Stanford University

Distinguished scholar Robert Harrison delivers The Europe Center “Europe Now” Lecture

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The Fall 2011 Europe Center distinguished “Europe Now” speaker, Robert Harrison is a research affiliate at the Center.  At Stanford University, Harrison is the Rosina Pierotti Professor of Italian Literature.  A profound thinker on medieval Italian literature, Harrison has also established himself as one of our preeminent analysts of western culture, and its preocupation through literature, religion, and mythology in the interchange of secular and sacred realms.

Professor Harrison's publications are as prodigious as they are influential.  In his first book, The Body of Beatrice (1988; editions in English and Japanese) Harrison writes of medieval Italian lyric poetry, with special emphasis on Dante's early work La Vita Nuova.  This was followed by Forests: The Shadow of Civilization, (1992; editions in English, French, Italian, German,  Japanese, and Korean), in which he deals with the multiple and complex ways in which the Western imagination has symbolized, represented, and conceived of forests, primarily in literature, religion, and mythology.  Rome, la Pluie: A Quoi Bon Littérature? (1994; editions in French, Italian, and German) takes the creative form of dialogues between two characters and deals with various topics such as art restoration, the vocation of literature, and the place of the dead in contemporary society.  His next book, Dominion of the Dead Dominion of the Dead, (2003; editions in German, French, and Italian) focuses on the relations the living maintain with the dead in diverse secular realms.  Professor Harrison's most recent book is Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition (2008; editions in English and French).

Known widely among students and the engaged public, Robert Harrison has hosted the lively and meaningful literary talk show on Stanford KZSU radio called "Entitled Opinions". The show features wonderful hour-long conversation with a variety of scholars, writers, and scientists.  To be a student of Professor Harrison is to be mentored by one of the world’s preeminent scholars who also embodies the ideal of his humanist subjects.   To be chosen for Robert Harrison’s radio interview is to be engaged in the rich experience of making the humanities matter to our world’s deepest concerns.  In his spare time, Robert Harrison is also lead guitarist for the cerebral rock band Glass Wave.

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European and Global Economic Crisis Series: "The Italian Economic and Social Crisis"

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Italy is the 8th biggest national economy in the world and the 3rd biggest in the Euro zone after Germany and France. Although it holds the third-largest gold reserves in the world, enjoys a high living standard with comparatively low private debts and is technologically innovative, as for example the recent takeover of parts of the U.S. car industry during the financial crisis 2008-11 underscored, it is currently considered to be the most vulnerable national economy threatened by the European debt crisis because of its huge public debt which reached 118% of the GDP in 2011. Although Italy is considered as "too big to fail" because it could hardly be saved by the European rescue funding programme with a GDP of more than 2.1 trillion Euro, there are fears that a further loss of trust by the international money markets could trigger an unprecedented crisis. Interest rates payed for Italian public debt rose to record numbers in fall 2011 due to the downgrading by leading rating agencies since summer 2011. The seminar gives a concise overview over the current state of affairs in Italy, including its debt and economic crises, and discusses their potential interweavement with the social crisis the country is undergoing in the view of international observers. In the age of media democracy, contextual political factors like social and cultural psychology, public appearances and symbolic events are increasingly impacting Italian politics and economics in ambivalent ways.

A podcast of this talk will soon be made available.

Reuben W. Hills Conference Room

Roland Benedikter Speaker
Seminars
European and Global Economic Crisis Series

Islam and Contemporary Europe: A New Generation of Converts to Islam: Frictions of Race and Religion in Germany

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Why in the last ten years an increasing number of ethnic Germans have converted to Islam in Salafi mosques or, after converting elsewhere, have chosen to attend these famously conservative houses of worship? Most scholars explain the spread of Salafism in Europe primarily as a social protest engaged in by second- and third-generation immigrant Muslims who feel marginalized from mainstream society. This article argues instead that Salafism can best be understood as a fundamentalist religious movement which satisfies individuals’ spiritual, psychological, and sociological needs. It is not so different from other fundamentalisms, particularly in the attraction it holds for converts. Among the most attractive aspects for newcomers is Salafism’s anti-culturalist and anti-traditionalist bent, which allows ethnic Germans to move past their racialized assumptions about Muslims and embrace Islam without necessarily embracing immigrant Muslims. Unlike the great majority of mosques in Germany, which function as ethnic and national community centers, Salafi mosques create unique settings where piety— rather than ethnicity— defines belonging.

Esra Özyürek, is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California – San Diego. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. Her work focuses on how politics, religion, and social memory shape and transform each other in contemporary Turkey and Germany. Her earlier work, Nostalgia for the Modern: State Secularism and Everyday Politics in Turkey (Duke Univ. Press, 2006), focused on the transformation of state secularism as Turkey moved from from the top-down modernization project of the 1930s to market based modernization in the 1990s. Currently she is undertaking a comparative ethnographic study of conversion to religious minorities, namely converts to Islam in Germany and to Christianity in Turkey. 

Co-sponsored by The Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies.

Workshop papers are available to Stanford affiliates upon request by email to  abbasiprogram@stanford.edu.

CISAC Conference Room

Esra Ozyurek Associate Professor of Anthropology Speaker UC San Diego
Seminars
Islam and Contemporary Europe

Nelly Sachs: Migration and Memory, Poetry and Context

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Reception, workshop and dramatic reading in celebration of the life, poetry and the evocative context of Nelly Sachs, winner of the 1966 Nobel Prize for Literature.

Inspired by the publication of the American edition of Nelly Sachs: Flight and Metamorphosis, the documented biography of the Nobel prize-winning poet Nelly Sachs, by author Aris Fioretos (Stanford University Press, 2012), Mr. Fioretos will be available for book signings (books will also be available for purchase.)

Seating is limited.

Co-sponsored by the Stanford Institute for Creativity and the Arts (SiCa) and the Taube Center for Jewish Studies

POST EVENT RELATED PUBLICATIONS:

"Nelly Sachs.  Ever hear of her?  Nobel poet finds new recognition"
AUTHOR
Cynthia Haven
PUBLISHED BY
THE BOOK HAVEN, Stanford University, March 2012

"Dust-to-Dust Song"
AUTHOR
Paul Reitter
PUBLISHED BY
JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS, Vol. 10, Summer 2012

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The Bender Room
5th floor, Green Library
Stanford University

Amir Eshel

Dept of German Studies
Building 260, Room 204
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-2030

(650) 723-0413 (650) 725-8421
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Edward Clark Crossett Professor of Humanistic Studies
Professor of Comparative Literature
Professor of German Studies
Eshel.jpg MA, PhD

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.

Affiliated faculty of The Europe Center
Affiliated faculty of The Taube Center for Jewish Studies
Faculty Director of The Contemporary Research Group
Faculty Director of the Poetic Media Lab
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Amir Eshel Moderator
Aris Fioretos Author and Professor of Aesthetics Speaker Humboldt University, Berlin
Deniz Göktürk Professor of German / Film and Media Speaker UC Berkeley

Axel Englund

Encina Hall
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305

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Anna Lindh Fellow, The Europe Center
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Axel Englund is a scholar of Literature and Musicology. He completed his doctorate at Stockholm University, Sweden (April 2011), where he has also taught modernist exile literature and metrics. His dissertation, a book version of which is being published by Ashgate in 2012, focuses on the poetry of the German-speaking Holocaust survivor Paul Celan, and its interplay with music. In 2009, he was a visiting scholar at the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Columbia University. His research interests include the poetry and music of the 20th century, intermedial relations, critical musicology, hermeneutics and aesthetics. His current research addresses the poetic output of W.G. Sebald.
Axel Englund Anna Lindh Fellow (former) at Stanford University and Scholar of Literature and Musicology Speaker Stockholm University

Anna Westerstahl Stenport

Encina Hall
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305

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Visiting Associate Professor and Anna Lindh Fellow, The Europe Center
Stenport.jpg PhD

As a Visiting Associate Professor and Anna Lindh fellow in The Europe Center, Anna Westerstahl Stenport researches the contemporary European and Nordic film and media industries. Her interests include production studies and digital convergence culture and span investigations into aesthetics, film genre, and thematic analyses. She includes practitioner perspectives in her work and incorporates extensive interview material in her writing. Current scholarship focuses on contemporary Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish film industry culture. She is the author of a book on Swedish director Lukas Moodysson's debut feature 'Show Me Love'  (University of Washington Press Nordic Film Classics Series, 2012). Current research includes film adaptations of Scandinavian crime writers Stieg Larsson, Henning Mankell, and others.  

Anna also researches turn-of-the century European literature, drama, and culture with an emphasis on economic history. She has written extensively on Swedish author and playwright August Strindberg. Works include the book Locating August Strindberg's Prose: Modernism, Transnationalism, and Setting (University of Toronto Press, 2010) and numerous articles and book chapters.  

A native of Sweden's Göteborg, Anna holds degrees from Uppsala University and a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. She is an Affiliate Associate Professor at the University of Gothenburg, as well as a tenured professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.   

Anna Westerstahl Stenport Anna Lindh Fellow at Stanford University and Associate Professor Speaker University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Leslie Morris Professor of German Speaker University of Minnesota
Lucy Alford Doctoral Candidate, Department of Comparative Literature Speaker Stanford University
Andrew Utter Artistic Director Speaker Uranium Madhouse Theater, Los Angeles
Workshops

History and Memory: Global and Local Dimensions

The second conference in the multi-year TEC-Van Leer Jerusalem Institute project on the reconciliation of divided regions and societies.

 

Conference Summary
By Roland Hsu, Associate Director, the Europe Center, and Kathryn Ciancia, (Ph.D., Stanford).

The Europe Center, with project partner the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, hosted the major international conference at Stanford University (May 17-18, 2012), dedicated to “History and Memory: Global and Local Dimensions”.  This conference was aimed to deepen our understanding of disputes over history, and to find ways towards resolving conflictual memory.  Participants – all leaders in their field, and representing voices from U.S., European, Israeli, Palestinian, and Arab worlds – were challenged to answer:

  • What are the historians’ responsibilities in developing shared narratives about war, civil conflict, occupation, and genocide?
  • How do we understand the relation between the work of professional historians and that of civic society organizations?
  • How should one think about the relative importance of historical commissions and truth commissions in “coming to terms with the past”?
  • How do efforts in post-conflict situations to reach accurate assessments (“truth”) of the events meet the needs of healing social, ethnic, and/or religious wounds (“reconciliation”)?
  • What are the consequences and meaning of actions of forgiveness, including the formal granting of amnesty? Do these actions conflict with the writing of history?

Participants included:
Khalil, Gregory (Telos Group)
Göçek, Müge (Univ. of Michigan)
Milani, Abbas (Stanford)
Bashir, Bashir (The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute)
Barkan, Elazar (Columbia)
Karayanni, Michael (The Hebrew University)
Confino, Alon (University of Virginia)
Bartov, Omer (Brown)
Cohen, Mitchell (Baruch)
Eshel, Amir (Stanford)
Glendinning, Simon (LSE)
Motzkin, Gabriel (The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute)
Naimark, Norman (Stanford)
Penslar, Derek (Toronto)
Rouhana, Nadim (Tufts)
Uhl, Heidemarie (Austrian Academy of Sciences)
Zerubavel, Yael (Rutgers)
Zipperstein, Steven (Stanford)


Notes and Highlights
In his opening remarks, Amir Eshel, Director of The Europe Center, situated the conference within its wider context—a series under the title “Debating History, Democracy, Development, and Education in Conflicted Societies,” which began with a conference on “Democracy in Adversity and Diversity” in Jerusalem in May 2011.  Eshel posed the question of why Stanford’s Europe Center should focus on issues relating to the wider Middle East, particularly the historic and ongoing conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.  In answering his own question, Eshel argued that the European Union had begun to look closely at its own neighborhood, with a particular emphasis on the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership (EUROMED), which explores questions of migration, religion, and civil society in the eastern Mediterranean and North Africa.  As such questions are important in both Europe and the EUROMED region, scholars who work on Europe need to think within a broader geographical context that stretches beyond Old Europe or even the European Union.

Amir Eshel also introduced some of the key ideas that informed the conference. Questions of memory and history have been central to academic discourse over the past three decades.  Indeed, memory and history have taken on a crucial, even obsessive, dynamic.  Where are we today in this global interdisciplinary conversation?  Can the study of memory help us to understand the conflicted societies of the greater Middle East?  Can the huge scholarly interest in such subjects help us to think in new ways about the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians?  Can the European experience of dealing with difficult memories aid us as we try to understand Israeli and Palestinian memories of the 1948 Nakba?  What is the role of historical research, on the one hand, and cultural remembrance, on the other, in promoting reconciliation and cohabitation? Since the conference aimed to focus less on the peace process in the Middle East and more on attempts at reconciliation and cohabitation, he urged participants to consider how Israelis and Palestinians might live together

In order to highlight work that had recently been undertaken, Eshel then focused on the fields of historical research and cultural discourse.  Over the past few decades, he argued, narratives have become increasingly crucial in the historiography, much of the impetus coming from so-called critical historiography.  For instance, the last decade has witnessed the publication of Motti Golani and Adel Manna’s Two Sides of the Coin, which presents two narratives of the Nakba of 1948.  In this multi-perspective narrative, the conflict is presented as one of both territory and historical memory.  Similarly, Mahmoud Yazbak and Yfaat Weiss’s Haifa Before and After 1948 was co-authored by Israelis and Palestinians and features fourteen different narratives.  A further collection, entitled Zoom In: Palestinian Refugees of 1948, Remembrances, deals with contemporary memories of the Nakba.  All three books were published by the Institute For Historical Justice and Reconciliation and the Republic of Letters, while the Van Leer Institute and Al-Quds University in Palestinian East Jerusalem have also published a series of schoolbooks that present similar multi-perspective narratives.

In addition to the changes in the historiography, there has been a shift in the cultural discourse, exemplified by the Israeli novelist Alon Hilu’s The House of Rajani (2012), which details the experiences of one Palestinian family and includes a map of Jaffa-Tel Aviv featuring Palestinian sites that vanished in 1948. The fact that Hilu’s novel received critical acclaim and was commercially successful indicates a new willingness on the part of Israelis to learn about the Palestinian experience.  Eshel has himself just completed a book comparing post-Second World War German and Austrian cultural memory with Israeli cultural memory of 1948. Since Palestinians and Israelis are bound to live together, Eshel argued that the solutions depend on narratives of the past, with history at the center of the discussion.  Throughout the conference, participants were urged to ask themselves two questions: Can we do more? Can we do better?   

 

Video casts of select sessions of the conference are available on Stanford YouTube.

Titles of the sessions are:

  • History and Memory Welcome and Introduction (Amir Eshel and Gabriel Motzkin)
  • Session 1:  "Memory and the Philosophy of History" (Gabriel Motzkin) and “From Rational Historiography to Delusional Conspiracies: Travails of History in Iran” (Abbas Milani)
  • Session 2:“The Public and Private Erasure of History and Memory: Ottoman Empire, Turkish Republic and the Case of the Collective Violence against the Armenians (1789-2009)” (Fatma Müge Göçek)  and “The Shoah and the Logics of Comparison: The place of the Jewish Holocaust in Contemporary European Memory” (Heidemarie Uhl)
  • Session 4:  America, Prolepsis and the 'Holy Land' (Gregory Khalil) and “Neutralizing History and Memory in Divided Societies” (Bashir Bashir)
  • Session 5:  "Role of Historical Memory in Conflict Resolution" (Elazar Barkan) and “I Forgive You” (Simon Glendinning)
  • Session 6: "Historicizing Atrocity as a Path to Reconciliation" (Omer Bartov) and “A Memory of One’s Own: History, Political Change and the Meaning of 1977” (Mitchell Cohen)


Plans for the Next Conference
The final session involved a Round Table discussion in which participants had the opportunity to reflect on the larger themes of the conference and to suggest ways in which the dialogue could be fruitfully continued.  Three of the conference organizers began with their own reflections on the conference before the discussion was opened up to all participants.  Norman Naimark pointed to three key ideas that he had learned from the proceedings.  The first was the concept that history and memory should not necessarily be seen as distinct entities.  Second, Naimark pointed to the importance of comparative approaches, citing Derek Penslar’s presentation as a good example.  While the conference did not deal with the fields of Eastern European, Russian, and German history, external scholarly interjections into these fields have made them places of stimulating debate. Finally, since there is much that we do not know about 1948, Naimark urged the creation of a history that would place those events within a much broader chronological context, just as Omer Bartov is doing for the town of Buczacz.  In his remarks, Gabriel Motzkin focused on the relationship between memory and the ongoing political process in Israel.  He expressed agreement with Nadim Rouhana that Jewish Israelis need to recognize Palestinian memories, but added that Palestinians have to acknowledge the Jewish religious project in which the land of Israel occupies the same place that salvation does for Christians.  Finally, Amir Eshel urged participants to consider the role of the “practical past”—how do we use the past in order to engage the present and imagine the future? He suggested that there are a variety of possible political solutions, but that there is also a long list of actions that the present Israeli government could take in order to aid reconciliation, including acts of apology and acknowledgment.

The organizers express their deep appreciation to the conference participants.  They also support the keen interest in continuing the work on this subject and the larger project, with follow-up programming.  The next conference in this series, from the Europe Center-Van Leer Jerusalem Institute partnership, will be announced at The Europe Center website.

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Landau Economics Building
Lucas Room 134(A)

Conferences
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Opera After Freud

The conference will take as its point of departure two peculiar facts: that interpreting (especially German) opera with Freud’s theories in mind is not just productive, but almost imperative at a particular moment of the form’s history (in particular after Wagner); and that psychoanalysis suddenly loses at least some of that heuristic purchase in the period after the first World War. We hope to detail and interrogate the elective affinities between Freudian psychoanalysis and fin-de-siècle opera in light of the severance of that affinity later in the twentieth century. What unspoken factors subtended the uncanny felicity of Freud as a paradigm for analyzing the operas of Wagner, Pfitzner, Schreker, Zemlinsky, Braunfels, etc., and what factors fell away in the wake of Schoenberg, Wolpe, Berg, and Weill?

For full program, please visit https://www.stanford.edu/dept/DLCL/cgi-bin/web/events/opera-after-freud

Sponsored by the Office of the Associate Dean of the Humanities, the Division of Literatures, Cultures and Languages, the Stanford Humanities Center, The Europe Center, and the Department of Music

Levinthal Hall

Thomas Grey Professor of Musicology, and by courtesy, German Studies Moderator Stanford
Brian Hyer Professor of Music Theory Panelist University of Wisconsin-Madison
Lawrence Kramer Professor of English Speaker Fordham University
Paul Robinson Professor of History Moderator Stanford
Richard Leppert Professor of Cultural Studies & Comparative Literature Panelist University of Minnesota
Lydia Goehr Professor of Philosophy Panelist Columbia University
Peter Burgard Professor of German Moderator Harvard
Jessica Payette Assistant Professor of Musicology Panelist Oakland University
Charles Kronengold Assistant Professor of Musicology Panelist Stanford
Heather Hadlock Associate Professor of Musicology Moderator Stanford
Daniel Albright Professor of English Panelist Harvard
David Levin Professor of German Studies and Cinema and Media Studies Panelist University of Chicago
Mary Ann Smart Professor of Musicology Moderator UC Berkeley
Gundula Kreuzer Assistant Professor of Music History Panelist Yale
Ryan Minor Professor of Music History and Theory Panelist Stony Brook University
Adrian Daub Assistant Professor of German Studies Moderator Stanford
Bryan Gilliam Professor of Musicology Panelist Duke
Stephen Hinton Professor of Music, and by courtesy, German Panelist Stanford
Conferences

Developing Partnership: The Europe Center and University of Innsbruck

Authors
Karen Haley
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On September 13th, The Europe Center Associate Director Roland Hsu met with University of Innsbruck Rector Tillman Mark and members of his rectory to discuss areas of cooperative research and scholar exchange.  Also in attendance was the 2011 Distinguished Austrian Visiting Chair Professor Max Preglau who is on faculty at the University of Innsbruck. A full story (in German) can be found on the University of Innsbruck website.

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Josef Baumgartner

Encina Hall
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305

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Visiting Scholar, The Europe Center
Josef_Baumgartner_3_2.jpg PhD

Josef Baumgartner has been an economist at the Austrian Institute of Economic Research (WIFO) in Vienna, Austria since April 1996. He is a senior economist in WIFO's Macroeconomics and European Policy Research Group. In 2009 (Feb. to Nov.) he was acting desk economist for Austria at DG Economic and Financial Affairs of the European Commission in Brussels. From 2003 to 2005 he was a member of the Eurosystem Inflation Persistence Network (IPN) organized by the European Central Bank (ECB). Before he joined WIFO,  he was an assistant professor at the Department of Economics at the Technical University Vienna (Dec. 1994 to March 1996). Next to his research positions he held various affiliations as (part-time) lecturer in economics at the University of Linz, Technical University Vienna, Vienna University of Economics and Business and the University of Applied Sciences of the Chamber of Commerce in Vienna.

He studied economics and econometrics at the University of Linz (MA in Economics, July 1993), the Institute of Advanced Studies in Vienna (Sept. 1992 to Nov. 1994), the University of Copenhagen (August 2009) and the Vienna University of Economics and Business (PhD in Econometrics and Economics, Aug. 2010).

In his current research (jointly work with G. Ruenstler, WIFO) he analyses macroeconomic divergences within the euro area and with the world economy within an analytical framework of a global cointegrated vector autoregressive model.

Josef's publication list can be found on the back of his attached Curriculum Vitae.

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