The Europe Center is jointly housed in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Stanford Global Studies Division.
Educating and involving the Stanford community is a critical part of the European Security Initiative. Stanford faculty, students, staff, visitors and neighbors are warmly welcome to attend this series of public events on Russia, Europe and the United States.
The 5th annual Romanian Film Festival, themed "Travelling Shots: Families Beyond Boundaries," will be held on different dates at Stanford University, UC Berkeley and San Francisco State University starting on Nov. 5th and ending on Nov. 13th.
Stanford University will host the festival on November 5th and November 8th.
Sunday, November 8, 2015:
For the complete list of other festival dates, times, locations and films, please visit https://rofilmfestival.wordpress.com/program/
Sponsored by Stanford's Center for Russian, East European & Eurasian Studies (CREEES), and the Special Language Program (SLP), and the Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies at UC Berkeley (ISEEES) and the Department of Cinema at San Francisco State University.
Co-sponsored by Stanford's The Europe Center, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, and Stanford University Libraries and UC Los Angeles' Department of Slavic, East European and Eurasian Languages and Cultures, Center for European and Eurasian Studies, and the Romanian Student Club, and the “Nicolae Tonitza” High School, Bucharest, Romania, and Fundatia Semn, Romania.
Cubberley Auditorium
School of Education Building
485 Lasuen Mall
Stanford University
The 5th annual Romanian Film Festival, themed "Travelling Shots: Families Beyond Boundaries," will be held on different dates at Stanford University, UC Berkeley and San Francisco State University starting on Nov. 5th and ending on Nov. 13th.
Stanford University will host the festival on November 5th and November 8th.
Thursday, November 5, 2015:
For the complete list of other festival dates, times, locations and films, please visit https://rofilmfestival.wordpress.com/program/
Sponsored by Stanford's Center for Russian, East European & Eurasian Studies (CREEES), and the Special Language Program (SLP), and the Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies at UC Berkeley (ISEEES) and the Department of Cinema at San Francisco State University.
Co-sponsored by Stanford's The Europe Center, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, and Stanford University Libraries and UC Los Angeles' Department of Slavic, East European and Eurasian Languages and Cultures, Center for European and Eurasian Studies, and the Romanian Student Club, and the “Nicolae Tonitza” High School, Bucharest, Romania, and Fundatia Semn, Romania.
East Asia Library, Room 224
Lathrop Library Building
518 Memorial Way
Stanford University
General Philip M. Breedlove will discuss the rapidly evolving geopolitical climate in Europe. Additionally, he will highlight many of the current and future security challenges which the United States and NATO must be prepared for.
Gen. Breedlove is Commander, Supreme Allied Command, Europe, SHAPE, Belgium and Headquarters, U.S. European Command, Stuttgart, Germany.
The General was raised in Forest Park, Ga., and was commissioned in 1977 as a distinguished graduate of Georgia Tech's ROTC program. He has been assigned to numerous operational, command and staff positions, and has completed nine overseas tours, including two remote tours. He has commanded a fighter squadron, an operations group, three fighter wings, and a numbered air force. Additionally, he has served as Vice Chief of Staff of the U.S. Air Force, Washington, D.C. Operations Officer in the Pacific Command Division on the Joint Staff; Executive Officer to the Commander of Headquarters Air Combat Command; the Senior Military Assistant to the Secretary of the Air Force; and Vice Director for Strategic Plans and Policy on the Joint Staff.
Prior to assuming his current position, General Breedlove served as the Commander, U.S. Air Forces in Europe; Commander, U.S. Air Forces Africa; Commander, Air Component Command, Ramstein; and Director, Joint Air Power Competence Centre, Kalkar, Germany. He was responsible for Air Forces activities, conducted through 3rd Air Force, in an area of operations covering more than 19 million square miles. This area included 105 countries in Europe, Africa, Asia and the Middle East, and the Arctic and Atlantic oceans. As Vice Chief, he presided over the Air Staff and served as a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Requirements Oversight Council and Deputy Advisory Working Group. He assisted the Chief of Staff with organizing, training, and equipping of 680,000 active-duty, Guard, Reserve and civilian forces serving in the United States and overseas. General Breedlove has flown combat missions in Operation Joint Forge/Joint Guardian. He is a command pilot with 3,500 flying hours, primarily in the F-16.
Koret Taube Conference Center (Room 130)
Gunn-SIEPR Building
366 Galvez Avenue
Encina Hall
616 Serra Street
Stanford, CA 94305-6165
Shannon Johnson earned a masters from Stanford's Liberal Arts program, with a thesis entitled "'We were all White once': Race, Polygamy, and the Salvific Mormon Family." Her BA from Brigham Young University is in English literature; she wrote an honors thesis there on "Emily Dickinson: Transcendental Trinitarian." She worked in admin at Columbia University and as an English teacher in Japan and Egypt before taking time away to raise four children. Shannon has been at The Europe Center since 2014, and joined the staff at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law in 2020.
The fate of a soldier serving in the Russian army in the First World War largely depended on luck and circumstances. But even though his own means of influencing his fate were limited, there were available certain active choices – such as shirking and desertion – that could turn his life around in both positive and negative ways. For Russian civil and military authorities, of course, desertion was a nuisance that was fought against by all available means. Sometimes, such as with physical punishment, these means only succeeded in lowering the already low morale and increasing the number of deserters.
Dr. Mart Kuldkepp's presentation will focus on a small and somewhat exceptional group of deserters from the Russian army: the soldiers who served in the border guard regiments in Northern Finland and deserted alone or in small groups over the border to neutral Sweden. He will consider their motivation in doing so, and their subsequent fate, as much as it is known. At the same time, he will also look at how Sweden administratively handled this very unforeseen phenomenon and how the deserters were treated by Swedish authorities.
Mart Kuldkepp completed his PhD dissertation at University of Tartu, Estonia, in 2014 and joined University College London in 2015. Dr. Kuldkepp has been active as an academic in the field of Scandinavian Studies since 2007. Dr. Kuldkepp’s primary research focus is on 20th century Scandinavian political history, with a particular interest in contacts between the Scandinavian and the Baltic states, but also has interest in the history of secret services and espionage and Old Norse-Icelandic literature and culture. His teaching has mostly concerned the history of Scandinavian culture, society, and politics from the earliest times up to today. He has taught subjects related to Old Norse studies and overview courses in humanities.
Organized by the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies and co-sponsored by The Europe Center and Stanford University Libraries
Co-sponsored by the Department of History, Department of Religious Studies, The Europe Center, The France- Stanford Center for interdisciplinary Studies, Program in Global Justice, McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society, Stanford Global Studies, School of Humanities and Sciences, Stanford Humanities Center, Center for South Asia
Stanford Humanities Center
424 Santa Teresa St.
Please mark your calendars for a talk by former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen.
"We Need American Global Leadership"
Date: September 25, 2015
Time: 12:00PM to 1:30PM
Location: Bechtel Conference Center, Encina Hall
RSVP by 5:00PM September 21, 2015
Anders Fogh Rasmussen has been at the center of European and global politics for three decades as Secretary General of NATO, Prime Minister of Denmark, Danish Minister of Economic Affairs, and a leading Danish parliamentarian. Mr Rasmussen took office as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s 12th Secretary General on August 1, 2009 and held that position until September 30, 2014. His tenure marked a fundamental transformation of the alliance. He oversaw the alliance’s operational peak with six operations on three continents including Afghanistan, Kosovo, Libya, counter-piracy operations along the Somali coast, and a training mission in Iraq. Upon leaving NATO, Mr. Rasmussen founded Rasmussen Global, which provides geopolitical and strategic consulting services and advises clients on a wide range of issues such as international security, transatlantic relations, the European Union, and emerging markets. We invite you to visit our website for additional information about this event.
We would like to introduce you to some of the students that we support and the projects on which they are working. Our featured student this month is Nicola Bianchi (Economics). Nicola obtained his Ph.D. in Economics from Stanford University in 2015. He has since joined the Department of Management and Strategy at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University as an Assistant Professor.
Nicola's dissertation examines the economics of education and innovation. His recent research examines the effect of a 1961 Italian reform that increased access to university STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) programs. Using data that he digitized from hand-written transcripts and income tax returns, a process funded in part by The Europe Center, he shows a surprising result. As expected, many more students completed STEM degrees. However, these students did not earn higher incomes, relative to earlier cohorts that were denied access into university. He explains this finding by showing that educational expansion congested college resources and made the student body more heterogeneous, which in turn decreased human capital accumulation. He also demonstrates that the most talented students (not directly affected by the policy) abandoned STEM in favor of other college majors where educational expansion did not take place. This work contributes to the literature on the public finance of education by isolating and quantifying increased college access and by examining within-major, within-cohort, and between-course variation, rather than relying exclusively on cross-cohort comparisons. The results of this research have been covered by the Washington Post.
Accepting Applications: September 21, 2015 - October 16, 2015
The Europe Center invites applications from graduate and professional students at Stanford University whose research or work focuses on Europe. Funds are available for Ph.D. candidates across a wide range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences to prepare for dissertation research and to conduct research on approved dissertation projects. The Europe Center also supports early graduate students who wish to determine the feasibility of a dissertation topic or acquire training relevant for that topic. Additionally, funds are available for professional students whose interests focus on some aspect of European politics, economics, history, or culture; the latter may be used to support an internship or a research project. For more information please visit our website.
The Europe Center offers Stanford undergraduates the opportunity to apply for summer internships with leading European think tanks and international organizations. To date, the initiative has partnerships with Brussels-based think tanks, Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) and Breugel, and with the European Parliament's Alliance of Liberals and Democrats in Europe (ALDE).
This past summer The Europe Center sponsored six undergraduate student internships. Jake Leih (International Relations, 2016) and Eddy Rosales Chavez (International Relations, 2017) were selected for positions at ALDE, Ameena Tawakol (Public Policy, 2017), Grace Choi (Economics, 2018) and Hope Sheils (International Relations, 2016) for positions at Bruegel and Kate Wilson (Public Policy, 2016) for a position at CEPS.
The students have documented their summer internships in a blog. The highlights of the students' experiences included a trip to Strasbourg for the European Parliament's plenary session, various research projects on topics such as free trade agreements (FTAs) and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), geographical trade indicators, tax policy, and immigration and visa practices, working on European Parliament committee amendments, and a celebrity spotting - dining just a few tables away from then-Greek Prime Minister, Alexis Tsipras. Overall, the students describe their experiences as invaluable. For more information on The Europe Center's Undergraduate Internship Program, please visit our website.
Few topics have captured mass, political, and scholarly attention as consistently as income inequality and the distribution of wealth. Seeking to better understand these phenomena by adding a more historical perspective to contemporary debates, Stanford University's Walter Scheidel and colleagues at the University of Vienna organized a conference of scholars working on inequality. Over the course of three days, attendees presented cutting-edge research on historical analyses of inequality within and across countries over three millennia. This conference, The Haves and the Have Nots: Exploring the Global History of Wealth and Income Inequality, was sponsored by The Europe Center and the University of Vienna. Additional information about the participants and their projects can be found in the conference program.
The Europe Center is delighted to welcome Distinguished Visiting Austrian Chair Professor, Martina Kaller, to Stanford University. Dr. Kaller is a philosopher and historian working on global history with a focus on the Global South. She studied in Vienna, Berlin and at the Universidad Autónoma de México (UNAM). She earned her Ph.D. in epistemology of history from the University of Vienna and did her postdoctoral thesis in modern history there as well. Her main research focus is on global food history and global studies of food. While visiting Stanford, Dr. Kaller will be teaching in the Department of History and researching food supply in global cities.
Sarah Cormack-Patton received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Pittsburgh in August 2015. She is a political economist working at the nexus of comparative politics and international relations with a focus on European politics. Sarah is interested in how the cross-border movement of goods, capital, and people impacts the domestic policy-making process, and how domestic politics in turn affect these cross-border flows. In her current research, Sarah is focused on international migration. Her doctoral dissertation examined the ways in which varying bundles of migrant rights affect domestic preferences over immigration, the effect of these rights on the policy-making coalitions that form over immigration, and how these preferences aggregate in various institutional environments.
October 13, 2015
5:30PM - 7:00PM
Renee Firestone, Hermine Liska, and Bernhard Rammerstorfer
"Taking the Stand - A film presentation and Q&A with survivors of the Holocaust"
Location to be announced
RSVP by 5:00PM October 9, 2015
Save the Date: October 30, 2015
Conference: "On Cruelty: Global Reflections for the Age of Revolutions to the War on Citizenship"
This conference is co-sponsored by The Europe Center, Department of History, The Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies, School of Humanities & Sciences, Program in Ethics in Society, The France-Stanford Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, Department of Religious Studies, Center for South Asia, Stanford Global Studies.
Save the Date: November 9, 2015
Mart Kuldkepp, Tartu University
"Russian deserters to Sweden in World War I"
This seminar is organized by the Center for Russian, Eastern European and Eurasian Studies and co-sponsored by The Europe Center.
September 24, 2015
4:30PM - 5:45PM
Toomas Hendrik Ilves, President of Estonia
"Democracy Rebooted: The Future of Technology in Elections"
Bechtel Conference Center, Encina Hall
RSVP by 5:00PM September 23, 2015
September 25, 2015
12:00PM - 1:30PM
Anders Fogh Rasmussen, former Secretary General, NATO
"We Need American Global Leadership"
Bechtel Conference Center, Encina Hall
RSVP by 5:00PM September 21, 2015
Save the Date: October 14, 2015
Sergey Aleksashenko, Senior Fellow, Development Center (a Mosco-based think tank) and Nonresident Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution
October 27, 2015
5:30PM - 7:00PM
Lena Jonson, Swedish Institute of International Affairs (UI)
"Art and Protest in Putin's Russia"
Location to be announced
No RSVP required
November 2, 2015
12:00PM - 1:30PM
Vladimir Milov, President, Institute of Energy Policy
"The Global Impact of Russia's Political and Economic Situation"
Reuben Hills Conference Room
RSVP by 5:00PM October 28, 2015
Save the Date: November 10, 2015
Lilia Shevtsova, Senior Associate, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Save the Date: January 5, 2016
Sergei Guriev, Visiting Professor of Economics, Sciences Po - Paris
**Reservations for this event is closed** We are at capacity and cannot accept further reservations.
Twenty-four years ago the Soviet Union collapsed. Since then, Russia has been transformed in many dimensions but it is difficult to describe the country today. According to its Constitution, Russia is a democratic republic and federation, but modern Russia looks more like an absolute monarchy. The Russian economy is dominated by state corporations, the oligarchs of the 90's, and the cronies of the 2000’s. The economy has been in recession for more than a year and hasn’t exhibited any signs of recovery. Is the country stable? Can it face its governance and economic challenges? Can we forecast the medium-term future of the Russian economy? Could the economy collapse?
Sergey Aleksashenko is a Senior Fellow at the Development Center (a Moscow-based think tank) and Nonresident Senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Since graduating Moscow State University in 1986, he has been involved in academia, the public sector, and in business. From 1990-1991 he was appointed to the Commission on Economic reforms of the Government of the USSR as one of the "500 days" plan members. In 1993-1995 he worked as deputy Minister of Finance of Russia in charge of budgetary planning, macroeconomic, and tax policy. From 1995-1998 he was responsible for monetary policy as the first deputy Governor of the Central bank of Russia. From 2000 to 2004 he was the deputy CEO of the Interros Holding where he lead the strategy and business development teams. In 2006-2008 he was the Chairman and CEO of Merrill Lynch Russia, the largest financial institution in Moscow, where he greatly increased the bank's scope and presence. Before the financial crisis of 2008, he returned to academia and became the Director of Macroeconomic Research at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. At the same time, he sat on the boards of Aeroflot, United Grain company, United Aircraft Corporation, and the National Reserve bank. At the end of 2012 he faced political persecution and in September 2013 he left Russia for Washington D.C. where he currently resides.
The Pussy Riot protest, and the subsequent heavy handed treatment of the protestors, grabbed the headlines, but this was not an isolated instance of art being noticeably critical of the regime. As this book, based on extensive original research, shows, there has been gradually emerging over recent decades a significant counter-culture in the art world which satirises and ridicules the regime and the values it represents, at the same time putting forward, through art, alternative values. The book traces the development of art and protest in recent decades, discusses how art of this kind engages in political and social protest, and provides many illustrations as examples of art as protest. The book concludes by discussing how important art has been in facilitating new social values and in prompting political protests.
Lena Jonson is Associate Research Fellow at UI. Her research currently focuses on Russian domestic politics and issues of political and societal change (modernisation) as well as the contemporary role of culture and its standing in Russia.
Lena Jonson has published several articles and works examining Russian society and politics (mainly foreign and security policy), Russia's relations with Europe and Russian relations with the former Soviet territories. She has also published widely on Central Asia, and on Tajikistan in particular.
Lena Jonson is one of the founders of the network "Sällskapet för studier av Ryssland, Central-och Östeuropa samt Centralasien" (1997) and was its first chairperson. She has been a guest researcher at George Washington University and the Kennan Institute at the Wilson Centre, as well as a scholarship recipient at the universities of (then) Leningrad and Moscow. From 2005-2009, she served as Cultural Attaché at the Swedish Embassy in Moscow. In 2002, she worked as a Political Officer at the OSCE-office i Dushanbe, Tajikistan. In 1997-1998, she was a Senior Researcher at the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London.
Sponsored by the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies and co-sponsored by The Europe Center.