Londa Schiebinger presented the keynote address and wrote the conceptual background paper for the United Nations' Expert Group Meeting on Gender, Science, and Technology, September 2010 in Paris. She presented the finding at the United Nations in New York, February 2011 with an update spring 2014. The UN Resolutions of March 2011 call for "gender-based analysis ... in science and technology" and for the integrations of a "gender perspective in science and technology curricula."
In 2011-2012 and 2018-2020, Schiebinger entered into major collaborations with the European Commission and the U.S. National Science Foundation to promote Gendered Innovations in Science, Health & Medicine, Engineering, and Environment. This project draws experts from across the U.S., Europe, Canada, Asia, and was presented at the European Parliament, July 2013. For a popular overview, see Gendered Innovations: Harnessing the Creative Power of Gender Analysis.
Schiebinger has also addressed the Korean National Assembly (2014). In 2015, she addressed 600 participants from 40 countries on Gendered Innovations at the Gender Summit 6—Asia Pacific, a meeting devoted to gendered innovations in research, development, and business. She spoke at the Gender Summit 10 in Tokyo in 2017. She has given seminars at the Japanese Science and Technology Agency in Tokyo, the Japanese Science Council, at Nature magazine in London, the George Institute in Sydney, the Royal Palace in Amsterdam, L'Oréal and UNESCO in Paris, the Global Research Council in São Paulo, the German Science Foundation in Bonn, and UK Research and Innovation in London, and the EDIS Symposium on Inclusive Research and Experimental Design, Francis Crick Institute in London, among others.
Schiebinger recently moderated the launch of American Association of University Women's launch of Solving the Equation: The Variables for Women's Success in Engineering and Computing at Samsung's Mountain View Campus (2015). Schiebinger also helped launch the League of European Research Universities' major report Gendered Research & Innovation, Brussels (2015).
Her study, "Housework is an Academic Issue," with Shannon Gilmartin, Academe (Jan/Feb. 2010): 39-44, was profiled on ABC News. A 30-minute interview on gender in science can be seen on Belgian television. Recent podcasts include: Does gender diversity lead to better science? (2018), Skeleton Wars, the History of Women in Science (2018), and The Secret Cures of Slaves (2018), and The Future of Everything (2019). See also The Robots are Coming! But Should They be Gendered? Schiebinger is a member of the Faculty Planning Committee for Stanford Human-Centered AI Institute. Her work on gender in AI was featured in Nature comment: Design AI so that it's Fair.
Schiebinger's work in the eighteenth century investigates colonial science in the Atlantic World. In particular she explores medical experimentation with slave populations in the Caribbean. Her project reconceptualizes research in four areas: first and foremost knowledge of African contributions to early modern science; the historiography of race in science; the history of human experimentation; and the role of science in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world.
Londa Schiebinger has been the recipient of numerous prizes and awards, including the prestigious Alexander von Humboldt Research Prize and John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. Schiebinger has just been appointed a Distinguished Affiliated Professor at the Technische Universität, Münichen, and member of their Institute for Advanced Studies. She has also served as a Senior Research Fellow at the Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte in Berlin, the Jantine Tammes Chair in the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences at the University of Groningen, a guest professor at the Georg-August-Universität in Göttingen, and the Maria Goeppert-Meyer Distinguished Visitor, Oldenburg University. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, National Endowment for the Humanities, Rockefeller Foundation, Fulbright-Hays Commission, Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst.
Londa Schiebinger was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (2013), the Faculty of Science, Lund University, Sweden (2017), and the University of Valencia, Spain (2018); the Interdisciplinary Leadership Award from Women's Health at Stanford Medical School, 2010; Prize in Atlantic History from the American Historical Association, 2005 and the Alf Andrew Heggoy Book Prize from the French Colonial Historical Society, 2005, both for her Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World. She also won the 2005 J. Worth Estes Prize from the American Association for the History of Medicine for her article "Feminist History of Colonial Science," Hypatia 19 (2004): 233-254. This prize goes to the author of an article of outstanding scholarly merit in the history of pharmacology. Her work has been translated into thirteen languages.
Londa Schiebinger's research has been featured in Forbes, the Times Higher Education, Le Monde, La Recherche, World Economic Forum, El País, The New Yorker, DiscovHer, EuroScientist, University World News, Moneyish, the New York Times, Die Zeit, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitschrift, La Vanguardia, at the London Museum of Natural History, on NPR, and elsewhere. She speaks and consults nationally and internationally on gender in science, medicine, and engineering.
Schiebinger is currently accepting graduate students in Gendered Innovations in Science, Health & Medicine, Engineering, and Environment and the History of Science.
Populism is on the rise: but to understand this phenomenon, we should first clearly conceptualize it and recognize that populism takes on different forms in various historical and political contexts. These “populisms” pose a threat to modern liberal democracy. As Poland and Hungary show, populists exclude entire swathes of society from the polity, and undermine the formal institutions and the informal norms of democracy.
Encina Hall
616 Serra Street
Stanford, CA 94305-6165
Sarah Cormack-Patton is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Aberdeen. She is a political scientist whose research examines the politics of globalization, and particularly international migration, in the European Union and the United States. Sarah is interested in the economic and social effects of the cross-border movement of people, goods, and capital; the political coalitions that form over the cross-border movement of people, goods, and capital; the conditions under which states permit or limit the entry or exit of goods, capital, and people; and the efficacy of state policies designed to effect the entry or exit of goods, capital, and people. Her current research projects examine the ways in which varying bundles of migrant rights affect immigration policy preferences, the political coalitions that form over immigration policy, and the types of immigration policies enacted. Sarah earned her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Pittsburgh in 2015 and was a Postdoctoral Scholar at Stanford University from September 2015 to September 2017.
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
The Stanford Humanities Center
424 Santa Teresa Street
Stanford, CA 94305

Co-sponsored by the Global Populisms Project