Born in Tunis in 1957, Laurent Cohen-Tanugi is a Paris-based international lawyer, policy adviser and public intellectual.

A member of the Paris and New York Bars, his practice focuses on cross-border mergers and acquisitions, international arbitration, competition law, and policy advisory work. In the fall of 2007, he was appointed by the French government to lead a task force on the future of the European Union's Lisbon Strategy, ahead of the French Presidency of the EU ("Beyond Lisbon: A European Strategy For Globalisation", Peter Lang, 2008, www.euroworld2015.eu).

He was previously a partner of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP (2005-2007), Senior Vice President and General Counsel of Sanofi-Synthélabo, a European pharmaceutical group (2004), and a partner of Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton (1991-2003). In recent years, he was involved in substantial cross-border mergers such as Vivendi Universal, Sanofi-Aventis and Alcatel-Lucent.

Mr Cohen-Tanugi is an alumnus of the Ecole Normale Supérieure and holds an agrégation in French literature from the University of Paris and a degree from the Institute of Political Studies of Paris.  He graduated from the University of Paris Law School in 1981 and received an LL.M. degree from the Harvard Law School in 1982. 

He is the author of numerous influential books, including Le Droit sans l'Etat (PUF, 1985), a comparative essay on the French and American legal and political traditions, prefaced by Professor Stanley Hoffmann of Harvard University; La Métamorphose de la Démocratie (Odile Jacob, 1989), on the changes affecting the French and European democratic cultures since the late sixties; L'Europe en danger (Fayard, 1992), anticipating the current crisis of political Europe; Le Choix de l'Europe (Fayard, 1995), on the future of European unification, and Le Nouvel ordre numérique (Odile Jacob, 1999), a multi-disciplinary analysis of the communications and information technology revolution. 

His latest English-language works include An Alliance At Risk, The United States And Europe After September 11 (Johns Hopkins University Press, September 2003), exploring the present state and future prospects of transatlantic relations, and The End of Europe? (Foreign Affairs, November/December 2005, Volume 84., No. 6), an analysis of the state of the EU following the French and Dutch rejections of the EU constitutional treaty, and most recently, The Shape of the World to Come, on the geopolitics of globalization (Columbia University Press, 2008), which will also be published in China.

Laurent Cohen-Tanugi is a regular columnist in French newspapers Les Echos and Le Monde, and lectures on a variety of subjects internationally. A director of Notre Europe, a think-tank founded by former EC Commission President Jacques Delors, he is actively involved in European policy-making. He is also a member of the French Academy of Technologies and a director of several think-tanks, including the Fondation pour l'innovation politique. A frequent consultant to the French government, he sat on the Commission on Judicial Reform set up by President Chirac in 1997, and on the Commission on the Intangible Economy set up by the French government in 2006. He is also a member of the Policy Advisory Council of the French-American Foundation.

Mr. Cohen-Tanugi taught a seminar in European affairs at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris from 2005 to 2008 and will be teaching a course on Transatlantic Merger and Acquisitions at the Harvard Law School in the spring of 2009. Laurent Cohen-Tanugi is the advisor to the Polish government in preparation for his upcoming presidency of the EU in 2011.

This lecture summarizes the argument of a forthcoming book (Suhrkamp, Princeton University Press) that Stalin's crimes of the 1930s should be considered genocide. This requires a review of historical/legal concepts of genocide and of the mass killing of the period itself.

Norman Naimark is the Robert and Florence McDonnell Professor of East European Studies: a professor of history; core faculty member of FSI's Forum on Contemporary Europe; and an FSI senior fellow by courtesy. He is an expert on modern East European, Balkan, and Russian history. His current research focuses on the history of genocide in the 20th century and on postwar Soviet policy in Europe. He is author of the critically acclaimed volumes: The Russians in Germany: The History of the Soviet Zone of Germany, 1945-1949 (Harvard 1995) and Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in 20th Century Europe (Harvard 2001).  Most recently, he has co-edited books on Yugoslavia and its Historians (Stanford 2003), Soviet Politics in Austria, 1945-1955: Documents from the Russian Archives (in German and Russian, Austrian Academy of Sciences, 2006),  and The Lost Transcripts of the Politburo (Yale 2008). 

Ambassador Simons will seek to honor the broad scholarship of his friend Alexander Dallin by situating a discussion of emerging states within a vision of Eurasia as a world region equally shaped and driven by its own internal dynamic(s). Simons will argue that across the region shared experience and shared features are just as weighty as differences: civil societies are weak, markets are distorted or incomplete, politics features struggle among elites over resources and tends toward semi-authoritarian rule even where democratic forms take hold. Yet there is cause for hope. Simons focuses on states, but he sees states consolidating almost everywhere, so that as resurgent Russia presses on its neighbors, they can now press back. Stable development of strong state institutions within which new civil societies can take root and grow is possible and should be the top priority, but it will come only if the nationalism that gives content to these new states is civic and inclusionary rather than ethno-religious on the East Central European model. The U.S. can help or hinder its emergence everywhere in Eurasia, but if it wishes to help it must realize that in this part of the world the path to democracy leads through state development, and that it can best act as a City on the Hill if its policy centers on today's emerging new states, since they must be the incubators of tomorrow's new civil societies.

The Annual Alexander Dallin Lecture was founded in 1998 to honor Professor of History and Political Science Alexander Dallin, a founder of Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies at Stanford and CREEES director, 1985-89 and 1992-94. The Dallin Lecture is co-sponsored by the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

In her presentation "Russian Science Policy: Before and During the Economic Crisis," Irina Dezhina will outline the major characteristics of the R&D sector in Russia and offer an analysis of government science policy on the eve of the global financial crisis. She will also discuss the various reactions to the financial crisis in Russia, both by the federal government and the science sector, including companies investing in R&D. Finally, Dezhina will analyze the effectiveness of the Russian government's anti-crisis policy in terms of its impact on supporting science and innovation.

Irina Dezhina is a Head of Division at the Institute for the World Economy and International Relations of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow. She also teaches the course of “Modern Problems of Russian Science and Innovation Policy” at the State University – Higher School of Economics. Dezhina earned her candidate degree in science and technology policy studies in 1992 from the Institute of National Forecasting of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and doctorate degree – in 2007 from the Institute for the World Economy and International Relations of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

She was Senior Research Fellow at the Analytical Center on Science and Industrial Policy, a think tank for the Russian Ministry of Science and Technology Policy and State Committee on Industrial Policy (1993-1995). Dezhina was also a Fulbright Scholar at the MIT Program “Science, Technology, and Society” (1997), and worked as Science Policy Analyst at Stanford Research Institute International, Washington, DC, USA (1998-1999). For twelve years (1995-2007) she worked at the Institute for the Economy in Transition (Moscow), a Russian think-tank. She has served as a consultant for the World Bank, OECD, and New Eurasia Foundation, and the U.S. Civilian Research and Development Foundation (since 1999). Dezhina has more then 150 publications including 6 monographs.

Jointly sponsored by the Forum on Contemporary Europea and the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies.

Jointly sponsored by the Forum on Contemporary Europe, Taube Center for Jewish Studies, and Department of History at Stanford University.

Antonis Balasopoulos, Assistant Professor in the Department of English Studies, University of Cyprus, is one of the most important younger scholars working in literary criticism and theory today. He has co-edited Comparative Literature and Global Studies: Histories and Trajectories; Conformism, Non-Conformism and Anti-Conformism in the Culture of the United States; and States of Theory: History and Geography of Critical Narratives.

He has held a Visiting Research Fellowship at Princeton University and has been appointed Institute Faculty at the Dartmouth Institute of American Studies, Dartmouth College. His research interests include Utopian fiction and nonfiction, 16th-19th centuries; Literature and Culture of US Empire, 1800-1900; literature, geography and the production of space; nationalism, colonialism and postcoloniality; critical theory, especially Marxism, genre theory, and theories of the political; visual culture, especially cinema.

Sponsored by the Division of Literatures, Cultures and Languages, the Department of Comparative Literature, the English Department, the Program in Modern Thought and Literature, German Studies, and the Forum on Contemporary Europe.

Europe is increasingly investing in research through its Framework Programme for Research. A European Research Council has been created to foster basic research of the highest quality. Business and industry are encouraged to take R&D initiatives. Attempts are also being made to coordinate research between EU Member Countries to achieve critical mass and avoid duplication of efforts. The new research program is also becoming more internationally oriented. Will Europe succeed in becoming the most knowledge intensive region in the world?

Kerstin Eliasson is an expert on national and international research and science policy. She is currently Director, Ministry of Education and Research, Sweden. From 2004-2006, she served as State Secretary, Ministry of Education, Science and Culture. Mrs. Eliasson has been the chief negotiator for Sweden's participation in two international research facilities in Germany. She serves as Member of the Board of the Joint Research Centre (European Union) and Member of High-level Strategic Forum for International S&T Cooperation (EU).

There are some peculiarities in conducting interviews about the Soviet past in post-Soviet space. What details of everyday life do interviewees reveal? And how do life stories shaped during Soviet times, but recalled and reconsidered in the post-communist era influence the interview?

Prof. Dalia Marcinkeviciene is chair of the Women’s Studies Center, and a lecturer in History Department at Vilnius University. Her research interests include Lithuanian family history during the period 1795-1990; theories in Sovietology. Marcinkeviciene was awarded Fulbright (2002-2003) and AAUW (2005-2006) research fellowships. She is an author and editor of three books (published in Lithuanian): Famous Lithuanian Women, the 19th – the Beginning of the 20th Century. Vilnius University Press, 1997; The Society of Married People: Marriage and Divorce in Lithuania, the 19th – the Beginning of the 20th Century. Lithuanian Institute of History, 1999; Life Stories of Lithuanian Women. Vilnius University Press, 2007