Stanford University

Migration and Citizenship (Society)

Nelly Sachs: Migration and Memory, Poetry and Context

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Reception, workshop and dramatic reading in celebration of the life, poetry and the evocative context of Nelly Sachs, winner of the 1966 Nobel Prize for Literature.

Inspired by the publication of the American edition of Nelly Sachs: Flight and Metamorphosis, the documented biography of the Nobel prize-winning poet Nelly Sachs, by author Aris Fioretos (Stanford University Press, 2012), Mr. Fioretos will be available for book signings (books will also be available for purchase.)

Seating is limited.

Co-sponsored by the Stanford Institute for Creativity and the Arts (SiCa) and the Taube Center for Jewish Studies

POST EVENT RELATED PUBLICATIONS:

"Nelly Sachs.  Ever hear of her?  Nobel poet finds new recognition"
AUTHOR
Cynthia Haven
PUBLISHED BY
THE BOOK HAVEN, Stanford University, March 2012

"Dust-to-Dust Song"
AUTHOR
Paul Reitter
PUBLISHED BY
JEWISH REVIEW OF BOOKS, Vol. 10, Summer 2012

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The Bender Room
5th floor, Green Library
Stanford University

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
Eshel.jpg MA, PhD

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
CV
Amir Eshel Moderator
Aris Fioretos Author and Professor of Aesthetics Speaker Humboldt University, Berlin
Deniz Göktürk Professor of German / Film and Media Speaker UC Berkeley

Axel Englund

Encina Hall
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305

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Anna Lindh Fellow, The Europe Center
Englund_headshot.jpg PhD
Axel Englund is a scholar of Literature and Musicology. He completed his doctorate at Stockholm University, Sweden (April 2011), where he has also taught modernist exile literature and metrics. His dissertation, a book version of which is being published by Ashgate in 2012, focuses on the poetry of the German-speaking Holocaust survivor Paul Celan, and its interplay with music. In 2009, he was a visiting scholar at the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Columbia University. His research interests include the poetry and music of the 20th century, intermedial relations, critical musicology, hermeneutics and aesthetics. His current research addresses the poetic output of W.G. Sebald.
Axel Englund Anna Lindh Fellow (former) at Stanford University and Scholar of Literature and Musicology Speaker Stockholm University

Anna Westerstahl Stenport

Encina Hall
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305

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Visiting Associate Professor and Anna Lindh Fellow, The Europe Center
Stenport.jpg PhD

As a Visiting Associate Professor and Anna Lindh fellow in The Europe Center, Anna Westerstahl Stenport researches the contemporary European and Nordic film and media industries. Her interests include production studies and digital convergence culture and span investigations into aesthetics, film genre, and thematic analyses. She includes practitioner perspectives in her work and incorporates extensive interview material in her writing. Current scholarship focuses on contemporary Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish film industry culture. She is the author of a book on Swedish director Lukas Moodysson's debut feature 'Show Me Love'  (University of Washington Press Nordic Film Classics Series, 2012). Current research includes film adaptations of Scandinavian crime writers Stieg Larsson, Henning Mankell, and others.  

Anna also researches turn-of-the century European literature, drama, and culture with an emphasis on economic history. She has written extensively on Swedish author and playwright August Strindberg. Works include the book Locating August Strindberg's Prose: Modernism, Transnationalism, and Setting (University of Toronto Press, 2010) and numerous articles and book chapters.  

A native of Sweden's Göteborg, Anna holds degrees from Uppsala University and a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. She is an Affiliate Associate Professor at the University of Gothenburg, as well as a tenured professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.   

Anna Westerstahl Stenport Anna Lindh Fellow at Stanford University and Associate Professor Speaker University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Leslie Morris Professor of German Speaker University of Minnesota
Lucy Alford Doctoral Candidate, Department of Comparative Literature Speaker Stanford University
Andrew Utter Artistic Director Speaker Uranium Madhouse Theater, Los Angeles
Workshops

History and Memory: Global and Local Dimensions

The second conference in the multi-year TEC-Van Leer Jerusalem Institute project on the reconciliation of divided regions and societies.

 

Conference Summary
By Roland Hsu, Associate Director, the Europe Center, and Kathryn Ciancia, (Ph.D., Stanford).

The Europe Center, with project partner the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, hosted the major international conference at Stanford University (May 17-18, 2012), dedicated to “History and Memory: Global and Local Dimensions”.  This conference was aimed to deepen our understanding of disputes over history, and to find ways towards resolving conflictual memory.  Participants – all leaders in their field, and representing voices from U.S., European, Israeli, Palestinian, and Arab worlds – were challenged to answer:

  • What are the historians’ responsibilities in developing shared narratives about war, civil conflict, occupation, and genocide?
  • How do we understand the relation between the work of professional historians and that of civic society organizations?
  • How should one think about the relative importance of historical commissions and truth commissions in “coming to terms with the past”?
  • How do efforts in post-conflict situations to reach accurate assessments (“truth”) of the events meet the needs of healing social, ethnic, and/or religious wounds (“reconciliation”)?
  • What are the consequences and meaning of actions of forgiveness, including the formal granting of amnesty? Do these actions conflict with the writing of history?

Participants included:
Khalil, Gregory (Telos Group)
Göçek, Müge (Univ. of Michigan)
Milani, Abbas (Stanford)
Bashir, Bashir (The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute)
Barkan, Elazar (Columbia)
Karayanni, Michael (The Hebrew University)
Confino, Alon (University of Virginia)
Bartov, Omer (Brown)
Cohen, Mitchell (Baruch)
Eshel, Amir (Stanford)
Glendinning, Simon (LSE)
Motzkin, Gabriel (The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute)
Naimark, Norman (Stanford)
Penslar, Derek (Toronto)
Rouhana, Nadim (Tufts)
Uhl, Heidemarie (Austrian Academy of Sciences)
Zerubavel, Yael (Rutgers)
Zipperstein, Steven (Stanford)


Notes and Highlights
In his opening remarks, Amir Eshel, Director of The Europe Center, situated the conference within its wider context—a series under the title “Debating History, Democracy, Development, and Education in Conflicted Societies,” which began with a conference on “Democracy in Adversity and Diversity” in Jerusalem in May 2011.  Eshel posed the question of why Stanford’s Europe Center should focus on issues relating to the wider Middle East, particularly the historic and ongoing conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.  In answering his own question, Eshel argued that the European Union had begun to look closely at its own neighborhood, with a particular emphasis on the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership (EUROMED), which explores questions of migration, religion, and civil society in the eastern Mediterranean and North Africa.  As such questions are important in both Europe and the EUROMED region, scholars who work on Europe need to think within a broader geographical context that stretches beyond Old Europe or even the European Union.

Amir Eshel also introduced some of the key ideas that informed the conference. Questions of memory and history have been central to academic discourse over the past three decades.  Indeed, memory and history have taken on a crucial, even obsessive, dynamic.  Where are we today in this global interdisciplinary conversation?  Can the study of memory help us to understand the conflicted societies of the greater Middle East?  Can the huge scholarly interest in such subjects help us to think in new ways about the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians?  Can the European experience of dealing with difficult memories aid us as we try to understand Israeli and Palestinian memories of the 1948 Nakba?  What is the role of historical research, on the one hand, and cultural remembrance, on the other, in promoting reconciliation and cohabitation? Since the conference aimed to focus less on the peace process in the Middle East and more on attempts at reconciliation and cohabitation, he urged participants to consider how Israelis and Palestinians might live together

In order to highlight work that had recently been undertaken, Eshel then focused on the fields of historical research and cultural discourse.  Over the past few decades, he argued, narratives have become increasingly crucial in the historiography, much of the impetus coming from so-called critical historiography.  For instance, the last decade has witnessed the publication of Motti Golani and Adel Manna’s Two Sides of the Coin, which presents two narratives of the Nakba of 1948.  In this multi-perspective narrative, the conflict is presented as one of both territory and historical memory.  Similarly, Mahmoud Yazbak and Yfaat Weiss’s Haifa Before and After 1948 was co-authored by Israelis and Palestinians and features fourteen different narratives.  A further collection, entitled Zoom In: Palestinian Refugees of 1948, Remembrances, deals with contemporary memories of the Nakba.  All three books were published by the Institute For Historical Justice and Reconciliation and the Republic of Letters, while the Van Leer Institute and Al-Quds University in Palestinian East Jerusalem have also published a series of schoolbooks that present similar multi-perspective narratives.

In addition to the changes in the historiography, there has been a shift in the cultural discourse, exemplified by the Israeli novelist Alon Hilu’s The House of Rajani (2012), which details the experiences of one Palestinian family and includes a map of Jaffa-Tel Aviv featuring Palestinian sites that vanished in 1948. The fact that Hilu’s novel received critical acclaim and was commercially successful indicates a new willingness on the part of Israelis to learn about the Palestinian experience.  Eshel has himself just completed a book comparing post-Second World War German and Austrian cultural memory with Israeli cultural memory of 1948. Since Palestinians and Israelis are bound to live together, Eshel argued that the solutions depend on narratives of the past, with history at the center of the discussion.  Throughout the conference, participants were urged to ask themselves two questions: Can we do more? Can we do better?   

 

Video casts of select sessions of the conference are available on Stanford YouTube.

Titles of the sessions are:

  • History and Memory Welcome and Introduction (Amir Eshel and Gabriel Motzkin)
  • Session 1:  "Memory and the Philosophy of History" (Gabriel Motzkin) and “From Rational Historiography to Delusional Conspiracies: Travails of History in Iran” (Abbas Milani)
  • Session 2:“The Public and Private Erasure of History and Memory: Ottoman Empire, Turkish Republic and the Case of the Collective Violence against the Armenians (1789-2009)” (Fatma Müge Göçek)  and “The Shoah and the Logics of Comparison: The place of the Jewish Holocaust in Contemporary European Memory” (Heidemarie Uhl)
  • Session 4:  America, Prolepsis and the 'Holy Land' (Gregory Khalil) and “Neutralizing History and Memory in Divided Societies” (Bashir Bashir)
  • Session 5:  "Role of Historical Memory in Conflict Resolution" (Elazar Barkan) and “I Forgive You” (Simon Glendinning)
  • Session 6: "Historicizing Atrocity as a Path to Reconciliation" (Omer Bartov) and “A Memory of One’s Own: History, Political Change and the Meaning of 1977” (Mitchell Cohen)


Plans for the Next Conference
The final session involved a Round Table discussion in which participants had the opportunity to reflect on the larger themes of the conference and to suggest ways in which the dialogue could be fruitfully continued.  Three of the conference organizers began with their own reflections on the conference before the discussion was opened up to all participants.  Norman Naimark pointed to three key ideas that he had learned from the proceedings.  The first was the concept that history and memory should not necessarily be seen as distinct entities.  Second, Naimark pointed to the importance of comparative approaches, citing Derek Penslar’s presentation as a good example.  While the conference did not deal with the fields of Eastern European, Russian, and German history, external scholarly interjections into these fields have made them places of stimulating debate. Finally, since there is much that we do not know about 1948, Naimark urged the creation of a history that would place those events within a much broader chronological context, just as Omer Bartov is doing for the town of Buczacz.  In his remarks, Gabriel Motzkin focused on the relationship between memory and the ongoing political process in Israel.  He expressed agreement with Nadim Rouhana that Jewish Israelis need to recognize Palestinian memories, but added that Palestinians have to acknowledge the Jewish religious project in which the land of Israel occupies the same place that salvation does for Christians.  Finally, Amir Eshel urged participants to consider the role of the “practical past”—how do we use the past in order to engage the present and imagine the future? He suggested that there are a variety of possible political solutions, but that there is also a long list of actions that the present Israeli government could take in order to aid reconciliation, including acts of apology and acknowledgment.

The organizers express their deep appreciation to the conference participants.  They also support the keen interest in continuing the work on this subject and the larger project, with follow-up programming.  The next conference in this series, from the Europe Center-Van Leer Jerusalem Institute partnership, will be announced at The Europe Center website.

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Landau Economics Building
Lucas Room 134(A)

Conferences
Date Label

European and Global Economic Crisis Series: "Europe At The Cross Road – Ending or Finalizing the EMU"

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Jacob Funk Kirkegaard has been a research fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics since 2002 and is also a senior associate at the Rhodium Group, a New York-based research firm. Before joining the Institute, he worked with the Danish Ministry of Defense, the United Nations in Iraq, and in the private financial sector. He is a graduate of the Danish Army's Special School of Intelligence and Linguistics with the rank of first lieutenant; the University of Aarhus in Aarhus, Denmark; and Columbia University in New York.

He is author of The Accelerating Decline in America's High-Skilled Workforce: Implications for Immigration Policy (2007) and coauthor of US Pension Reform: Lessons from Other Countries (2009) and Transforming the European Economy (2004) and assisted with Accelerating the Globalization of America: The Role for Information Technology (2006). His current research focuses on European economies and reform, pension systems and accounting rules, demographics, offshoring, high-skilled immigration, and the impact of information technology.

Jacob Kierkegaard interviews on the European financial crisis can be found in the following NPR articles:

"Why European Leaders are Suddenly Backing More Bank Bailouts"

"Ireland Went Down with its Banks.  Why Didn't that Happen in the U.S.?"

"Is This Europe's 'Lehman Moment'?  Banks Don't Think So"

 
 

CISAC Conference Room

Jacob Kirkegaard Research Fellow Speaker Peterson Institute for International Economics
Seminars
European and Global Economic Crisis Series

International Conference on "History and Memory: Global and Local Dimensions"

Authors
News Type
News
Date
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The Europe Center announces its upcoming international conference on “History and Memory: Global and Local Dimensions.”  With European and Van Leer Jerusalem Institute partnership, the conference is part of the Center’s multi-year series on Reconciliation, seeking insight and answers to regional and civil conflict in today’s world of nationality, resource, and territory disputes, as well as multicultural communities and global immigration and mobility.  The conference on “History and Memory: Global and Local Dimensions” is the second of the Center’s international conferences in the series; the first was on “Democracy in Adversity and Diversity.”

Details on The Europe Center’s series on “Reconciliation”, the conference on “History and Memory,” and the conference on “Democracy in Adversity and Diversity” are available at The Europe Center’s events pages.

Video and podcast presentations conference will be available soon on these pages.

 

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Closing Guantanamo: Where has the debate gone?

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Closing Guantanamo: Where has the debate gone?Please join the Program on Human Rights for a discussion with Shane Kadidal - Senior Managing Attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights -on why the issue of closing the Guantanamo Bay Detention Center has all but disappeared as a matter of public discourse.

The Supreme Court’s Guantanamo detainee cases have attracted more attention than any other judicial decisions in the wake of 9/11, and the opinions are frequently required reading in law schools. Yet more than seven years after the decision in Rasul v. Bush and three years after the decision in Boumediene v. Bush, not a single detainee has been released by court order, the litigation has ground to a halt in the district courts, and the prison remains open despite the promises of both presidential candidates in the last election to close it. This talk will explore the reasons why, with particular emphasis on the manner in which the D.C. Circuit has managed, with some subtlety, to pull all the teeth from the Boumediene decision.
 
Shayana Kadidal is senior managing attorney of the Guantánamo Global Justice Initiative at the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York City. He is a graduate of the Yale Law School and a former law clerk to Judge Kermit Lipez of the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. In his ten years at the Center, he has worked on a number of significant cases in the wake of 9/11, including the Center's challenges to the detention of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay (among them torture victim Mohammed al Qahtani and former CIA ghost detainee Majid Khan), which have twice reached the Supreme Court, and several cases arising out of the post-9/11 domestic immigration sweeps. He was also counsel in CCR's legal challenges to the “material support” statute (decided by the Supreme Court in 2010), to the low rates of black firefighter hiring in New York City, and to the NSA’s warrantless surveillance program

Room 280 - Stanford Law School (Crown Building

Shane Kadidal Senior Managing Attorney of the Guantanamo Global Justice Initiative Speaker Center for Constitutional Rights
Seminars
Courts, Politics and Human Rights

Determinants of Territorial Conflicts in Africa

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Reuben W. Hills Conference Room

Hein Goemans Associate Professor, Political Science, University of Rochester Speaker
Kenneth Schultz Professor, Political Science; Affiliated Faculty Member, CISAC Speaker
Jessica Gottlieb PhD Candidate, Political Science, Stanford University Commentator
Seminars

Women, War and Peace

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This event is co-sponsored by the Program on Social Entrepreneurship at CDDRL together with the Clayman Institute for Gender Research, the Program in Ethics in Society, and the Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society.

Award-winning documentarian and Stanford alumna Abigail Disney will talk about her latest project, PBS mini-series Women, War & Peace — the most comprehensive global media initiative ever mounted on the roles of women in peace and conflict, an area she calls the ignored "second front of war."

Disney is a filmmaker, philanthropist, and scholar. She holds degrees from Yale, Stanford, and Columbia. Her work in philanthropy, women's engagement and leadership, and conflict resolution has been recognized through the Epic Award from the White House project, the Changing Landscape for Women Award from the Center for the Advancement of Women, and the prestigious International Advocate for Peace (IAP) Award from the Cardozo Law School's Cardozo Journal of Conflict Resolution.


Watch the premiere episode of Women, War & Peace, "I Came to Testify," at 11pm on October 11th, 2011 on KQED. Then join the conversation with Abigail Disney at Stanford the following day at 7pm on October 12th, 2011.

When the Balkans exploded into war in the 1990s, reports that tens of thousands of women were being systematically raped as a tactic of ethnic cleansing captured the international spotlight. "I Came to Testify" is the moving story of how a group of 16 women who had been imprisoned by Serb-led forces broke history's great silence — and stepped forward to take the witness stand in an international court of law.

This event is free and open to all. However, tickets are required. To get tickets, click here.

Cemex Auditorium, Zambrano Hall
Knight Management Center (free underground parking available)
Stanford, CA 94305, USA

Abigail Disney Speaker
Kavita N. Ramdas Executive Director Host Program on Social Entrepreneurship
Seminars

Brenna Powell

Encina Hall
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

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Visiting Scholar, 2011-12
Powell.jpg

Brenna Marea Powell received her PhD in Government and Social Policy from Harvard in 2011. She is interested in comparative racial and ethnic politics, conflict and inequality. Her research includes security and policing in divided societies, as well as racial politics in Brazil and the United States. She has been a graduate fellow at Harvard's Wiener Center for Inequality and Social Policy, and Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation. Prior to her graduate study, she spent five years working with the Stanford
Center on International Conflict and Negotiation on grassroots dialogue and community-based mediation programs in Northern Ireland. Brenna speaks Portuguese and received her BA from Stanford in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity.

At CDDRL, Brenna is working with the Global Commission on Elections, Democracy and Security supported by the Kofi Annan Foundation and International IDEA. She is also working on a book project about post-conflict policing in Northern Ireland.

Henrik Larsen

Encina Hall
616 Serra Street
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

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Visiting Researcher
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Henrik Boesen Lindbo Larsen is a CDDRL visiting researcher 2011-12, while researching on his PhD project titled NATO Democracy Promotion: the Geopolitical Effects of Declining Hegemonic Power. He expects to obtain his PhD from the University of Southern Denmark and the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS) in 2013.

Henrik Larsen’s PhD project views democracy promotion as a policy resulting from power transitions as mediated through the predominant narratives of great powers. It distinguishes between two main types of democracy promotion, the ability to attract (enlargement, partnerships) and the ability to impose (out-of-area missions, state-building). NATO’s external policies are increasingly pursued with a lower intensity and/or with a stronger geographical demarcation.

Prior to his PhD studies, Henrik Larsen held temporary positions for the UNHCR in the Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congoand with the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Denmark working with Russia & the Eastern neighborhood. He holds an MSc in political science from the University of Aarhus complemented with studies at the University of Montreal, Sciences Po Paris and the University of Geneva. He has been a research intern at École Militaire in Paris and he is member of the Danish roster for election observation missions for the OSCE and the EU.

 

Publications

  • "Libya: Beyond Regime Change”, DIIS Policy Brief, October 2011.
  • "Cooperative Security: Waning Influence in the Eastern Neighbourhood" in Rynning, S. & Ringsmose, J. (eds.), NATO’s New Strategic Concept: A Comprehensive Assessment, DIIS Report 2011: 02.
  • "The Russo-Georgian War and Beyond: towards a European Great Power Concert", DIIS Working Paper 2009: 32 (a revised version currently under peer review). 
  • "Le Danemark dans la politique européenne de sécurité et de défense: dérogation, autonomie et influence" (Denmarkin the European Security and Defense Policy: Exemption, Autonomy and Influence) (2008), Revue Stratégique vol. 91-92.
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