The 6th Annual Romanian Film Festival at Stanford, UC Berkeley and San Francisco State University, with additional screenings at University of California Los Angeles and San Francisco Art Institute, centers on the theme “DILEMMAS, DECISIONS, DESTINIES” with a selection of films focusing on history, humor and events that continue to shape the contemporary film making landscape. Some of the selected films are first major works, while others represent established artists – year after year these filmmakers continue to make their mark on the international stage by garnering acclaim for their bold and exceptional storytelling.

The program presents Cristian Mungiu’s acclaimed “Graduation”, Best Director winner at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival, Bogdan Mirica’s thriller “Dogs”, winner of FIPRESCI AWARD at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival, Radu Jude’s “Aferim”, Silver Bear for Best Director at 2015 Berlin Film Festival, Romanian-French co-production “The Fixer” by Adrian Sitaru and “Double”, Catrinel Danaiata’s film directorial debut.

The Romanian film festival continues its series of interdisciplinary and comparative discussions on the realities of Eastern Europe in today’s increasingly globalized world. Audiences are invited to reflect upon key moments during pre and post-1945 European history from a Romanian perspective.

For the listing of film screenings and guest speakers by date and location, please visit the Romanian Film Festival website.

The event is presented by Stanford University's Center for Russian, East European & Eurasian Studies (CREEES) and Special Language Program (SLP); UC Berkeley's Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies; and San Francisco State's Department of Cinema.  Co-sponsored by Stanford University's The Europe Center and Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures; the San Francisco Art Institute; UCLA's Department of Slavic, East European and Eurasian Languages and Cultures, Center for European and Eurasian Studies, and Romanian Student Club; the “Nicolae Tonitza” High School (Bucharest, Romania) and Fundatia Semn (Romania).   For additional sponsorship information, please visit the Romanian Film Festival website.

ABSTRACT

In this talk, Karine Walther discusses her new book Sacred Interests: The United States and the Islamic World, 1821-1921. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as Americans increasingly came into contact with the Islamic world, U.S. diplomatic, cultural, political, and religious beliefs about Islam began to shape their responses to world events. In Sacred Interests, Karine V. Walther excavates the deep history of American Islamophobia, showing how negative perceptions of Islam and Muslims shaped U.S. foreign relations from the Early Republic to the end of World War I.

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ABSTRACT

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Dr. Jillian Schwedler is Professor of Political Science at the City University of New York’s Hunter College and the Graduate Center, and Nonresident Senior Fellow of the Rafiq Hariri Center for the Middle East at the Atlantic Council.  She is member of the Board of Directors and the Editorial Committee of the Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP), publishers of the quarterly Middle East Report.

Dr. Schwedler’s books include the award-winning Faith in Moderation: Islamist Parties in Jordan and Yemen (Cambridge 2006) and (with Laleh Khalili) Policing and Prisons in the Middle East (Columbia 2010).  Her articles have appeared in World Politics, Comparative Politics, Middle East Policy, Middle East Report, Journal of Democracy, and Social Movement Studies, among many others.  Her research has received support from the National Science Foundation, the United States Institute of Peace, the Fulbright Scholars Program, the American Institute for Yemen Studies, and the Social Science Research Council, among others. 

ABSTRACT

From 1975 to 1990, Lebanon experienced a long war involving various national and international actors. The peace agreement that followed and officially propelled the country into a "postwar" era did not address many of the root causes of war, nor did it hold main actors accountable. Instead, a politics of "no victor, no vanquished" was promoted, in which the political elite agreed simply to consign the war to the past. However, since then, Lebanon has found itself still entangled in various forms of political violence, from car bombings and assassinations to additional outbreaks of armed combat.

In this talk, Sami Hermez discusses his newly released book War Is Coming. The book argues that the country's political leaders have enabled the continuation of violence and examines how people live between these periods of conflict. What do everyday conversations, practices, and experiences look like during these moments? How do people attempt to find a measure of certainty or stability in such times? Hermez's ethnographic study of everyday life in Lebanon between the volatile years of 2006 and 2009 tackles these questions and reveals how people engage in practices of recollecting past war while anticipating future turmoil. Hermez demonstrates just how social interactions and political relationships with the state unfold and critically engages our understanding of memory and violence, seeing in people's recollections living and spontaneous memories that refuse to forget the past. With an attention to the details of everyday life, War Is Coming shows how even a conversation over lunch, or among friends, may turn into a discussion about both past and future unrest.

Shedding light on the impact of protracted conflict on people's everyday experiences and the way people anticipate political violence, Hermez highlights an urgency for alternative paths to sustaining political and social life in Lebanon.

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- This event is co-sponsored by Stanford Global Studies, The Europe Center, and the History Department - 

Abstract: By 1914, exploiting colonies was a well-established practice of even the most ‘liberal’ empires. Treating areas of Europe like colonies was not, except on the more remote peripheries. However, when the Central Powers occupied substantial parts of Europe during World War One, they applied harsh economic regimes while the British and French intensified the use of their empires. This paper will consider the comparisons – and the links - between these two forms of exploitation. It will suggest that both became ‘laboratories of autarky’ for kinds of economic regime (especially with regard to manpower) that were still not possible domestically for the nation-states fighting the war. The argument will be general but focus empirically on French North Africa and German-occupied France and Belgium. 

About the Speaker: John Horne is Leverhulme Visiting Professor at Oxford University (2016-17) and Emeritus Fellow and former Professor of Modern European History at Trinity College Dublin, where he founded the Centre for War Studies. He is a Fellow of the Royal Irish Academy and a board member of the Research Centre at the Historial de la Grande Guerre, Péronne (France). He is the author and editor of a number of books and over ninety chapters and articles, many relating to the history of the Great War. Among his latest publications are (ed.) A Companion to World War One (Oxford, Blackwell-Wiley, 2010); (ed.) Vers la guerre totale: le tournant de 1914-1915 (Paris, Tallandier, 2010); and with Robert Gerwarth (ed.) War in Peace: Paramilitary Violence in Europe after the Great War (Oxford University Press, 2012). He is currently working on a history of the French experiences of the First World War.

This workshop is part of the Economic History Workshop series in the Department of Economics and is co-sponsored by The Europe Center.

Damian Collins MP is a member of the House of Commons, and Chairman of the Parliamentary Select Committee for Culture, Media and Sport. He graduated in modern history from the University of Oxford, and Charmed Life, the phenomenal world of Philip Sassoon is his first book.

No RSVP required.  For more information, please contact jewishstudies.stanford.edu.

*This is an author event; the bookstore will be on-site selling copies of Collins' book.

This event is co-sponsored by the Taube Center for Jewish Studies, the Department of History, and The Europe Center.

The Italian civil war and the Nazi occupation of Italy occurred at a critical juncture, just before the birth of a new democracy and when, for the first time in a generation, Italians were choosing political affiliations and forming political identities. In this paper we study how these traumatic events shaped the new political system. We exploit geographic heterogeneity in the intensity and duration of the civil war, and the persistence of the battlefront along the “Gothic line” cutting through Northern-Central Italy. We find that the Communist Party gained votes in the post-war elections where the Nazi occupation and the civil war lasted longer, mainly at the expense of the centrist and catholic parties. This effect persists until the early 1990s. Evidence also suggests that this is due to an effect on political attitudes. Thus, the foreign occupation and the civil war left a lasting legacy of political extremism and polarization on the newborn Italian democracy.

Guido Tabellini is the Intesa Sanpaolo Chair in Political Economics at Universita' Bocconi.

This seminar is part of the Comparative Politics Workshop in the Department of Political Science and is co-sponsored by The Europe Center.