CISAC faculty and fellows offer their winter reading (and listening) selections:

Martha Crenshaw, senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and professor, by courtesy, of political science, recommends:

My Brilliant Friend, by Elena Ferrante

Karl Eikenberry, Oksenberg-Rohlen Fellow at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, CISAC, CDDRL, and TEC affiliate, and director of the U.S.-Asia Security Initiative at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, recommends:

Lost Enlightenment: Central Asia's Golden Age from the Arab Conquest to Tamerlane, by S. Frederick Starr

“This book was recommended to me by Abbas Milani before making a trip to Central Asia and the Caucasus. My respect for the civilizations of those regions grew immensely as a result of this read. Transformed my thinking.”

Rodney C. Ewing, Frank Stanton Professor in Nuclear Security and Co-Director, CISAC, recommends:

In the Shadow of Los Alamos - Selected Writings of Edith Warner, by Edith Warner

“I have the personal tradition at Christmas of rereading the Christmas letters of Edith Warner - written just down the slope from Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project. Warner captures the enchantment of New Mexico and touches on what was going on up the hill.”

Colin Kahl, co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation, the inaugural Steven C. Házy Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and professor, by courtesy, in the department of political science at Stanford University recommends:

The Jungle Grows Back: America and Our Imperiled World, by Robert Ragan

“This short provocative book (essentially a long essay) discusses what America’s role should be in an increasingly chaotic world—one full of challenges that the existing norms, institutions, and alliances that compromise the liberal international order seem increasingly ill-suited to address. Whether one agrees or disagrees with Kagan’s conclusions, his analysis is insightful and worth arguing with.”

Erik Lin-Greenberg, predoctoral fellow at CISAC and a PhD candidate in political science at Columbia University, recommends:

Rise and Kill First, by Ronen Bergman

“Rise and Kill First traces the history of Israel's targeted killing program from before the establishment of the State of Israel to present day. Ronen Bergman draws from hundreds of interviews and previously unpublished documents to describe the organizations and operations responsible for assassinating Israel's adversaries in a book that reads more like an action novel than a non-fiction work.”

Michal Onderco, junior faculty fellow, CISAC, recommends:

White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America, by Joan Williams

“If you sometimes wonder about the worldviews of the people you meet under the Christmas tree, this book will give you a framework to understand them better. Williams wrote an excellent (and surprisingly easy to read) book explaining misunderstanding between classes in America; which surprisingly well resonates with research findings from outside the US. Though solutions proposed are rather simplistic, the analysis is worth reading and pondering. ”

Seeing People Off, by Jana Beňová

“A novel about a hipster couple in Bratislava, with all the trappings of the hipster life in Central Europe. Jana Benova received the 2012 European Union Prize for Literature for the book, and it is one of the rare modern Slovak fiction translated to English. Come for the (somewhat) exotic origin, stay for the story.”

Kathryn Stoner, deputy director at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University and a senior fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, as well as the deputy director of the Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy at Stanford University, recommends:

These Truths: A History of the United States, by Jill Lepore

“This book came out a few months ago and is a really excellent overview of US history through the lens of inequality. It is really well written, and informative even for those of us who think we know US history well.”

Harold Trinkunas, deputy director and senior research scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University, recommends:

Secret Wars: Covert Conflict in International Politics, by Austin Carson

“An engaging read on why states engage in covert action against each other and why even competitors may have a mutual interest in not acknowledging such activities, keeping them 'backstage' and deniable to avoid the risk of escalation and war.”

Sherry Zaks, postdoctoral fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation recommends:

Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking, by Samin Nosrat

“Samin Nosrat -- a former Chez Panisse chef and Alice Waters protege -- takes her readers on an enthralling journey through the four essentials of good cuisine. This book changed the way I cook and eat. While the book itself has some (amazing!) recipes, it reads more like a memoir and history than a cookbook. Nosrat is charming, brilliant, and witty. Don't just skip it in favor of the Netflix Series. If anything, do both. Bon appetit!”

S-Town Podcast, hosted by Brian Reed

“S-Town is one of the most enrapturing examples of investigative reporting I've ever come across. No description would do it justice. It won the 2017 Peabody award and only highlights how antiquated other literary and journalism awards are for not expanding to accommodate this medium. If you want make sitting in Bay Area traffic more palatable, throw this into your rotation.”

Amy Zegart, senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute of International Studies (FSI), professor of political science (by courtesy) at Stanford University, and a contributing editor to The Atlantic, recommends:

The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age, by David Sanger

“David Sanger's exploration of cyber weapons is an instant classic.”

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, by John Carreyrou

“A riveting non-fiction account of how Elizabeth Holmes turned Theranos into a $9 billion Silicon Valley fraud.”

Read full text here. 

儿童早期发展关乎人的一生，对贫困农村儿童早期发展领域的投入，会为社会发展带来长期且高效的回报。

2018年11月17日，“养育未来，从0开始——2018年儿童早期发展国际论坛”在陕西西安举行，诺贝尔经济学奖得主詹姆斯·赫克曼等国内外学者，用来自世界各地的成功案例提示着儿童早期发展工作的重要性。

而正在秦岭山区、陕西宁陕县推进的“养育未来”项目，成为与会专家们讨论的焦点，“宁陕模式”成为中国在0-3岁儿童早期发展工作上全新的经验。

项目发起方之一阿里巴巴脱贫基金副主席彭蕾在现场称，希望携手各界，以宁陕实践为起点，共同探索可复制、宜推广的社会模式，让中国儿童早期发展的探索，从0开始，走向世界。

Under the title “Political Contestation and New Social Forces in the Middle East and North Africa,” the Program on Arab Reform and Democracy convened its 2018 annual conference on April 27 and 28 at Stanford University. Bringing together a diverse group of scholars from across several disciplines, the conference examined how dynamics of governance and modes of political participation have evolved in recent years in light of the resurgence of authoritarian trends throughout the region.

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The conference’s second panel, tilted “Situating Gender in the Law and the Economy,” featured Texas Christian University Historian Hanan Hammad, who assessed the achievements of the movement to fight gender-based violence in Egypt. Focusing on Gulf Cooperation Council states, Alessandra Gonzales, a Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, analyzed the differences in female executive hiring practices across local and foreign firms. Stanford University Political Scientist and FSI Senior Fellow Lisa Blaydes presented findings from her research on women’s attitudes toward Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) in Egypt.

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The fourth panel of the conference, “The Economy, the State, and New Social Actors,” featured George Washington University Associate Professor of Geography Mona Atia, who presented on territorial restructuring and the politics governing poverty in Morocco. Amr Adly, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the American University in Cairo, analyzed the relationship between the state and big business in Egypt after the 2013 military coup. Rice University Professor of Economics Mahmoud El-Gamal shared findings from his research on the economic determinants of democratization and de-democratization trends in Egypt during the past decade.

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The conference included a special session featuring former fellows of the American Middle Eastern Network at Stanford (AMENDS), an organization dedicated to promoting understanding around the Middle East, and supporting young leaders working to ignite concrete social and economic development in the region. AMENDS affiliates from five different MENA countries shared with the Stanford community their experiences in working toward social change in their respective countries.

Gi-Wook Shin, director of APARC, was quoted in South China Morning Post. “These young people spend the first 25 to 30 years of their life studying for exams, and when they finally move out of their shell into the real world and realise life is not a multiple choice test, and there isn’t always a clear-cut answer to every problem, that’s already a mid-life crisis for them in a way,” he said. “It is both physically draining and mentally not healthy to spend one’s young adulthood studying for exams after exams.”

Future Visions: Challenges and Possibilities of Korean Studies in North America — Social Science panel. From left to right: UC Berkeley's Laura Nelson, University of Michigan's Jordan Siegel, Stanford's Yong Suk Lee, USC's David Kang, Harvard's Paul Chang.

How can Korean studies faculty cultivate supportive and critical scholarly communities with graduate students? What can be done to overcome the severe constraints on Korean language training in North America? Why is there a dearth of Korea scholarship in academic literature? And how should Korean studies librarians prepare for the future in the light of new technologies and young researchers’ increasing interest in digital scholarship?

These were some of the questions examined at a two-day conference, “Future Visions: Challenges and Possibilities of Korean Studies in North America,” convened by the Korea Program of Stanford’s Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) on November 1-2. Co-sponsored by the Seoul-based Foundation Academia Platonica, the conference, the first of its kind, gathered distinguished Korean studies scholars from twelve North American institutions to consider the state of the field, assess its challenges, and carry forward a vision for its future direction and potential. Its six unique panels focused not only on the major disciplines of Korean studies—history, literature, and the social sciences—but also on language education, library collections and services, and Korean Wave.

“The presentations and discussions by our fellow experts reflected the breadth and depth of Korean studies in North America,” says APARC Director and the Korea Program Director Gi-Wook Shin. “Our program was established at Stanford in 2001 and has since become a leader in Korean studies in North America, so it is a special privilege for us to bring together colleagues from eminent institutions around the continent to further advance Korean studies education and research in the academic and policy worlds, and to build upon our track record of action and achievements.”

“The field of Korean studies, however,” notes Shin, “has significantly changed over the past seventeen years and it isn’t without its challenges. This is our opportunity to consider frankly where we go next and how we could explore the path ahead together.”

Conference participants indeed engaged in deep conversations and shared ideas and dilemmas regarding teaching in the different disciplines of Korean studies in North America. Harvard sociologist Paul Chang listed three types of challenges facing the field: publication, academic, and professional challenges. David C. Kang, professor of international relations and director of the Korean Studies Institute at the University of Southern California, emphasized the publication challenge: why is it, asked Kang, that top academic journals in the discipline of political science and international relations publish so much more scholarship about Europe than they do about Korea and Asia at large, even while the rise of Asian nations is surely one of the most consequential issues of the twenty-first century? The onus, Kang argued, comes back to East Asia scholars “to produce better and more compelling scholarship, and to better train graduate students.”

University of British Columbia's Ross King and conference participants.

Yet complex issues surround the question of how to broaden graduate coursework—and whether to do so. Korean language and linguistics expert Ross King, head of the department of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, was one of several panelists who considered the obstacles to graduate training, among different aspects of academic challenges facing the field of Korean studies. King probed into how Sinocentrism and what he called the “Mandarin conceit”—that is, the notion that training in Literary Sinitic should be predicated on a near-native proficiency in modern Mandarin Chinese—are emerging as a major stumbling block to the study of premodern Korean literary culture. He also pointed to the constraints on language training in both Korean and hanmun in North America, which, he claimed, is why we can probably anticipate continued decrease in the number of ethnically non-Korean (non-Korea-educated) graduate students undertaking graduate study in Korean literature.

University of Washington's Hyokyoung Yi (left) and Stanford's Joshua Capitanio at a panel on library collections and service.

Sung-Ock Sohn, who coordinates the Korean language program in the department of Asian languages and cultures at the University of California – Los Angeles, further shed light on King’s prediction. She explained that while enrollments in Korean language classes have shown a sharp increase in American higher education institutions in the past decade, particularly at the introductory level and among ethnically non-Korean students, there is a high attrition rate of students from an introductory to advanced Korean classes nationwide.

How should the field move forward?

Participants proposed a host of ideas to that end. These included helping graduate students collaborate with colleagues in Korea; dedicating funding for junior faculty to spend periods of time before tenure conducting research and honing language skills in Korea at appropriate institutions, and for mid-career scholars to spend a year in Korea; emphasizing the application of social science theories and methods to premodern and modern East Asia; motivating scholars to apply a comparative lens to the study of the historical and contemporary experience of East Asia; and integrating linguistic and cultural diversity in Korean language classes by, for example, incorporating service learning in authentic contexts and extending the content spectrum to include topics such as Korean popular culture.

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Korean Wave was the focus of the conference’s widely attended closing panel that featured K-pop star Siwon Choi, a member of Korean boy band Super Junior, and multi-platinum music producer Dominique Rodriguez, managing director of SM Entertainment USA. They spoke about the global reach of Korean pop music and some of the ways in which Korean popular culture could stimulate interest in Korean studies. Dafna Zur, assistant professor in Stanford’s department of East Asian languages and cultures, who chaired the panel, challenged her students to consider “what it means not just to monetize culture but to design culture with specific markets and audience in mind.” The Stanford Daily published a detailed article on the panel.

“We are grateful to Foundation Academia Platonica for its generous support of Stanford’s Korea Program at Shorenstein APARC and for making this conference possible through our shared vision for the future of Korean studies in North America,” said Gi-Wook Shin. “Our thanks also go to our many other friends and partners, including the Korea Foundation that has helped achieve great results through its commitment to promoting understanding of Korea in academia and beyond and its support of the overseas Korean Studies Program since its establishment in 1991.”

South Korean TV company SBS NBC filmed the conference that will be featured in an upcoming documentary about Korean studies in the United States.

Read the conference report or listen to the audio recordings of the sessions, below.

Comedian Conan O’Brien recently announced that he will visit Hokuei City (aka “Conan Town”) in Tottori Prefecture, Japan, which is well known for its sand dunes and the manga character, Detective Conan. Detective Conan was created by artist Gosho Aoyama, who was born in Hokuei. In fact, Tottori’s main airport is called the Tottori Sand Dunes Conan Airport. Tourists from the United States and other countries are drawn to the sand dunes and the “Manga Kingdom,” a nickname for Tottori because it is the home prefecture of many famous manga artists like Aoyama.

Governor Shinji Hirai of Tottori, who leads these efforts to make Tottori a more notable tourist destination, recently met with Governor Phil Scott of Vermont to formalize a sister state relationship. Both governors hope to give their students more opportunities for exchange. These are just two examples of the increasing synergy between the United States and Tottori, the least populous prefecture in Japan. Thanks to the vision of Governor Hirai, SPICE launched a distance-learning course, Stanford e-Tottori, for high school students in Tottori Prefecture in 2016. The course instructor, Jonas Edman, hopes that the course will help to build even more bridges at the grassroots level between Tottori and the United States.

Now in its third year, Stanford e-Tottori enrolls students from public and private schools in Tottori Prefecture and is a cornerstone of Tottori Prefecture’s Global Leaders’ Campus, an initiative by the Tottori Prefectural Board of Education to internationalize the curriculum in all schools in Tottori. Governor Hirai’s vision has provided many Tottori high school students with the opportunity to study with Edman, who engages students in English with Stanford scholars and experts on topics ranging from U.S. high schools to cultural diversity in the United States.

On August 1, 2018, Edman participated in the opening ceremony for the third year of Stanford e-Tottori. He met Superintendent Hitoshi Yamamoto, Office Director Takuya Fukushima (High School Division), several others of the Tottori Prefectural Board of Education, and the new cohort of students. Edman also visited Tottori Nishi High School and gave a special lecture to students. “Though the technology that I use to teach Stanford e-Tottori has improved over the years, I have to say that it was enormously rewarding to meet my students in person,” reflected Edman. “Seeing them in their picturesque home prefecture—and some of them in their school [Tottori Nishi High School]—provided a context that cannot be replicated virtually. My online interaction with the students from now will feel different.”

I also had the chance to visit Tottori Prefecture on August 26, 2018 to give the opening lecture for the third-year offering of Stanford e-Tottori. In attendance were not only the current cohort students but also three students from last year’s cohort. Before class began, I could feel the nervousness among the students as they anxiously waited outside the presentation room. Once class commenced, however, I could sense that their nerves started to settle down. The students gave their best during class, and I was so impressed with their efforts in particular because it was the first lecture of the course. I have no doubt that their English skills and understanding of U.S. society and culture will improve under the mentorship of Edman.

High school students from Tottori Prefecture with SPICE Director Gary Mukai and Stanford Visiting Scholar Junichiro Hirata

The Tottori Prefectural Board of Education encourages its students to appreciate Tottori’s historic ties to agriculture and fisheries and its natural beauty. Tottori is also said to be Japan’s best place for stargazing. Simultaneously, the Board of Education instills in its students a need to see the world in a grain of sand through courses like Stanford e-Tottori. To me, helping students appreciate the delicate balance of innovation and tradition lies at the heart of Tottori Prefecture’s Global Leaders’ Campus, and SPICE is honored to be a part of this initiative.