Abstract: Today’s international relations are plagued by anxieties about the nuclear state and the state of being nuclear. But exactly what does it mean for a nation, a technology, a substance, or a workplace to be “nuclear”? How, and to whom, does the designation “nuclear” matter? Considering these questions from African vantage points shifts our paradigm for understanding the global nuclear order. In any given year of the Cold War, African mines supplied 20%–50% of the Western world’s uranium ore. As both political object and material substance, African ore shaped global conceptions and meanings of the “nuclear,” with enduring consequences for the legal and illegal circulation of radioactive materials, the global institutions and treaties governing nuclear weapons and atomic energy, and the lives and health of workers. This talk explores those consequences, drawing on historical and contemporary examples from Niger and South Africa. The view from Africa offers scholars and policymakers fresh perspectives on issues including global nuclear governance, export controls, pricing mechanisms, and occupational health regulation

About the Speaker: Gabrielle Hecht is professor of history at the University of Michigan, where she also directs the Program in Science, Technology, and Society. Her publications include two books on history and policy in the nuclear age. Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade (MIT Press, 2012) offers new perspectives on the global nuclear order. The Radiance of France: Nuclear Power and National Identity (MIT Press, 1998, 2nd edition, 2009) explores how the French embedded nuclear policy in reactor technology. It received awards from the American Historical Association and the Society for the History of Technology. Hecht was appointed by ministerial decree to the scientific advisory board for France’s national radioactive waste management agency, ANDRA. She also serves on the advisory board for AGORAS, an interdisciplinary collaboration between academic and industry researchers to improve safety governance in French nuclear installations. She recently advised the U.S. Senate Committee on Investigations on the history of the uranium market, for its report on Wall Street Bank Involvement with Physical Commodities. Hecht’s work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council for Learned Societies, and the South African and Dutch national research foundations, among others. Hecht holds a Ph.D. in history and sociology of science from the University of Pennsylvania.

Abstract: Scholars know quite a lot about U.S. nuclear war planning from the end of World War II to the end of the Cold War. We know a great deal about how nuclear deterrence was and is supposed to work. We know much less about how officers and others understood the circumstances and consequences if deterrence had failed and these plans had been used in war. What was it like to make very specific and workable plans for a war that, in President Ronald Reagan’s words, “cannot be won and must never be fought”—but nonetheless—might have been fought? This is a problem of understanding how organizations build complex technical and logistical routines, and how people in these organizations understood and made sense of the possibility that in some circumstances, nuclear weapons would be used. How did war planners imagine the circumstances? The scenarios of what might ensue? The consequences? It is one thing to say the whole situation was a paradox, or a conundrum; it is another to understand the many meanings of this situation for those involved. Explanation hinges on how people in organizations make plans, develop scenarios, and tell stories.

About the Speaker: Lynn Eden is Associate Director for Research at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University. Eden received her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Michigan, held several pre- and post-doctoral fellowships, and taught in the history department at Carnegie Mellon before coming to Stanford.

In the area of international security, Eden has focused on U.S. foreign and military policy, arms control, the social construction of science and technology, and organizational issues regarding nuclear policy and homeland security. She co-edited, with Steven E. Miller, Nuclear Arguments: Understanding the Strategic Nuclear Arms and Arms Control Debates (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989). She was an editor of The Oxford Companion to American Military History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), which takes a social and cultural perspective on war and peace in U.S. history. That volume was chosen as a Main Selection of the History Book Club.

Eden's book Whole World on Fire: Organizations, Knowledge, and Nuclear Weapons Devastation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004; New Delhi: Manas Publications, 2004) explores how and why the U.S. government--from World War II to the present--has greatly underestimated the damage caused by nuclear weapons by failing to predict damage from firestorms. It shows how well-funded and highly professional organizations, by focusing on what they do well and systematically excluding what they don't, may build a poor representation of the world--a self-reinforcing fallacy that can have serious consequences, from the sinking of the Titanic to not predicting the vulnerability of the World Trade Center to burning jet fuel. Whole World on Fire won the American Sociological Association's 2004 Robert K. Merton Award for best book in science, knowledge, and technology.

Eden has also written on life in small-town America. Her first book, Crisis in Watertown (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972), was her college senior thesis; it was a finalist for a National Book Award in 1973. Her second book, Witness in Philadelphia, with Florence Mars (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), about the murders of civil rights workers Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman in the summer of 1964, was a Book of the Month Club Alternate Selection.

An international conference organized by the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies at Stanford University.

Participants:

Damir Arsenijević, Edina Bećirević, Boris Buden, Amila Buturović, Andrew Herscher, Norman Naimark, Zilka Spahić-Šiljak, Branimir Stojanović, Milica Tomić, and Sarah Wagner

Co-sponsored by Stanford Global Studies, The Europe Center, The Mediterranean Studies Forum, The Sohaib and Sara Abbasi Program in Ilamic Studies, the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Film and Media Studies Program in the Department of Art & Art History, Stanford Humanities Center, with funding from the US Department of Education Title VI National Resource Centers program.

Ernst Röhm (1887-1934) was an early member of the Nazi Party and Hitler’s closest friend.  As head of the Nazi SA (Sturmabteilung), Röhm was one of the most powerful men in the Third Reich, at least until his execution during the “Night of Long Knives” in the summer of 1934.  Röhm was also openly homosexual.   This talk considers Röhm’s rise, the disclosure of his homosexuality in 1931 in two widely-publicized trials (for violation of the anti-sodomy statute), his role in the consolidation of Nazi control, and his downfall.  The talk also considers how Hans Blüher’s theory of the Männerbund (male association) might help analyze not only Röhm and the Nazis but also contribute more broadly to the historical sociology of nationalist revolution.

Co-sponsored by the Department of History, The Europe Center and the Department of German Studies.

Abstract: Chevaline was the codename given to a highly-secret program begun in 1970 to improve the performance of the UK's force of Polaris submarine-launched ballistic missiles in order to give them the capability to overcome Soviet ABM defenses deployed around Moscow. After much technical difficulty, delays in project timescale and cost escalation the new system was finally introduced in 1982, but it had already attracted major criticism for the expenditure involved, claims of project mismanagement, the rationale that underpinned its development, and its concealment from proper parliamentary scrutiny. This lecture will explore the background to the program, why it ran into so many problems, and how it became one of the most controversial episodes in post-war British defense policy. An understanding of the problems confronted by the attempt to improve Polaris illuminates a number of key themes and issues that are of relevance to policymakers concerned with strategic weapons programs and project management.

About the Speaker: Matthew Jones’ current research focuses on British nuclear history during the Cold War. He has also written on many different aspects of US and British foreign and defense policy in the 20th century, and has a long-standing interest in empire and decolonization in South East Asia. Jones’ first book, Britain, the United States and the Mediterranean War, 1942-44 (Macmillan, 1996), examined strains in the Anglo-American relationship by strategic issues and command problems in the Mediterranean theater. His book, Conflict and Confrontation in South East Asia, 1961-1965: Britain, the United States, Indonesia, and the Creation of Malaysia (Cambridge University Press, 2002), looks at the federation of Malaysia during British decolonization in the early 1960s. After Hiroshima: The United States, Race, and Nuclear Weapons in Asia, 1945-1965 (Cambridge University Press, 2010) addresses US nuclear policies in Asia in the period of the Korean War, confrontation with China, and early engagement in Vietnam. His current project on UK nuclear policy encompasses the development of nuclear strategy within NATO, the Anglo-American nuclear relationship, and European responses to strategic arms control. In 2008, Jones was appointed by the Prime Minister to become the Cabinet Office official historian of the UK strategic nuclear deterrent and the Chevaline program, a commission that will lead to the publication of a two-volume official history exploring British nuclear policy between 1945 and 1982. Jones’s journal articles have appeared in Diplomatic History, Historical Journal, Journal of Cold War Studies, and English Historical Review. He gained his DPhil in Modern History at St. Antony’s College, Oxford, in 1992.

Karen Dawisha is the author of Putin’s Kleptocracy. Who Owns Russia? and the Walter E. Havighurst Professor of Political Science and Director of the Havighurst Center at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.

Co-sponsored by the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies, The Europe Center, and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law.

This colloquium is the final event of the year-long working group on 'The Contemporary." The workshop examines the  “contemporary” with a focus on defining moments such as: 1945, 1973, 1989, and 2001. In recent years the concept of the contemporary has been taken up within limited disciplinary discourses and in the context of distinct geographical settings. The horizon of this workshop, however, is the global. We employ a comparative and interdisciplinary approach to the hybrid term “contemporary” as it intersects various fields and serves as a heuristic device to understand phenomena in politics, culture, and the arts. In this spirit, our colloquium brings together scholars from various fields and disciplines that all are grappling with questions such as 1. what is this thing we call "the contemporary," and how do traditional disciplinary methods need to adapt to new challenges faced by the unique cultural objects of the contemporary moment?

For more information on this colloqium and to view videos of the presentations, please visit The Contemporary website

Co-sponsored by the Department of Literatures, Cultures and Language, Department of Literatures, Cultures and Language Research Units, The Europe Center, Stanford Humanities Center and Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity.

What does 20 years mean when we are dealing with traumas of war? How do people symbolize the war, what kind of imaginary do they create when they try to make sense of what happened to them and their country, and how do they come to terms with their losses?

In the last years, I have visited both Srebrenica and St. Louis in Missouri, home of the largest community of Bosnian refugees in the US. The way these two communities deal with trauma is radically different. However, they strangely find similar dilemmas when they search for the remains of their loved ones with the help of forensic analysis.

Trauma, however, has not surpassed also the observers - the Dutch soldiers who witnessed the genocide and did nothing to prevent it. But did the other observers - the international community - learn anything from Srebrenica? Did not the lack of reflection on failure of intervention in Srebrenica, paradoxically, allow other future failures to multiply?

Renata Salecl is a philosopher and sociologist. She is Senior Researcher at the Institute of  Criminology at the Faculty of Law in Ljubljana, Slovenia, professor at the School of Law, Birkbeck College, University of London and Recurring Visiting Professor at Cardozo School of Law in New York. Salecl is the author of The Spoils of Freedom (Routledge 1994), (Per)versions of Love and Hate (Verso, 1998), On Anxiety (Routledge 2004), Tyranny of Choice (Profile Books 2010).  Her books have been translated into more than 10 languages.  She also writes commentaries for the leading daily newspaper Delo in Ljubljana, Slovenia. In the last years, she has been named Slovenian Woman Scientist of the Year as well as Woman of the Year.

Co-sponsored by Stanford Global Studies, The Europe Center, The Mediterranean Studies Forum, The Sohaib and Sara Abbasi Program in Ilamic Studies, the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Film and Media Studies Program in the Department of Art & Art History, Stanford Humanities Center, with funding from the US Department of Education Title VI National Resource Centers program.

For more information on the conference, please visit here: Yugoslav Space Twenty Years After Srebrenica

To RSVP, please send email to luisrr@stanford.edu.  You may request a copy of the workshop paper at the same time.

On March 27, 1492, a few days before the Edict that expelled the Jews from Spain, the royal chronicler Alfonso de Palencia (1423-1492) published his Castilian translations of two works by the famous Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, The Jewish War and Against Apion.  Palencia’s volume, Guerra judaica con los libros contra Appion, thus exemplifies the tension between two facets of Josephus’s writing:  his fierce critique of Jewish sectarianism and stubborn resistance to Imperial order and his eloquent defence of their religious and cultural traditions. This paper explores the cultural and political significance of these Spanish translations in the light of the events leading up to 1492 and it considers whether Palencia appropriated this Romanized Jewish historian in order to open up a space for religious minorities in the new imperial order ushered in by the Catholic Monarchs. To do this, I read Palencia’s translations against other contemporary texts by and about Jews and conversos, and consider the marginalia of sixteenth-century readers found in extant copies of the 1492 edition.

The broader issues raised include: the ambivalent alignment between the ‘intellectual’ and the ‘State’ (both terms need to be historicised); anti-judaism as a ‘way of thinking’ (to borrow David Nirenberg’s term); the meaning and limits of early modern tolerance.

This talk is part of the Theoretical Perspectives of the Middle Ages workshop.

Co-sponsored by The Europe Center, Stanford Humanities Center, Iberian and Latin American Cultures and the Department of Religious Studies.

Abstract

Convened by Professor Joel Beinin and Professor Robert Crews, this one-day conference will explore the global history of the Middle East and North Africa. The conference is chronologically delimited by two New York-centered financial panics that had substantial consequences for the Middle East and North Africa. While the region has long been engaged in global circuits of commerce, culture, and migration, this choice of chronological frame highlights the renewed salience of political economy in several academic disciplines.

Conference Program

8:45 -9:00 Welcoming Remarks

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