How is digital technology reshaping our relationships with the past? This presentation will elucidate how digital technology redefines our fundamental understanding of time, history, and memory, thus giving rise to a new concept known as "digital historicity."

Having spread extensively throughout the world in just a few decades, digital technology has significantly reshaped our relations to the past. This presentation argues that digital technology serves a purpose beyond being a new tool for historical research, commonly referred to as digital history. It also profoundly influences our fundamental relationship with time, history, and memory, thereby giving rise to a novel concept known as "digital historicity." This digital historicity is distinguished by several key aspects, notably datafication, algorithmization, virtualization, and gamification of our perception of the past.

This shift towards digital historicity moves us away from traditional inquiries into historical representation and towards a focus on sensory immersion, which redefines history as a real-time experience of the virtually recreated past. In our contemporary digital condition, the past is constantly being remixed, reimagined, and repurposed in unexpected ways, particularly evident in the digital gaming industry, which will be a central focus of this paper.

Marek Tamm is professor of cultural history in Tallinn University. He is also Head of Tallinn University Centre of Excellence in Intercultural Studies and member of the Estonian Academy of Sciences. His primary research fields are cultural history of medieval Europe, historical theory, digital history, and cultural memory studies. His most recent book is The Fabric of Historical Time, co-written with Zoltán Boldizsár Simon (Cambridge University Press, 2023).

*If you need any disability-related accommodation, please contact Shannon Johnson at sj1874@stanford.edu. Requests should be made by October 19, 2023.

Six years after the people of Catalonia exercised their right to self-determination, the Catalan challenge still keeps the Spanish institutions in a gridlock, posing a major challenge to the democratic principles of the European Union.

It has been six years since the people of Catalonia exercised their right to self-determination in a referendum of independence, despite Spain’s attempt at stopping it with riot police. Spain has so far blocked the implementation of the democratic decision of Catalans by means of a combination of human rights abuse and political manipulation, and thanks to the complicit approval of the EU institutions. Nevertheless, Catalan self-determination remains the main hurdle that chokes Spanish institutions, and hence poses a major challenge to the democratic principles and practices of the European Union. I will provide background and review the recent political developments and possible future developments of the Catalan case, contextualizing it in the discussions regarding the principle and practices of self-determination. 

Clara Ponsatí is a Member of the European Parliament since February 2020, where she serves in the Industry Technology Reserach and Energy and Economics and Monetary Affairs Committees. From July 2017 until November 2017 she served as Minister of Education in the Catalan Government under President Carles Puigdemont. Prior to entering politics, Ponsatí was an economics professor. She was Chair of Economics at the School of Economics and Finance at the University of St Andrews, where she served as head of the school from 2015 to 2017. Before joining St Andrews she was Research Professor at the Institute for Economic Analysis (CSIC) where she served as director from 2006 to 2012. 

Previously, Ponsatí taught at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota. She has had visiting appointments at Georgetown University, the University of California at San Diego, and the University of Toronto. Professor Ponsatí is a specialist in Game Theory and Public Economics, with interest in negotiations, bargaining, and voting. She has worked extensively on strategy, collective decisions, taxes and redistribution, with a distinguished publication record. She has worked on fiscal federalism and has advised the Catalan government on budgetary and tax affairs. Her research explores the links between group formation and majoritarian institutions, to understand the causes and effects of meritocracy and egalitarianism in the performance and stability of democratic organizations.

*If you need any disability-related accommodation, please contact Shannon Johnson at sj1874@stanford.edu. Requests should be made by October 26, 2023.

Organized by Professor Joan Ramon Resina, Director of the Iberian Studies Program at The Europe Center.

Just how bad is the current danger of democratic backsliding in the US and around the world?

Influential voices contend that democracy is in decline worldwide and threatened in the US. Using a variety of measures, I show that the global proportion of democracies is, in fact, at or near an all-time high. The current rate of backsliding is not historically unusual and is well-explained by the income levels of existing democracies. Historical data yield extremely low estimated hazards of democratic breakdown in the US—considerably lower than in any democracy that has failed. Western governments are seen as threatened by a supposed decline in popular support for democracy and an erosion of elite norms. But the evidence for these claims is sparse. While deteriorating democratic quality in some countries is indeed a cause for concern, available evidence suggests that alarm about a global slide into autocracy is exaggerated.

Daniel Treisman is a Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles and Interim Director of UCLA’s Center for European and Russian Studies. A graduate of Oxford and Harvard, he has published six books and many articles in leading political science and economics journals, as well as numerous commentaries in public affairs journals and the press. His research focuses on Russian politics and economics as well as comparative political economy, including the analysis of democratization, the politics of authoritarian states, political decentralization, and corruption. 

A former co-editor of The American Political Science Review, he is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and has consulted for the World Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and USAID. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution (Stanford), the Institute for Human Sciences (Vienna), and the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences (Stanford), and he is currently an Andrew Carnegie Fellow. In 2023, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His latest book, co-authored with Sergei Guriev, "Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century" (Princeton University Press, 2022), has been translated into 13 languages and won the Prix Guido et Maruccia Zerilli-Marimo of the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques in Paris.

*If you need any disability-related accommodation, please contact Shannon Johnson at sj1874@stanford.edu. Requests should be made by November 23, 2023.

Given the rise of Euroscepticism, illiberalism, and economic nationalism expressed by populist leaders in Eastern Europe over the past decade, did the EU and NATO enlargement support or detract from establishing and sustaining a commitment to liberalism? How will Russia’s invasion of Ukraine shape the trajectory of liberalism in the region?

EU and NATO accession gave momentum to Eastern Europe’s democratic and capitalist development, despite the many domestic political challenges associated with this dual transition. Given the subsequent rise of Euroscepticism, illiberalism, and economic nationalism expressed by populist leaders over the past decade, and given violations of democratic norms, did the specific process of enlargement support or detract from establishing and sustaining a commitment to liberalism and so-called European values? Moreover, how does the Ukraine war fit into a trajectory of liberal development in Eastern Europe? These are the questions addressed in this presentation.

Hilary Appel is Podlich Family Professor of Government and George R. Roberts Fellow at Claremont McKenna College. Professor Appel has published numerous books and articles on the politics of economic reform in Russia and Eastern Europe in leading scholarly journals like World Politics, Comparative Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Review of International Political Economy, Post-Soviet Affairs, East European Politics and Societies, and others.

Her co-authored book with Mitchell A. Orenstein, From Triumph to Crisis: Neoliberal Economic Reform in Post-Communist Countries (Cambridge University Press, 2018), won the Silver Medal Laura Shannon Prize for Best Book in European Studies 2018-2019. Prof. Appel has received national fellowships from the Social Science Research Council, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Fulbright Foundation, the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Harriman Institute at Columbia University, and the Institute for the Study of World Politics.

*If you need any disability-related accommodation, please contact Shannon Johnson at sj1874@stanford.edu. Requests should be made by October 5, 2023.

As part of the Stanford Global Studies Summer Film Festival, The Europe Center will hold a virtual Q&A discussion around the 2022 UK film, "The Swimmers," with Dr. Christophe Crombez (Stanford University, University of Leuven).

Please watch the movie, available on Netflix, before attending the discussion. (See trailer above.) Email questions for the Q&A discussion to the_europe_center@stanford.edu.

Description from Netflix: From war-torn Syria to the 2016 Rio Olympics, two young sisters embark on a risky voyage, putting their hearts and their swimming skills to heroic use.

*If you need any disability-related accommodation, please contact Shannon Johnson at sj1874@stanford.edu. Requests should be made by July 5, 2023.

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In this talk, Abbiati will explore how contemporary novels that depict the pain of IRA terrorism represent the perspective of victims. The talk will use computational methods to investigate the structural representation of pain in literary works dealing with "The Troubles", to then consider the emotional impact of using these methods to study politically engaged fiction. By analyzing the aesthetic experience of reading literature having it processed by algorithms, the presentation aims to shed light on the impact of computational literary analysis on the reader's empathetic response.

The presentation will include lunch and take place at the Stanford Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis in Wallenberg 433A. A Zoom link is available upon request from Center Manager, Jonathan Clark (jclark93@stanford.edu).

Simone Abbiati is a third-year PhD student in Transcultural studies in the humanities at University of Bergamo. His work relates to the hermeneutic rethinking of DH methodologies regarding fictional space, and he is particularly interested in combining text mining and digital cartography to reflect on politically debated spaces in literature. He is currently working on the British-Irish border and the Basque Country, with the aim of identifying how literature mirrored different border conceptions such as complex territorialization processes and terrorism.

Sponsored by the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis, co-sponsored by the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages and The Europe Center.