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Veteran journalist Barbara Crossette wins 2010 Shorenstein Journalism Award

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This annual award, which carries a cash prize of $10,000, honors a journalist not only for a distinguished body of work, but also for the particular way that work has helped American readers to understand the complexities of Asia. It is awarded jointly by the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Center at Stanford University, and the Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard University, part of the Kennedy School of Government. Events have been hosted alternately at both centers.

Barbara Crossette serves as United Nations correspondent for The Nation and is a freelance writer on foreign policy and international affairs. Her articles and essays have appeared periodically in World Policy Journal, published at the New School University in New York. "Will John Bolton Ruin the UN?" an article published in Foreign Policy, in the July/August 2006, presaged the campaign that led to the resignation of the ambassador.

Crossette was the New York Times bureau chief at the United Nations from 1994 to 2001. She was earlier a Times chief correspondent in Southeast Asia and South Asia and a diplomatic reporter in Washington. She has also reported from Central America, the Caribbean, and Canada, and been deputy foreign editor and senior editor in charge of the Times' weekend news operations. Before joining newspaper paper in 1973, Crossette worked for The Evening and Sunday Bulletin in Philadelphia and The Birmingham Post in Birmingham, England.

She is the author of several books on Asia, including So Close to Heaven: The Vanishing Buddhist Kingdoms of the Himalayas (1995) and The Great Hill Stations of Asia (1998). The latter was a New York Times notable book of the year in 1998. In 2000, Crossette wrote a survey of India and Indian-American relations, India: Old Civilization in a New World, for the Foreign Policy Association in New York. She is also the author of India Facing the 21st Century (1993). Most recently she was a co-author with George Perkovich of a section on India in the 2009 book Powers and Principles: International Leadership in a Shrinking World.

In 1999, Crossette received the Business Council of the United Nations' Korn Ferry Award for outstanding reporting on the organization, and in 2003 the United Nations Correspondents' Association's lifetime achievement award. In 2008, she was awarded a Fulbright prize for her contributions to international understanding.

Crossette has taught journalism, politics, and international affairs at a broad range of institutions, including the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, Punjab University, Princeton University, Bard College, and the Royal University of Phnom Penh. In 2004 and 2005 she also worked with journalists in Brazil as a Knight International Press Fellow.

Born in Philadelphia, Crossette received a BA in history and political science from Muhlenberg College. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Women's Foreign Policy Group.

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The Korean War After 60 Years: History and Memory in Korea and the United States

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This lecture will examine the origins of the Cold War in East Asia, how early the Cold War came to Korea, how the Korean War transformed the containment doctrine, how it solidified the continuing divisions in East Asia, and how it transformed defense policy in the United States, leading to a far-flung structure of seemingly permanent military bases in South Korea, Japan, Germany, and many more countries that lasts down to 2010.  Professor Cumings will also examine problems of history and memory regarding what most Americans call "the forgotten war."

Bruce Cumings teaches international history, modern Korean history and East Asian political economy at the University of Chicago, where he has taught since 1987 and where he is the Gustavus F. and Ann M. Swift Distinguished Service Professor and the chairman of the History Department.  He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1975. He has taught at Swarthmore College (1975-77), the University of Washington (1977-86), and Northwestern University (1994-97). He is the author of the two-volume study, The Origins of the Korean War (Princeton University Press, 1981, 1990), War and Television (Visal-Routledge, 1992), Korea's Place in the Sun: A Modern History (W. W. Norton, 1997; updated ed. 2005), Parallax Visions: Making Sense of American—East Asian Relations (Duke University Press, 1999; paperback 2002), North Korea: Another Country (New Press, 2003), co-author of Inventing the Axis of Evil  (New Press, 2004), and is the editor of the modern volume of the Cambridge History of Korea (forthcoming). He is a frequent contributor to The London Review of Books, The Nation, Current History, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and Le Monde Diplomatique. The first volume of his Origins won the John King Fairbank book award of the American Historical Association for the best book on East Asia in the previous two years, and the second volume won the Quincy Wright book award of the International Studies Association. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1999, and is the recipient of fellowships from the Ford Foundation-funded Foreign Area Fellows program, NEH, the MacArthur Foundation, the Center for Advanced Study at Stanford, and the Abe Fellowship Program of the Social Science Research Council. He was also the principal historical consultant for the Thames Television/PBS 6-hour documentary, Korea: The Unknown War. He recently published Dominion From Sea to Sea: Pacific Ascendancy and American Power, which was ranked as one of the top 25 books of 2009 by the Atlantic Monthly. Random House will publish his short book, The Korean War, on the war’s 60th anniversary in 2010. He is also contracted to publish a new, single-volume synoptic edition of The Origins of the Korean War.

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Bruce Cumings Professor and Chairman of the History Department, University of Chicago Speaker
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Korean Studies Colloquium Series

Capote and Atxaga versus the Counterterrorists: Why Counterterrorism Fails

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Joseba Zulaika is Professor at the Center for Basque Studies at the University of Nevada, Reno. Professor Zulaika holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Princeton University. His most recent publications include Terrorism: the Self-Fulfilling Prophecy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), and Contraterrorismo USA: profecía y trampa (Irun: Alberdania, 2009). Professor Zulaika’s ongoing research addresses the Bilbao Guggenheim Museoa and the ethnography of Bilbao with additional emphasis on global culture, architecture, museum politics, and tourism industries. His primary research interests include Basque culture and politics, the international discourse of terrorism, various traditional occupations (fishermen, hunters, farmers), diasporic and global cultures, history of anthropological thought, and theories of symbolism, ritual, and discourse.

Sponsored by the Iberian Studies Program at the Forum on Contemporary Europe, and the Department of Iberian and Latin American Cultures at Stanford University.

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Joseba Zulaika Professor, Center for Basque Studies Speaker University of Nevada, Reno
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Hannah Arendt and the Humanities: On the Relevance of Her Work Beyond the Realm of Politics

In the wake of 9/11 and the so-called War on Terror there has been in recent years an immense interest in Hannah Arendt's thought in a variety of disciplines ranging from Political Science through History to Cultural Criticism. While Arendt's political analysis, especially her insights into the nature of totalitarian ideologies and regimes has received much attention, relatively little has been said on the possible impact of her unique philosophical vocabulary in such works as The Human Condition, Between Past and Future or The Life of the Mind or on our understanding of literature and the arts as they address contemporary society and politics. Giorgio Agamben, as only one example, makes references to Origins of Totalitarianism, but leaves out The Human Condition or Hannah Arendt's writing on literature or culture. A recent collection of Arendt's writings on literature and culture provides a first opportunity to reflect on the status of literature and the arts in Arendt's work, and on the usefulness of her concepts for an understanding of contemporary society and culture (Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb (ed.), Hannah Arendt, Reflections on Literature and Culture (Stanford UP, 2007). But it is precisely Arendt's conviction that literature and the arts contribute indispensably to our understanding of politics and history that calls for an examination of how Arendt's work opens new perspectives and adds a critical vocabulary to address literature and the arts.

The relative dearth of attention to Arendt's possible relevance and impact on our thinking about literature and the arts is especially peculiar given Arendt's reliance on literary texts throughout her writing. The aim of the Stanford Workshop is to consider if Hannah Arendt's work offers a productive vocabulary for thinking about literature, the arts and culture at the intersection of history, politics, and ethics.

Our question is: what may be the usefulness of such concepts, terms, and figures of speech as "natality," or Arendt's conception of the "world," or of the distinction between the "public," the "private," and the "social"? We would like to consider together: what happens when one puts Arendt's thought in contact with the study of culture in its widest sense (and not exclusively within the discipline of political theory)? What may be the implications of Arendt's reliance on literature and culture, at key moments in her analysis of political and social reality, to our understanding of their possible significance to contemporary society and politics? The workshop aims to examine the relevance of Arendt's work for the humanities in the broadest sense, and to examine Arendt's work in light of some recent advances in critical thinking in turn.

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Ulrich Baer Professor of German and Comparative Literature, New York University; Vice Provost for Global Programs and Multiculturalism Speaker
Sonja Boos Visiting Assistant Professor of German, Oberlin College & Conservatory Speaker
Stephan Braese Professor of European Jewish Literature and Cultural History, RWTH Aachen University Speaker
Nir Evron Ph.D. Candidate in Comparative Literature, Stanford University Speaker

Amir Eshel

Dept of German Studies
Building 260, Room 204
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-2030

(650) 723-0413 (650) 725-8421
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Edward Clark Crossett Professor of Humanistic Studies
Professor of Comparative Literature
Professor of German Studies
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Amir Eshel is Edward Clark Crossett Professor of Humanistic Studies. He is Professor of German Studies and Comparative Literature and as of 2019 Director of Comparative Literature and its graduate program. His Stanford affiliations include The Taube Center for Jewish Studies, Modern Thought & Literature, and The Europe Center at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. He is also the faculty director of Stanford’s research group on The Contemporary and of the Poetic Media Lab at Stanford’s Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA). His research focuses on contemporary literature and the arts as they touch on philosophy, specifically on memory, history, political thought, and ethics.

Amir Eshel is the author of Poetic Thinking Today (Stanford University Press, 2019); German translation at Suhrkamp Verlag, 2020). Previous books include Futurity: Contemporary Literature and the Quest for the Past (The University of Chicago Press in 2013). The German version of the book, Zukünftigkeit: Die zeitgenössische Literatur und die Vergangenheit, appeared in 2012 with Suhrkamp Verlag. Together with Rachel Seelig, he co-edited The German-Hebrew Dialogue: Studies of Encounter and Exchange (2018). In 2014, he co-edited with Ulrich Baer a book of essays on Hannah Arendt, Hannah Arendt: zwischen den Disziplinen; and also co-edited a book of essays on Barbara Honigmann with Yfaat Weiss, Kurz hinter der Wahrheit und dicht neben der Lüge (2013).

Earlier scholarship includes the books Zeit der Zäsur: Jüdische Lyriker im Angesicht der Shoah (1999), and Das Ungesagte Schreiben: Israelische Prosa und das Problem der Palästinensischen Flucht und Vertreibung (2006). Amir Eshel has also published essays on Franz Kafka, Hannah Arendt, Paul Celan, Dani Karavan, Gerhard Richter, W.G. Sebald, Günter Grass, Alexander Kluge, Barbara Honigmann, Durs Grünbein, Dan Pagis, S. Yizhar, and Yoram Kaniyuk.

Amir Eshel’s poetry includes a 2018 book with the artist Gerhard Richter, Zeichnungen/רישומים, a work which brings together 25 drawings by Richter from the clycle 40 Tage and Eshel’s bi-lingual poetry in Hebrew and German. In 2020, Mossad Bialik brings his Hebrew poetry collection בין מדבר למדבר, Between Deserts.

Amir Eshel is a recipient of fellowships from the Alexander von Humboldt and the Friedrich Ebert foundations and received the Award for Distinguished Teaching from the School of Humanities and Sciences.

Affiliated faculty of The Europe Center
Affiliated faculty of The Taube Center for Jewish Studies
Faculty Director of The Contemporary Research Group
Faculty Director of the Poetic Media Lab
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Amir Eshel Charles Michael Chair in Jewish History and Culture; Director, Forum on Contemporary Europe, Stanford University Speaker
Barbara Hahn Distinguished Professor of German, Vanderbilt University Speaker

Robert Harrison

121 Pigott Hall
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305

(650) 723-4204
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Senior Fellow, by courtesy, at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Rosina Pierotti Professor of Italian Literature
Professor of French and Italian
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Professor Harrison received his doctorate in Romance Studies from Cornell University in 1984, with a dissertation on Dante's Vita Nuova. In 1985 he accepted a visiting assistant professorship in the Department of French and Italian at Stanford. In 1986 he joined the faculty as an assistant professor. He was granted tenure in 1992 and was promoted to full professor in 1995. In 1997 Stanford offered him the Rosina Pierotti Chair. In 2002, he was named chair of the Department of French and Italian. In 2014 he was knighted "Chevalier" by the French Republic.  He is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and lead guitarist for the cerebral rock band Glass Wave.

Professor Harrison's first book, The Body of Beatrice, was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 1988. It deals with medieval Italian lyric poetry, with special emphasis on Dante's early work La Vita Nuova. The Body of Beatrice was translated into Japanese in 1994. Over the next few years Professor Harrison worked on his next book, Forests: The Shadow of Civilization, which appeared in 1992 with University of Chicago Press. This book deals with the ways in which the Western imagination has symbolized, represented, and conceived of forests, primarily in literature, religion, and mythology. It offers a select history that begins in antiquity and ends in our own time. Forests appeared simultaneously in English, French, Italian, and German. It subsequently appeared in Japanese and Korean as well. In 1994 his book Rome, la Pluie: A Quoi Bon Littérature? appeared in France, Italy, and Germany. This book is written in the form of dialogues between two characters and deals with topics such as art restoration, the vocation of literature, and the place of the dead in contemporary society.

Professor Harrison's next book, The Dominion of the Dead, published in 2003 by University of Chicago Press, examines the relations the living maintain with the dead in diverse secular realms. This book was translated into German, French and Italian. Professor Harrison's book Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition appeared in 2008 with the University of Chicago Press, in French with Le Pommier, and in Italian with Fazi Editori , and in German with Hanser Verlag (it subsequently appeared in Chinese translation). His most recent book Juvenescence: A Cultural History of Our Age came out in 2014 with Chicago University Press.  In 2005 Harrison started a literary talk show on KZSU radio called "Entitled Opinions."  The show features hour long conversations with a variety of scholars, writers, and scientists.  Robert Harrison is also the Director of Another Look, a Stanford-based book club.

Affiliated faculty at The Europe Center
Robert Harrison Rosina Pierotti Professor of Italian Literature, Stanford University Speaker
Christine Ivanovic Visiting Professor, Department of German Language and Literature, Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology, The University of Tokyo Speaker
Martin Klebes Assistant Professor of German, University of Oregon Speaker
Eyal Peretz Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature, Indiana University Speaker
Liliane Weissberg Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor in the School of Arts and Sciences; Professor of German and Comparative Literature, University of Pennsylvania Speaker
Thomas Wild Berlin Speaker
Workshops

Legalizing Human Rights in Africa: Workshop #5

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This 2009-10 interdisciplinary research workshop examines the trajectory of human rights discourse and institutions in Africa by means of regional and international comparisons. Africa is the third, and most recent, region to establish a regional human rights court, the African Court of Human and Peoples' Rights (ACPHR). At this critical juncture in African human rights, there is an urgent need for deeper understandings and applications of the law of human rights.

This workshop will be of interest and benefit to faculty and graduate students conducting research in the following areas: African studies; human rights; law; anthropology; cultural studies; history; political science and international relations; philosophy; and sociology.

The workshop, coordinated by Helen Stacy (Law School, FSI), met once during Fall quarter and will meet three times during the Winter and Spring quarters of the 2009-2010 academic year.

Our first meeting of Spring quarter features Professor Harri Englund, Department of Social Anthropology at University of Cambridge and author of many articles and books including Prisoners of Freedom: Human rights and the African Poor (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).

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Rm. 208

Helen Stacy Senior Fellow, CDDRL, Senior Lecturer, Stanford Law School Moderator
Harri Englund Department of Social Anthropology at University of Cambridge Speaker
Workshops

Nanshin: Japan and Southeast Asia in the 20th Century

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An introduction to the origins, evolution, and recent  status of  interaction between Japan and Southeast Asia, 1900-2000.

Mark R. Peattie is a visiting scholar at Shorenstein APARC and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is a professor of history emeritus at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. He was the John A. Burns Distinguished Visiting Professor of History at the University of Hawaii in 1995.

Peattie is a specialist in modern Japanese military, naval, and imperial history. His current research focuses on the historical context of Japanese-Southeast Asian relations. He is also directing a pioneering and international collaborative effort of the military history of the study of the Sino-Japanese war of 1937-45 being sponsored by the Asia Center at Harvard University.

He was a member of the U.S. Information Agency from 1955 to 1968 with service in Cambodia (1955-57), in Japan (Sendai, Tokyo, Kyoto) (1958-67), and in Washington, D.C. (1967-68).

Peattie holds a Ph.D. in Japanese history from Princeton University.

Daniel and Nancy Okimoto Conference Room

Mark Peattie

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Visiting Scholar
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Mark R. Peattie was a visiting scholar at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. He was a professor of history emeritus at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, and was the John A. Burns Distinguished Visiting Professor of History at the University of Hawai'i in 1995.

Peattie was a specialist in modern Japanese military, naval, and imperial history. His current research focused on the historical context of Japanese-Southeast Asian relations. He was also directing a pioneering and international collaborative effort of the military history of the study of the Sino-Japanese war of 1937–45 being sponsored by the Asia Center at Harvard University.

He is editor, with Peter Duus and Ramon H. Myers, of the Japanese Wartime Empire, 1937–1945 (Princeton University Press, 1996). Peattie is the author of the Japanese Colonial Empire: The Vicissitudes of Its Fifty-Year History (Tokyo: Yomiuri Press, 1996).

He coauthored, with David Evans, Kaigun: Strategy, Tactics and Technology in the Imperial Japanese Navy, 1887–1941 (Naval Institute Press, 1997), winner of a 1999 Distinguished Book Award of the Society for Military History. A sequel, Sunburst: The Rise of Japanese Naval Air Power, 1909–1941, was published by the Naval Institute Press in 2001.

Peattie is also the author of the monograph A Historian Looks at the Pacific War (Hoover Essays in Public Policy, 1995).

Peattie was a reader for Columbia University, University of California, University of Hawai'i, Stanford University, University of Michigan, and U.S. Naval Institute Presses.

Peattie frequently served as lecturer in the Stanford University Continuing Studies Program and in the Stanford Alumni Travel Program.

He was named an associate in research at the Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard University from 1982 to 1993.

He was a member of the U.S. Information Agency from 1955 to 1968 with service in Cambodia (1955–57), in Japan (Sendai, Tokyo, Kyoto, 1958–67), and in Washington, D.C. (1967–68).

Peattie held a PhD in Japanese history from Princeton University.

Mark Peattie Visiting Scholar, Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center Speaker Stanford University
Seminars

Telling Cases: Epistemological and Aesthetic Aspects of Case Narratives in 18th and 19th Century Science and Literature

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Case studies have a long history in both medicine and law. They contributed to the development of the new sciences humaines in the 18th century as well as of Freud's psychoanalysis, and they are still used in current social sciences as well as popular media formats. As a genuinely interdisciplinary genre, case studies are also influenced by the narrative structure of literature. At they same time, they served as a reference for the new striving for realism and individuality in enlightenment aesthetics. Therefore, in late 18th and early 19th century literature, the logic of induction that structures case studies is transferred into fictional narratives that not only claim to provide knowledge on the biological genre of humans, but also contribute to a new definition of the concept of literary genre. Exemplary readings of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Carl Philipp Moritz, Georg Buechner, and E.A. Poe will suggest a reading of case studies as a narrative form bridging the divide between the 'two cultures' of literature and science.

Nico Pethes received a Ph.D. in German Literature from University Cologne in 1998, and was a postdoc at University Siegen, 1998-2001. He was a Visiting Scholar and Visiting Assistant Professor at the Department of Comparative Literature and German at Stanford from 2001-2003; Director of a Research Group on the "Cultural History of Human Experimentation" at University Bonn 2003-2005, Habilitation in 2005; Professor of European Literature and Media History at University Hagen 2005-2009; and, since 2009, professor of Modern German Literature at University Bochum. His publications include "Zuglinge der Natur. Der literarische Menschenversuch des 18. Jahrhunderts" (Goettingen: Wallstein 2007), "Das Beispiel. Epistemologie des Exemplarischen" (coeditor; Berlin: Kadmos 2007); "'Victor, l'enfant de la foret': Experiments on Heredity in Savage Children" (in: Heredity Produced: At the Crossroads of Biology, Politics, and Culture, 1500-1870, eds. Staffan Mueller-Wille/Hans-Jorg Rheinberger, Cambridge MA/London: The MIT Press 2007, pp. 399-418); "Terminal Men. Biotechnical Experimentation and the Reshaping of 'the Human' in Medical Thrillers" (in: /New Literary History/ 36, 2005, pp. 161-185)

Encina Ground Floor Conference Room

Nicolas Pethes Professor of Modern German Literature at University Bochum; Visiting Scholar, Department of German Studies, Stanford University (Spring 2010) Speaker
Seminars

FCE Announces Book Release: "Ethnic Europe: Mobility, Identity, and Conflict in a Globalized World"

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The Forum on Contemporary Europe is pleased to announce the release of "Ethnic Europe: Mobility, Identity, and Conflict in a Globalized World" (Stanford University Press, 2010) edited by FCE Associate Director Roland Hsu.

Ethnic Europe offers accessible, comprehensive, and influential thinking on immigration, and the challenge of how we are to defend minority identity and encourage social solidarity in our world of global migration.  Focused on Europe as a destination for global immigration, eleven of the most influential social science and humanities authors address the increasingly complex challenges facing the expanding European Union—including labor migration, strains on welfare economies, local traditions, globalized cultures, Islamic diasporas, separatist movements, and threats of terrorism.  The authors confront the struggle shared in Europe and the U.S. to balance minority rights and social cohesion.  For the first time in one volume, these writers give startling insight into Europe’s fast-growing communities, taking the reader from global views to local detail.  From questions of high politics (If Europe includes Turkey, where does Europe end?) to local culture wars (How does McDonalds appeal to Catalans?), this collection engages theory, history, and generalized views of diasporas, including the details of neighborhoods, borderlands, and the popular literature and new media and films spawned by the creative mixing of ethnic cultures.

Roland Hsu, Associate Director of Stanford University’s Forum on Contemporary Europe at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, edited, and wrote the opening essay to make “Ethnic Europe” a foundation text and approachable guide to the experience of ethnic politics, migrant life, and movements for integration and exclusion.  With his experience at the Forum bringing scholarship, policy, and public comment to bear of our most pressing issues, Hsu offers this book on “Ethnic Europe” as an approachable guide to the general and specific of ethnic politics, migrant life, and movements for integration and exclusion. 

Roland Hsu earned his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, and before coming to Stanford was Assistant Professor of European History at the University of Idaho.  Hsu currently teaches, in addition to his research and work at the Forum, in the Humanities at Stanford University.

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Ideas of Secularization in Trans-Atlantic Perspectives

This workshop will address different ideas of secularization, the ways they have been historically narrated, and now function discursively, and how these insights may help us address the subject’s present day politicization. Workshop sessions will especially focus on the different approaches to secularization in the US and Europe.

In cultural, sociological, and geopolitical realms, religion and religiosity have become central issues in the contemporary world. This centrality raises questions about associating modernity with the secular, and also about what we mean by ‘secularism’ or ‘secularization.’ These concepts have been used variously to designate the progressive disappearance of religion and also its transformation into modern institutions, and connoting both emancipation and a nostalgia for lost origins. Today, this ambiguity is less an obstacle than a promise for future theory, since it encourages a promising debate about the modern and its relation towards religion.

Concepts of secularization appear to follow distinct perspectives: While an American debate focuses on the political issue of secularism and on sociological approaches, in Europe the concept is rather related to philosophy and cultural history. Both perspectives should be understood as interrelated and each responds to different historical and contemporary roles of religion in Europe and America, and raises important political questions. The 'neutrality' of the state toward religion, for example, as seen from a juridical or a historical perspective, has different meanings in the U.S. and Europe. No less important are the relations of Europe and the U.S. towards Islam in particular.

The present workshop aims to develop understandings of secularization that will be productive for cultural, political, and legal applications. Beyond a unified theory, secularization may be understood as a discursive construct, and as a series of figurative ideas: including metaphors such as the ‘death of God’ or modern ‘disenchantment,’ topoi such as Mysticism, Nihilism or the Vera Icon, and narratives such as the Weber-Thesis or the afterlife of antiquity. This workshop is intended to facilitate analysis of historical and contemporary issues including: Can ideas of secularization contribute to a fruitful analysis of the relation between religion and modernity? In what ways are secularism and faith integral to modern and postmodern thought? How can we put into productive debate American and the European approaches towards secularization? Does the idea of secularization necessarily cast theological communities as anti-modern?

WORKSHOP SCHEDULE

June 3

9:30am: Breakfast

10:00am:  Welcome and Workshop Introduction, Daniel Weidner

I. (Secularization in Question) 10:15am – 11:45am 

  • Adrian Pabst, "The Paradox of Faith – Religion beyond secularization and de-secularization"
  • Jean Claude Monod, "Has the concept of 'Secularization' lost any relevance?"

Lunch break 12:00pm-1:00pm

II (Rhetorics and Politics of Secularization) 1:00pm-2:30pm

  • Daniel Weidner, " ‘Secularization’ as Metaphor, Myth, and Allegory"
  • Christopher Soper, "Clothing the Naked Public Square:  Religion, Secularism, and the Future of Politics"

Break: 2:30pm-3:00pm

III (Case studies) 3:00pm-4:30pm

  • David Myers,  "Reflections on the 'Deprivatization' of Religion: Lessons Learned from Kiryas Joel, New York"
  • Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, "Disestablishment, American Style"

Day 1 summary remarks 4:30pm-5:00pm

Dinner

June 4

8:30am Breakfast, with day 2 opening remarks by Daniel Weidner

IV (Secularization in between) 9:00am-10:30am

  • John McCole, "Between disenchantment and the post-secular: Georg Simmel on religion"
  • Brian Britt, "Secular Reading, Religious Writing: Benjamin and Freud on Schreber"

Break 10:30-10:45am

V (Secularization and Literature) 10:45am-12:15pm

  • Christian Sieg , "Between the Religious and the Secular. Heinrich Böll’s Early Oeuvre in the Context of the Secularization Debate"
  • Russell Berman, "Konrad Weiss and the 'Christian Epimetheus' -- Secularization and the Weimar Crisis"

Lunch break 12:15pm-1:30pm

VI (Temporalities sacred and secular) 1:30pm-3:00pm

  • Andrea Schatz, "Irresistible Secularism? Time, Language and the Jewish Enlightenment"
  • Nitzan Lebovic, "Hannah Arendt and Extraordinary Secularism"

Workshop concluding remarks (Weidner) with concluding discussion 3:00pm-4:00pm.

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Board Room
Stanford Humanities Center

Winnifred Fallers Sullivan Associate Professor of Law and Director of the Law and Religion Program Speaker University at Buffalo Law School, State University of New York
Daniel Weidner Associate Director Speaker Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung, Berlin

Russell A. Berman

Department of Comparative Literature
Stanford University
Building 260, Room 201
Stanford, CA 94305-2030

(650) 723-1069 (650) 725-8421
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Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute, by courtesy
Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities
Professor of Comparative Literature
Professor of German Studies
Senior Fellow at The Hoover Institution
Faculty affiliate at The Europe Center
110501-7227rb.jpg PhD

Russell Berman is the Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities at Stanford and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution where he co-directs the Working Group on Islamism and the International Order. He holds a courtesy appointment at the Freeman Spogli Institute. He formerly served as Senior Advisor on the Policy Planning Staff of the United States Department of State and has been awarded a Mellon Faculty Fellowship at Harvard and an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship for research in Berlin; he has also been honored with the Bundesverdienstkreuz of the Federal Republic of Germany.

His books include The Rise of the Modern German Novel: Crisis and Charisma (1988) and Enlightenment or Empire: Colonial Discourse in German Culture (1998), both of which won the Outstanding Book Award of the German Studies Association. Some of his other books include Anti-Americanism in Europe: A Cultural Problem (2004), Fiction Sets You Free: Literature, Liberty and Western Culture (2007) and Freedom or Terror: Europe Faces Jihad (2010). In his books and many articles Berman has written widely on the cultural history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, critical theory, and cultural dimensions of trans-Atlantic relations, as well as on topics between Europe and the Middle East. His commentary on current events has appeared in The New Republic, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Times Internationale Politik, Telos, Daily Beast, the Los Angeles Review Books, die Welt, die Neue Zuercher Zeitung, die Weltwoche,  and American Greatness and elsewhere.

Faculty affiliate at The Europe Center
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Russell A. Berman Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities; Professor, Comparative Literature Speaker Stanford University
Andrea Schatz Lecturer, Jewish Studies Speaker King's College, London
Jean Claude Monod Researcher Speaker Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
Adrian Pabst Lecturer, Politics Speaker Rutherford College, University of Kent
Brian Britt Professor, Director of Religious Studies Speaker Virginia Tech Virginia Tech
John McCole Associate Professor and Department Head, History Speaker University of Oregon
David N. Myers Professor, History Speaker UCLA
Christian Sieg Researcher, German Studies Institute Speaker WWU Muenster
Christopher Soper Professor, Political Science Speaker Pepperdine University
Nitzan Lebovic Lecturer, Mineva Insitute for German History, Tel-Aviv University Speaker
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