Shannon Johnson
Encina Hall
616 Serra Street
Stanford, CA 94305-6165
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sj1874@stanford.edu
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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.
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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 
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 
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 
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.