Stanford University

History

SPICE Webinar: "Human Rights Day 2020: Teacher Workshop on Global Human Rights and Minority Social Movements in Japan"

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Webinar recording: https://youtu.be/8oDHKdyhZO0

 

In recognition of Human Rights Day on December 10, SPICE is honored to feature Dr. Kiyoteru Tsutsui, Professor of Sociology at Stanford University. Tsutsui’s research and scholarship on the globalization of human rights and its impact on local policy and politics—particularly with regards to minority groups in Japan—has helped to shape student awareness and understanding of the multitude of issues surrounding the protection of human rights.

In this webinar, Tsutsui will address the following:

  • How did “human rights” emerge as a universal norm and become institutionalized into various international treaties, organs, and instruments?
  • What impact have all the international institutions had on actual local human rights practices?
  • How do the case studies of the three most salient minority groups in Japan—the Ainu, Koreans, and Burakumin—help us to understand the transformative effect of global human rights ideas and institutions on minority activists?

Tsutsui’s in-depth historical comparative analysis in his book, Rights Make Might: Global Human Rights and Minority Social Movements in Japan, offers rare windows into local, micro-level impact of global human rights and contributes to our understanding of international norms and institutions, social movements, human rights, ethnoracial politics, and Japanese society.

This webinar is a joint collaboration between the Japan Program at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, Center for East Asian Studies, and SPICE at Stanford University.

 

Featured Speaker:

Kiyoteru Tsutsui, PhD 

Portrait of Kiyoteru Tsutsui
Kiyoteru Tsutsui is the Henri H. and Tomoye Takahashi Professor and Senior Fellow in Japanese Studies at Shorenstein APARC, the Director of the Japan Program at APARC, a Senior Fellow of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and Professor of Sociology at Stanford University. Prior to his appointment at Stanford in July 2020, Tsutsui was Professor of Sociology, Director of the Center for Japanese Studies, and Director of the Donia Human Rights Center at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Tsutsui’s research interests lie in political/comparative sociology, social movements, globalization, human rights, and Japanese society. More specifically, he has conducted (1) cross-national quantitative analyses on how human rights ideas and instruments have expanded globally and impacted local politics and (2) qualitative case studies of the impact of global human rights on Japanese politics. 

His research on the globalization of human rights and its impact on local politics has appeared in numerous academic publications and social science journals. His recent book publications include Rights Make Might: Global Human Rights and Minority Social Movements in Japan (Oxford University Press 2018), and the co-edited volume Corporate Social Responsibility in a Globalizing World (with Alwyn Lim, Cambridge University Press 2015). He has been a recipient of the National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, National Science Foundation grants, and the SSRC/CGP Abe Fellowship, among numerous other grants and awards. Tsutsui received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Kyoto University and earned an additional master’s degree and PhD from Stanford’s sociology department in 2002.

 

Via Zoom Webinar. Registration Link: https://bit.ly/3mMf8Aj.

Kiyoteru Tsutsui, PhD Stanford University
Workshops

A History from Within

 

This presentation is part of the French Culture Workshop Series

 

Co-sponsored by:
The Department of French and Italian, The Europe Center, the France-Stanford Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, and the Department of History

A History From Within: When Historians Write About Their Own Kin (DRAFT)

Online via Zoom: JOIN THE WEBINAR

Stéphane Gerson Professor of French, French Studies, and History New York University
Workshops

The Archive Question: Power and Statecraft in Saudi Arabia

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ABSTRACT

This talk is based on the speaker's recently released book Archive Wars The Politics of History in Saudi Arabia (Stanford University Press, 2020). The production of history is premised on the selective erasure of certain pasts and the artifacts that stand witness to them. From the elision of archival documents to the demolition of sacred and secular spaces, each act of destruction is also an act of state building. Following the 1991 Gulf War, political elites in Saudi Arabia pursued these dual projects of historical commemoration and state formation with greater fervor to enforce their postwar vision for state, nation, and economy. Seeing Islamist movements as the leading threat to state power, they sought to de-center religion from educational, cultural, and spatial policies. With this book, Rosie Bsheer explores the increasing secularization of the postwar Saudi state and how it manifested in assembling a national archive and reordering urban space in Riyadh and Mecca. The elites' project was rife with ironies: in Riyadh, they employed world-renowned experts to fashion an imagined history, while at the same time in Mecca they were overseeing the obliteration of a thousand-year-old topography and its replacement with commercial megaprojects. Archive Wars shows how the Saudi state's response to the challenges of the Gulf War served to historicize a national space, territorialize a national history, and ultimately refract both through new modes of capital accumulation.

SPEAKER BIO

Rosie Bsheer
Rosie Bsheer is Assistant Professor of History at Harvard University, where she teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on oil and empire, social and intellectual movements, urban history, historiography, and the making of the modern Middle East. Rosie’s publications include Archive Wars: The Politics of History in Saudi Arabia (Stanford University Press, 2020) and “A Counterrevolutionary State: Popular Movements and the Making of Saudi Arabia,” Past and Present (2018). She is Associate Producer of the 2007 Oscar-nominated film My Country, My Country and a co-editor of Jadaliyya E-zine.

Online, via Zoom: REGISTER

Rosie Bsheer Assistant Professor of History Harvard University
Seminars
Arab Reform and Democracy Speaker Series

Anna Ruxi Zhang

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APARC Predoctoral Fellow, 2020-2021
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Anna Zhang joined the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) as APARC Predoctoral Fellow for the 2020-2021 academic year. She is a PhD candidate at the political science department. Her research interests include civil conflict, state building, and internal migration. Her dissertation studies China's institutional solution to the challenges of territorial control. 

Jeffrey Weng

Shorenstein APARC Encina Hall E301 Stanford University
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Shorenstein Postdoctoral Fellow in Contemporary Asia, 2020-2021
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Jeffrey Weng joined the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center as the Shorenstein Postdoctoral Fellow in Contemporary Asia for the 2020-2021 academic year.  His research focuses on the evolution of language, ethnicity, and nationalism in China. At Shorenstein APARC, Weng continued to publish papers based on his doctoral research while reworking his dissertation into a book manuscript.

Jeffrey's dissertation examined language in the context of Chinese nation-building. Mandarin Chinese was artificially created about a century ago and initially had few speakers. Now, it is the world’s most-spoken language. How did this transition happen? Weng's research shows how the codification of Mandarin was done with the intention to match existing practices closely, but not exactly. Top-down efforts by the state to spread the new language faced enormous difficulties, and ultimately its wide-spread adoption may have been catalyzed more by economic growth and urban migration. By investigating how these monumental social and political changes occurred, Weng’s work deepens the understanding of societal shifts, past and present, in one of the world’s predominant nations, while also contributing more broadly to scholarship on class, the educational reproduction of privilege, and the construction and reconstruction of race, ethnicity, and nation.

He completed his Ph.D. in sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. He holds a BA in political science from Yale University, and his work has appeared in the Journal of Asian Studies and Theory and Society.

SPICE Webinar: “Angel Island Immigration Station: The Hidden History”

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Webinar recording: https://youtu.be/ou4OpF-8j-g

 

Connie will speak about how the Chinese detention barracks on Angel Island were saved from demolition in the 1970s, opening the door to the hidden history of the immigration station. She will recount the experience of her grandmother, Mrs. Lee Yoke Suey, who was detained in the barracks for 15 and a half months starting in 1924 and how the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled on her grandmother’s case.  

The Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education (SPICE), which is a program of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, worked with graphic artist Rich Lee to publish Angel Island: The Chinese-American Experience. Its author, Jonas Edman, will share activities and materials from this graphic novel that tells the story of Chinese immigrants who were detained at Angel Island Immigration Station in San Francisco Bay between 1910 and 1940.

This webinar is a joint collaboration between the Center for East Asian Studies and SPICE at Stanford University.

 

Featured Speakers:

Connie Young Yu

Connie Young Yu

Connie Young Yu is a writer, activist and historian. She is the author of Chinatown, San Jose, USA, co-editor of Voices from the Railroad: Stories by Descendants of Chinese Railroad Workers, and has written for many exhibits and documentaries on Asian Americans. She was on the citizens committee (AIISHAC) that saved the Angel Island immigration barracks for historical preservation and was a founding member of Asian Americans for Community Involvement (AACI). Connie is board member emeritus of the Chinese Historical Society of America and historical advisor for the Chinese Historical and Cultural Project (CHCP).

 

Jonas Edman

Jonas Edman

Jonas Edman is an Instructional Designer for the Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education (SPICE). In addition to writing curricula, Jonas coordinates SPICE’s National Consortium for Teaching About Asia (NCTA) professional development seminars on East Asia for middle school teachers, and teaches online courses for high school students. He also collaborates with Stanford Global Studies on the Education Partnership for Internationalizing Curriculum (EPIC) Fellowship Program. Prior to joining SPICE in 2010, Jonas taught history and geography in Elk Grove, California, and taught “Theory of Knowledge” at Stockholm International School in Stockholm, Sweden.

 

Via Zoom Webinar. Registration Link: https://bit.ly/3g9qnPc.

Connie Young Yu, independent historian and author
Jonas Edman Stanford University
Workshops

Self-inflicted wounds: The Church and dissipation of Christianity in Europe

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Anna Grzymała-Busse
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Anna Grzymala-Busse
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Christianity in Europe is fading. A vague and symbolic identity is replacing belief in God, belonging to denominations, and attendance at religious services. Olivier Roy documents these changes in Is Europe Christian?, and shows how long-term secularism, recent populism, and the cultural shifts of the 1960s are responsible for this fall from grace.

Stanford professor sees Hagia Sophia as a “time tunnel” linking Ottomans to the Roman Empire

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With the conversion last month of the architecturally stunning Hagia Sophia in Istanbul into a working mosque, Turkish President Recep Erdoğan fulfilled a long-held hope of many Turkish Muslims and of his own political party.
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Built as a cathedral, Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, Turkey, has also been a mosque and a museum and is now again a working mosque. | Getty Images
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Stanford history professor says conquest narratives don’t fully explain Hagia Sophia’s lasting legacy.

Norman Naimark Awarded the 2020 Norris and Carol Hundley Award

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Professor Norman Naimark was awarded a 2020 Norris and Carol Hundley Award from the Pacific Coast Branch of the AHA, for his book Stalin and the Fate of Europe (Harvard University Press, 2019). The award is given annually for the most distinguished book on any historical subject submitted by a scholar who resides within the twenty–two Western states or four Canadian provinces from which the Branch draws its membership.
Read more at Stanford Department of History
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Norman Naimark received the 2020 Norris and Carol Hundley Award from the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association

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