Cosponsored with the Iberian Studies Program, the Mediterranean Studies Forum, and the Department of History.

Noël Valis is a Professor of Spanish at Yale University. She previously taught at Johns Hopkins University, the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, and the University of Georgia. Her areas of interest include nineteenth- and twentieth-century Spanish literature and culture, comparative literature, and interdisciplinary approaches to modern Spanish culture.

She has published 19 books and numerous articles in PMLA, Novel, Romanic Review, Hispanic Review, Modern Age, MLN, Comparative Literature Studies, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, and other journals and essay collections. In May 2004 she was elected President of the Twentieth-Century Spanish Association of America. She is the recipient of both an NEH (National Endowment for the Humanities) Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship for 2006-07, for the book project, Body Sacraments: Catholicism and the Imagination in Modern Spanish Narrative.

She received her B.A. from Douglass College and her Ph.D. in Spanish and French from Bryn Mawr College.

Robert Davidson is assistant professor of Spanish and Catalan at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, University of Toronto. He holds a PhD from Cornell and an MA from Queen's University at Kingston. His research interests include theories of space, architecture, and Spanish cinema. He is currently working on hotel culture. He will be speaking about the Hotel Colon in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War and a hotel in Sarajevo during the Balkan wars in the 1990s.

Professor Davidson has published on different aspects of Castilian and Catalan avant-gardes, cultural theory, and film. He is currently completing two book projects: Jazz Age Barcelona and Hotel: From Détente to Detention.

Sponsored by the Iberian Studies Program at the Forum on Contemporary Europe and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese.

Cosponsored by the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies, the France-Stanford Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, and the Consulate General of France in San Francisco.

Alain Bauer is a French criminologist, a freemason, and a constitutionalist lawyer.

He has been Chancellor of the International Masonic Institute since 2003. Mr. Bauer is also the Director of the Institute for International and Strategic Relations and the National Institute for Higher Studies in Security, Director of Institute Alfred Fournier, and Director of Versant SA. He was the former Vice-President of the University of Paris, Panthéon-Sorbonne from 1982-1989 and a board member of the Chancellor's Office of the University of Paris. Mr. Bauer was also the former Secretary General of the World Trade Center in Paris-La-Défense and a former member of the International Legal Commission of the World Trade Center Association.

"Ethnicity in Today's Europe" will commence with a Related Presidential Lecture featuring Partha Chatterjee.

Conference Statement

Headlines today blaze with stories about the fate of Europe. There is a sense, both in Europe and around the world, that a sort of "tipping point" has been reached. A recurrent theme is the question of demographics. For instance, how are European social welfare systems going to cope with an aging population? What role will immigrants from outside Europe's borders, both recent and less recent, play in European society? What will be the impact of immigration between the member states of the European Union? What place will Europe's growing population of Muslims have in twenty-first century Europe?

As the ongoing process of unification redraws Europe's borders, as the populations of major European cities become more and more diverse, the question of ethnicity is at the forefront of many of the most important debates on the continent. On the one hand the long history of European national and ethnic identities is at play, as is the legacy of colonialism. On the other, a significant recent upswing in the movement of peoples around the globe has changed the face of Europe, often literally. Movement, of course, from outside Europe's borders into European states. But also, and crucially, movement within the space between Portugal and the Urals. Such movement certainly responds to a number of economic and social needs. At the same time, European conceptions of citizenship, equity, and nationhood often exist in tension with the realities of changing ethnic populations.

The conference "Ethnicity in Today's Europe" at Stanford will address this topic in an interdisciplinary manner. Participants will focus on the question: "What's new about the situation in Europe today?" Bringing together scholars from different disciplines, the conference will provide a historical perspective together with contributions addressing economic, social, cultural, and political issues. Some themes that may be discussed include: how the current situation mirrors or departs from the past; the role of the media in portraying the interaction between different groups; the different perspectives of specific populations within Europe; whether Europe's diversity is best described under the rubric of ethnicity, nationality, race, or some other term; similarities and differences between European nation-states with regard to diversity within their borders. Above all, participants will use their own disciplinary perspective to assess what is at stake in the interaction between peoples in Europe as the twenty-first century gets underway.

"Ethnicity in Today's Europe" is jointly presented by the Forum on Contemporary Europe and the Stanford Humanities Center.