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Stanford Korean studies expert Gi-Wook Shin has been named the William J. Perry Professor of Contemporary Korea, an endowed professorship established jointly by the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and the School of Humanities and Sciences (H&S). Shin is a professor in the Department of Sociology, senior fellow at FSI, director of the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) at FSI, and the founding director of the Korea Program within APARC.
 
“Gi-Wook is richly deserving of this appointment,” said FSI Director Michael McFaul. “He is a remarkable colleague and scholar who established a unique Korean studies program at Stanford and, within a relatively short period of time, built it into a leading research hub on contemporary Korea and U.S.-Korea relations. Grounded in the social sciences, the program’s approach to exploring issues of vital importance to policymaking in the United States and Korea from cross-regional and comparative perspectives is at the forefront of FSI’s efforts to foster global engagement through research and teaching.”
 
The William J. Perry professorship of contemporary Korea was established thanks to a generous gift from Jeong H. Kim, a technology entrepreneur passionate about education and public service, in honor of Professor William Perry, his mentor and friend, who played a significant role in encouraging Kim’s entrepreneurship. Perry is the Michael and Barbara Berberian Professor (emeritus) at Stanford and senior fellow at FSI. An expert in U.S. foreign policy, national security, and arms control, Perry was the 19th U.S. Secretary of Defense, serving during the 1994 crisis on the Korean peninsula. He has long worked inside and outside of government toward a peaceful resolution to the conflict on the Korean peninsula, an effort that he continues today as director of the Preventive Defense Project at FSI. Having witnessed the growth of the Korea Program under Gi-Wook Shin’s leadership, Kim decided to endow a professorship on contemporary Korea, which was named after Perry upon his retirement.
 
A prolific scholar, Shin is the author and editor of more than twenty books and numerous articles. Some of his recent books include Strategic, Policy and Social Innovation for a Post-Industrial Korea: Beyond the Miracle (2018); Superficial Korea (2017); Divergent Memories: Opinion Leaders and the Asia-Pacific War (2016); Global Talent: Skilled Labor as Social Capital in Korea (2015); and Troubled Transition: North Korea’s Politics, Economy, and External Relations (2013). Due to the wide popularity of his publications, many of them have been translated and distributed to Korean audiences. He frequently contributes expert commentary and analysis on the two Koreas and U.S.-Korea relations in both American and Korean news outlets. 
 
Shin is currently leading a multi-year research cluster that advocates for a “New Asia” of social, cultural, and economic maturity. It includes several projects that analyze a host of issues, such as flows of talent across national boundaries and talent management practices and policies harnessed by leading Asia-Pacific countries to compete in the new global knowledge economy; migration and diversity programs and policies of Asia-Pacific universities, corporations, and governments, and their impact on innovation and creativity; and the interests and policy environments of the two Koreas and their neighbors in relation to the North Korean nuclear problem, the U.S.-DPRK dialogue, the U.S.-ROK alliance, the rise of China, and Korean reunification.
 
“I am honored to become the William J. Perry Professor of Contemporary Korea,” said Shin. “As a Korean American scholar, my mission has been to strengthen the bonds between the two countries to which I am most attached. It has been a blessing to work together with collogues, friends, and partners at Stanford and in the United States and Korea to deliver on that mission through the Korea Program research, education, and outreach. I am proud of our accomplishments to date and look forward to addressing the challenges ahead and building on our record of achievement.”
 
Previously Shin held the Tong Yang, Korea Foundation, and Korea Stanford Alumni Chair of Korean Studies. His appointment as the William J. Perry Professor of Contemporary Korea concludes a long search for a candidate to fill the position. “We are thankful to Gi-Wook for his patience throughout the search process,” said McFaul. “This professorship is especially important at a time when changing regional relations and geopolitical developments around the Korean peninsula are front and center to U.S. and international interests.”
 

Media contact:
Noa Ronkin, Associate Director for Communications and External Relations
Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research center
 
 

 

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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.”

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Romain Wacziarg is a professor of economics at the UCLA Anderson School of Management and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). The paper that he will be presenting is co-authored by Guillaume Blanc, Brown University.

This talk is part of the Economic History Seminar Series, and is co-sponsored by The Europe Center.

Change and Persistence in the Age of Modernization: Saint-Germain-d’Anxure, 1730-1895
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Economics Building
Room 351

Romain Wacziarg Professor of Economics Speaker UCLA Anderson School of Management
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At 11am on November 11, 1918, the armistice that effectively ended the First World War was signed. What came to be known as “The Great War” had a profound and lasting impact on the cultural fabric of the nations involved: as Paul Fussell wrote, “its dynamics and iconography proved crucial to the political, rhetorical, and artistic life of the years that followed; while relying on inherited myth, war was generating new myth.” Over the course of the 20th century, the concept of war evolved beyond historically traceable moments and events to include the consideration of war as site and influence shaping every aspect of lived experience. This conference seeks to examine ways in which literature and the arts have taken up and taken apart war and the myths surrounding it -- grappling with it both as subject and context while also considering the ways in which the experience of war molded, mutilated, and morphed artistic forms. Though the word “centennial” often rings of monolithic celebration, it is equally an opportunity to highlight the attempts of writers and artists to contain, contend, or survive war and to question and problematize preconceptions and existing views of war by investigating their inherently bipolar nature.

November 10, 2018 (Day 2)
SCHEDULE:

  • 9 – 11am - 2nd PANEL
    Chair: Jennifer Scappettone (University of Chicago, Associate Professor)
     
  • Aubrey Knox (CUNY, PhD Student)
    "The Regulated Body: The Grand Palais as Military Hospital in World War I"
  • Joanna Fiduccia (Reed College, Assistant Professor)
    "A Destructive Character: Alberto Giacometti’s Crisis of the Monument"
  • Hadrien Laroche (INHA, France, Philosopher and Researcher)
    "Duchamp's waste: Trauma, Violence and Aesthetics"
     
  • 11 - 11.30am – COFFEE BREAK
     
  • 11.30am - 12.45pm – KEYNOTE ADDRESS

Jay Winter (Yale University, Emeritus Professor)
"All the Things We Cannot Hear: Silences of the Great War"

  • 12.45am – 2pm – LUNCH BREAK
     
  • 2 - 4.30pm - 3rd PANEL
    Chair: Peter Stansky (Stanford University, Emeritus Professor)
     
  • Martin Löschnigg (University of Graz, Austria, Professor)
    "‘The extreme fury of war self-multiplies’: First World War Literature and the Aesthetics of Loss"
  • Ron Ben-Tovim (Ben Gurion University, Israel, Post-Doc), Boris Shoshitaishvili (Stanford University, PhD Student)
    "Re-Enchanting the World after War: J. R. R. Tolkien, David Jones, and the Revision of Epic"
  • Anna Abramson (MIT, Post-Doc)
    "Atmospheric Myths of The Great War"
  • Isaac Blacksin (UC Santa Cruz, PhD Student)
    Senseless Encounter, Immutable Sense: The Contradictions of Reporting War

 

  • 4.30 – 4.45pm – COFFEE BREAK
     
  • 4.45 – 6pm – KEYNOTE ADDRESS

Alexander Nemerov (Stanford University, Professor)
"A Soldier Killed in the First World War"

For more info,  please email: massucco@stanford.edu

Sponsored by:  the Division of Literatures, Languages, and Cultures;  Stanford Department of Art and Art History; Theater and Performance Studies; Stanford Humanities Center; The Europe Center; Dept. of French and Italian; Dept. of History; Dept. of German Studies; and the Dean's Office of Humanities and Sciences.

 

Stanford Humanities Center
424 Santa Teresa Street
Stanford, CA 94305

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At 11am on November 11, 1918, the armistice that effectively ended the First World War was signed. What came to be known as “The Great War” had a profound and lasting impact on the cultural fabric of the nations involved: as Paul Fussell wrote, “its dynamics and iconography proved crucial to the political, rhetorical, and artistic life of the years that followed; while relying on inherited myth, war was generating new myth.” Over the course of the 20th century, the concept of war evolved beyond historically traceable moments and events to include the consideration of war as site and influence shaping every aspect of lived experience. This conference seeks to examine ways in which literature and the arts have taken up and taken apart war and the myths surrounding it -- grappling with it both as subject and context while also considering the ways in which the experience of war molded, mutilated, and morphed artistic forms. Though the word “centennial” often rings of monolithic celebration, it is equally an opportunity to highlight the attempts of writers and artists to contain, contend, or survive war and to question and problematize preconceptions and existing views of war by investigating their inherently bipolar nature.

November 9, 2018 (Day 1)
SCHEDULE:

  • 4 – 4.30pm – OPENING REMARKS
  • 4.30 - 7pm - 1st PANEL

Chair: Russell Berman (Stanford University, Professor)

  • Greg Chase (College of the Holy Cross, Lecturer)
  • ‘Death is not an event of life’: How Wittgenstein’s War Experience Re-Shaped His Philosophy
  • Victoria Zurita (Stanford University, PhD Student)
  • Ironic prospects: hope in Jean Giono’s To the Slaughterhouse
  • André Fischer (Auburn University, Assistant Professor)
  • Politics by other means: War photography in the work of Ernst Jünger
  • Nicholas Jenkins (Stanford University, Associate Professor)

 

For more info,  please email: massucco@stanford.edu

Sponsored by:  the Division of Literatures, Languages, and Cultures;  Stanford Department of Art and Art History; Theater and Performance Studies; Stanford Humanities Center; The Europe Center; Dept. of French and Italian; Dept. of History; Dept. of German Studies; and the Dean's Office of Humanities and Sciences.
 

Stanford Humanities Center
424 Santa Teresa Street
Stanford, CA 94305

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When did European modes of political thought diverge from those that existed in other world regions? We compare Muslim and Christian political advice texts from the medieval period using automated text analysis to identify four major and 60 granular themes common to Muslim and Christian polities, and examine how emphasis on these topics evolves over time. For Muslim texts, we identify an inflection point in political discourse between the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, a juncture that historians suggest is an ideational watershed brought about by the Turkic and Mongol invaders. For Christian texts, we identify a decline in the relevance of religious appeals from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. Our findings also suggest that Machiavelli’s Prince was less a turn away from religious discourse on statecraft than the culmination of centuries-long developments in European advice literature.

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The Journal of Politics
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Alison McQueen
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In 1670 the Sicilian painter Agostino Scilla (1629–1700) devised an entirely new way of depicting fossils when he wrote and illustrated his Vain Speculation Undeceived by Sense (1670–1671), which argued that fossils were the remains of once living creatures and not mimetic stones. This essay explores the nature of Scilla’s graphic innovations, comparing his fossils drawings and Pietro Santi Bartoli’s engravings of them to earlier and contemporary images of fossils. Scilla captured the effect of time on nature by infusing his style of drawing with his philosophical understanding of what it means to see and to know. He made his drawing less rich in detail to focus on those which served his purpose. In particular, he made the first use of dotted lines in paleontological illustration to render his images dynamic theoretical interpretations rather than static depictions.

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Endeavor
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Paula Findlen
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According to most scholars, the Enlightenment was a rational awakening, a radical break from a past dominated by religion and superstition. But in Let There Be Enlightenment, Anton M. Matytsin, Dan Edelstein, and the contributors they have assembled deftly undermine this simplistic narrative. Emphasizing the ways in which religious beliefs and motivations shaped philosophical perspectives, essays in this book highlight figures and topics often overlooked in standard genealogies of the Enlightenment. The volume underscores the prominent role that religious discourses continued to play in major aspects of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thought.

The essays probe a wide range of subjects, from reformer Jan Amos Comenius’s quest for universal enlightenment to the changing meanings of the light metaphor, Quaker influences on Baruch Spinoza’s theology, and the unexpected persistence of Aristotle in the Enlightenment. Exploring the emergence of historical consciousness among Enlightenment thinkers while examining their repeated insistence on living in an enlightened age, the collection also investigates the origins and the long-term dynamics of the relationship between faith and reason.

Providing an overview of the rich spectrum of eighteenth-century culture, the authors demonstrate that religion was central to Enlightenment thought. The term "enlightenment" itself had a deeply religious connotation. Rather than revisiting the celebrated breaks between the eighteenth century and the period that preceded it, Let There Be Enlightenment reveals the unacknowledged continuities that connect the Enlightenment to its various antecedents.

Contributors: Philippe Buc, William J. Bulman, Jeffrey D. Burson, Charly Coleman, Dan Edelstein, Matthew T. Gaetano, Howard Hotson, Anton M. Matytsin, Darrin M. McMahon, James Schmidt, Céline Spector, Jo Van Cauter.

 

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Johns Hopkins University Press
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We are sorry that the registration is now closed. It has reached the limit of the room capacity.

 

This event is one of the sessions in a 2-day conference, "Future Visions: Challenges and Possibilities of Korean Studies in North America," held November 1~2 at Stanford University.

If you are interested in attending other sessions of the conference, please click here to register.

The 2-day conference agenda is available.

Paul Brest Hall

555 Salvatierra Walk, Stanford University

Panel Discussions

Annual Stanford Primary Source Symposium

 

For further information, including the speakers and talk titles, please visit https://cmems.stanford.edu/primary-source-symposium

 

Co-sponsored by the Europe Center, the Department of Religious Studies, the Department of History, the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, the Department of Art & Art History, the Stanford Humanities Center, and Stanford University Libraries.

Stanford Humanities Center
424 Santa Teresa St.

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