The Europe Center is jointly housed in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Stanford Global Studies Division.
Korea University Seoul’s Graduate School on International Studies
The Europe Center invites you to attend this special event with opening remarks by co-hosts Amir Eshel, Abbas Milani, and Tobias Wolff
All interested faculty and students from all fields are invited to to join us for this open discussion. Thoughts and comments are welcome from all angles of analysis and about the myriad contexts and consequences of the years of the Rushdie affair: historical and present-day religion and its intersection with politics, the poetics of Rushdie’s new book, principles of free speech, authorial ethics and responsibility, international law, extra-juridical and political protections and persecutions, and the way the conflict was brought to a close with models and challenges for post-conflict reconciliation.
Co-sponsored by the Stanford Initiative for Religious and Ethnic Understanding and Coexistence, supported by the President’s Fund, The Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity, the Religious Studies Department, and the Taube Center for Jewish Studies
Oberndorf Event Center at the Knight Management Center, North Building, 3rd floor
655 Knight Way
Dept of German Studies
Building 260, Room 204
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-2030
Amir Eshel is Edward Clark Crossett Professor of Humanistic Studies. He is Professor of German Studies and Comparative Literature and as of 2019 Director of Comparative Literature and its graduate program. His Stanford affiliations include The Taube Center for Jewish Studies, Modern Thought & Literature, and The Europe Center at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. He is also the faculty director of Stanford’s research group on The Contemporary and of the Poetic Media Lab at Stanford’s Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA). His research focuses on contemporary literature and the arts as they touch on philosophy, specifically on memory, history, political thought, and ethics.
Amir Eshel is the author of Poetic Thinking Today (Stanford University Press, 2019); German translation at Suhrkamp Verlag, 2020). Previous books include Futurity: Contemporary Literature and the Quest for the Past (The University of Chicago Press in 2013). The German version of the book, Zukünftigkeit: Die zeitgenössische Literatur und die Vergangenheit, appeared in 2012 with Suhrkamp Verlag. Together with Rachel Seelig, he co-edited The German-Hebrew Dialogue: Studies of Encounter and Exchange (2018). In 2014, he co-edited with Ulrich Baer a book of essays on Hannah Arendt, Hannah Arendt: zwischen den Disziplinen; and also co-edited a book of essays on Barbara Honigmann with Yfaat Weiss, Kurz hinter der Wahrheit und dicht neben der Lüge (2013).
Earlier scholarship includes the books Zeit der Zäsur: Jüdische Lyriker im Angesicht der Shoah (1999), and Das Ungesagte Schreiben: Israelische Prosa und das Problem der Palästinensischen Flucht und Vertreibung (2006). Amir Eshel has also published essays on Franz Kafka, Hannah Arendt, Paul Celan, Dani Karavan, Gerhard Richter, W.G. Sebald, Günter Grass, Alexander Kluge, Barbara Honigmann, Durs Grünbein, Dan Pagis, S. Yizhar, and Yoram Kaniyuk.
Amir Eshel’s poetry includes a 2018 book with the artist Gerhard Richter, Zeichnungen/רישומים, a work which brings together 25 drawings by Richter from the clycle 40 Tage and Eshel’s bi-lingual poetry in Hebrew and German. In 2020, Mossad Bialik brings his Hebrew poetry collection בין מדבר למדבר, Between Deserts.
Amir Eshel is a recipient of fellowships from the Alexander von Humboldt and the Friedrich Ebert foundations and received the Award for Distinguished Teaching from the School of Humanities and Sciences.
Although Czechoslovak politicians in exile frequently proclaimed towards the end of the Second World War an ambition for their country to mediate between the U.S.S.R. and the Western powers, their deeds and utterances, imprinted in Soviet, Czech and other archival materials, testify to something else. With their faith in the West fatally shaken by Munich 1938, which was only amplified by the U.S. failure to liberate Prague in May 1945, they relied on a Soviet security guarantee against any further German aggression and on Stalin's promises of non-interference in internal Czechoslovak affairs. However, numerous concessions to the Soviet wishes and a growing domestic power of the Czechoslovak Communists undermined this cardboard castle that in the atmosphere of the growing East-West confrontation finally collapsed in February 1948.
Co-sponsored by the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies (CREEES) and the Department of History
Building 200 (History Corner),
Room 307
Encina Hall
616 Serra Street, C205-4
Stanford, CA 94305
Vit Smetana is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Contemporary History – Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, and also teaches modern international history at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University in Prague. His professional interest lies primarily in the policies of the great powers towards Czechoslovakia and Central Europe in the late 1930s and throughout the 1940s. His research during his stay at Stanford focuses on the topic “The Czech, Slovak and other Central European exiles in the Second World War and beyond”.
Dr. Smetana is the author of In the Shadow of Munich. British Policy towards Czechoslovakia from the Endorsement to the Renunciation of the Munich Agreement (1938-1942) (2008) and co-author of Draze zaplacená svoboda. Osvobození Československa 1944-45 (Dearly Paid Freedom. The Liberation of Czechoslovakia 1944-45) in two volumes (2009). He also edited the Czech version of the Robert F. Kennedy memoir of the Cuban Missle Crisis, Thirteen Days (1999).
The debt crisis is clear: Smaller areas can be managed better than large nations. Therefore they should be autonomous - under the umbrella of the European Union.
Europe Center scholar Dr. Roland Benedikter (47), has been honored with the 2012 Klaus Reichert Award for Medical Philosophy. This award, given by the Center for Medical Philosophy in Karlsruhe, Germany, was bestowed on Benedikter in recognition of his outstanding merits for medical ethics, for advancing the debate on avant-garde issues at the interplay between contemporary politics, sociology, ethics and medicine, and for his efforts to re-humanize the contemporary thought and international debate about the future of the human being in times of "transhumanism" and "hyper-technologization". The award is the most highly regarded academic award of this genre in Germany.
The award ceremony will be held on October 6, 2012 in Karlsruhe. In his award speech "What future for the human being: Humanism or Transhumanism? Aspects at the interplay between technology, politics and ethics", Benedikter will give an overview of the current "global systemic shift", its trend towards a "neuromorphosis" of global culture (two notions co-coined by him) and the future of the human being in the age of "transhumanism" and invasive new technologies. Benedikter will in particular elucidate the contemporary relation between macro-philosophical trends that will dominate the years ahead in the advanced international thought on the interplay between medicine and society.
Benedikter shares the award with his long time collaborator Prof. James Giordano, director of the Center on Neurotechnology at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies, Washington DC.
Encina Hall
616 Serra Street, C205-4
Stanford, CA 94305
Vit Smetana is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Contemporary History – Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, and also teaches modern international history at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University in Prague. His professional interest lies primarily in the policies of the great powers towards Czechoslovakia and Central Europe in the late 1930s and throughout the 1940s. His research during his stay at Stanford focuses on the topic “The Czech, Slovak and other Central European exiles in the Second World War and beyond”.
Dr. Smetana is the author of In the Shadow of Munich. British Policy towards Czechoslovakia from the Endorsement to the Renunciation of the Munich Agreement (1938-1942) (2008) and co-author of Draze zaplacená svoboda. Osvobození Československa 1944-45 (Dearly Paid Freedom. The Liberation of Czechoslovakia 1944-45) in two volumes (2009). He also edited the Czech version of the Robert F. Kennedy memoir of the Cuban Missle Crisis, Thirteen Days (1999).
Yair Mintzker is an assistant professor of history, specializing in German-speaking Central Europe from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Born and raised in Jerusalem, Professor Mintzker received his M.A. in history cum laude magna from Tel-Aviv University (2003) and his Ph.D. from Stanford University (2009). His broad interests include urban history as well as intellectual, cultural, and political history of Early Modern and Modern Europe.
Prof. Mintzker’s dissertation, The Defortification of the German City, 1689-1866 (winner of the Fritz Stern Prize of the German Historical Institute, 2009), tells the story of the metamorphosis of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German cities from walled to defortified places. By using a wealth of original sources, the dissertation discusses one of the most significant moments in the emergence of the modern city: the dramatic—and often traumatic—demolition of the city’s centuries-old physical boundaries and the creation of the open city. The research and writing of the dissertation were supported by grants from the School of Sciences and Humanities at Stanford, the DAAD, the Ms. Giles Whiting Foundation, and the Geballe Dissertation Prize at the Stanford Humanities Center.
Co-sponsored by the Department of History and the Taube Center for Jewish Studies.
Building 200 (History Corner)
Room 307
Building 200, Room 209
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-2024
James Sheehan is the Dickason Professor in the Humanities at Stanford, a professor of history, and an FSI senior fellow by courtesy. He is an expert on the history of modern Europe. He has written widely on the history of Germany, including four books and many articles. His most recent book on Germany is Museums in the German Art World: From the End of the Old Regime to the Rise of Modernism (Oxford Press, 2000). He has recently written a new book about war and the European state in the 20th century, Where Have All the Soldiers Gone? addressing the transformation of Europe's states from military to cilivian actors, interested primarily in economic growth, prosperity, and security. His other recent publications are chapters on "Democracy" and "Political History," which appear in the International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences (2002), and a chapter on "Germany," which appears in The Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment (Oxford University Press, 2002).
Sheehan is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. He has many won many grants and awards, including the Officer's Cross of the German Order of Merit. In 2004 he was elected president of the American Historical Association. He received a BA from Stanford (1958) and an MA and PhD from the University of California at Berkeley (1959, 1964).
