The exploration of visual archives related to Korean history has grown at an exponential rate over the past decade.  While photographs ostensibly hold the possibility of tranforming the captured ephemeral moments into the fixity of celluloid perpetuity, they can have profound effects on changing memories of the past, and collapsing time and space.  This lecture examines the history and the meanings of photography in modern Korean history through the two dual prisms of "wormholes" and "phantom zones."

Lynn is the AECL/KEPCO Chair in Korean Research at the Institute of Asian Research, University of British Columbia.  He is also the editor for the journal Pacific Affairs which has been published continuously since 1928.  His research covers a range of topics relating to modern and contemporary Korea (both South and North), and Japan.  His publications include Bipolar Orders: The Two Koreas Since 1989 (2007); "History of Gendered Migration in the Two Koreas," Harvard Asia Quarterly (2008); "Moving Pictures: Postcards of Colonial Korea," International Institute of Asian Studies Newsletter (2007); and "Vicarious Traumas: Television and Public Opinion in Japan's North Korea Policy," Pacific Affairs (2006).

Lynn received a B.A and an M.A from University of British Columbia, and a Ph.D. from Harvard University.

San Francisco State University will host a conference September 16-17, 2010 exploring the question and place of rights in history, politics, and society.

Rights, both individual and collective, have long been a theme in American society, often seen in conflict with state power. The conference welcomes papers on assertions of rights by insurgent groups, resistance to rights claims, and governmental efforts to suppress or promote rights, in areas including but not limited to: civil liberties; disability rights; labor and economic rights; feminism and antiracism; immigration; environmental justice; access to healthcare; the prison industrial complex; sexual orientation; the stateless; and human rights.

The goal is to bring together a wide variety of people from a range of academic, activist, legal, and community spaces to examine the place of rights within the context of American society (as situated within a boarder global political community). To that end, the conference is open to historians, both senior and junior scholars, graduate students, community advocates, archivists, and lawyers.

The deadline for submission of proposals, consisting of an abstract of 1000 words for panel and workshop proposals or 300 words for individual presentations and a one-page CV for each participant, is March 15, 2010. Send your proposals to

Christopher Waldrep
Department of History
San Francisco State University
San Francisco, California 94132

or via email to cwaldrep@sfsu.edu.

More information is available at this link.

Since World War II, a major element of globalization has involved the expansion of human rights norms, rules, and institutions.  This broad movement represents a dramatic shift from earlier emphases on the rights and duties of citizens of national states.  The human rights movement stresses universal and global rights, and the general responsibility to support these rights anywhere in the world, independent of national sovereignty boundaries.  This research project focuses both on the expansion of the human rights movement at the global level and the impact of the movement on national states and societies around the world. 
 
Research studies in the program track, and attempt to account for, the rapid expansion of human rights treaties, inter-governmental organizations, non-governmental organizations, and popular and professional discourse advocating human rights.  The studies also track the rapid expansion of the substantive rights involved, from simple principles of protection and due process to greatly expanded human rights to active cultural and political participation and self-expression.  And the studies track the expansion, over the whole post-War period, of the groups particularly emphasized in the human rights movement women, children, older people, indigenous people, poor people, handicapped people, gay and lesbian people, and members of all sorts of religious and ethnic minorities. 
 
Since 1970, the world human rights movement has expanded its earlier focus on the legal protections of the individual person, to a more empowered and empowering focus on human rights education.  And studies in the program now focus heavily on the expansion worldwide of human rights education.

When discussing Korea's "Chinese Decade," roughly defined as the dozen or so years prior to the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895, most of the attention is focused on the heavy-handed activities of Yuan Shikai in Seoul.  Less well known is that part of this Chinese effort to bind Korea more closely to China involved the absorption of Korea's newly-formed Maritime Customs Service.  Several scholars have looked at this period and the actions of some of the key players such as Sir Robert Hart, Li Hongzhang, Henry F. Merrill, and Paul Georg von Mollendorff.  Using the recently-discovered correspondence of the first commissioner of customs in Pusan, this talk will discuss some heretofore unknown aspects of this attempted takeover by China.

Wayne Patterson received his undergraduate degree in history from Swarthmore College, and his graduate degrees in history and international relations from the University of Pennsylvania.  He has authored or edited eleven books on modern Korea, including The Korean Frontier in America: Immigration to Hawaii, 1896-1910 (1994) and The Ilse: First-Generation Korean Immigrants in Hawaii, 1903-1973 (2000).  He has taught Korean history at a number of institutions in the United States, including Harvard University, the University of Chicago, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the University of South Carolina, the University of Kansas, and the University of Pennsylvania.  He has also taught Korean history abroad, including Ewha University, Korea University, Yonsei University, as Fulbright Distinguished Lecturer, and most recently, at the University of the Philippines, as Korea Foundation Visiting Professor.  His home institution is St. Norbert College in Wisconsin, where he is professor of history.  He is currently teaching Korean history as a visiting professor at the University of California - Berkeley.

On December 1, 2009 the Treaty of Lisbon entered into force, bringing to an end eight years of discussions on treaty reforms in the European Union (EU). It included many of the institutional reforms that were originally part of the proposed EU Constitution, voted down by voters in France and the Netherlands in 2005. The Treaty of Lisbon could potentially be one of the most important EU treaties, depending on whether, for example, the newly created permanent European Council Presidency will manage to assert its authority and whether the Parliament will succeed at imposing its interpretation of the treaties. The objectives of this seminar are twofold. First, it will present an overview of the most important political and institutional reforms of the Treaty of Lisbon, and discuss its implications. Second, it will focus on EU trade policy and study how the Treaty of Lisbon will affect it. Trade policy is a good policy area to analyze, because it is one of the areas in which the EU’s powers are most extensive, and because the Parliament acquired new powers in this area, as it did in many other policy domains. Procedurally trade policy differs significantly from other EU policies: the Commission negotiates trade agreements based on mandates it receives from the Council. Agreements need final approval from the Council and, since December, the Parliament. The seminar will present a political-economic analysis of EU trade policy, analyze the role of the mandate, and study the implications of the increased role of the Parliament.  

Christophe Crombez is a specialist of European Union (EU) politics and business-government relations in Europe. His research focuses on EU institutions, the institutions' impact on EU policies under alternative procedural arrangements, EU institutional reform, lobbying in the EU, and electoral laws and their consequences for voter representation, party politics and government formation.

Crombez has been at the Forum on Contemporary Europe (FCE) at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University as a visiting professor since 1999. At FCE he organizes seminars and other events on European Union politics and economics and European political systems. Crombez is also visiting professor at Stanford's Graduate School of Business, where he teaches a course on Politics and Business in Europe. He also teaches in the International Relations Program.

Furthermore, Crombez is professor of political economy and strategy at the University of Leuven in Belgium. He has been teaching in Leuven's business and economics department since 1994. His teaching responsibilities include political business strategy and applied game theory.

Christophe Crombez obtained a B.A. (Licentiaat) in Applied Economics from the University of Leuven in 1989, and a Ph.D. in Business, Political Economics, from Stanford University in 1994.

Audio Synopsis:

Professor Crombez first highlights key characteristics of the EU treaty system: each iteration of the treaty increases European integration; the growth of majority voting promotes smoother decision making; and every new treaty requires compromise between member states, and between political factions within the EU. Crombez then outlines changes in the Lisbon Treaty, including new policy areas for cooperation such as climate change, space policy, sports, judicial and police cooperation, and homeland security. The treaty establishes the European External Action Service, a kind of European diplomatic corps. Majority voting has been implemented in 68 new policy areas, including transport policy, immigration policy, and social security for migrant workers. The treaty grants significant new power to Parliament in multiple policy areas, and creates a permanent EU presidency. Progress has not been smooth, however: the Lisbon Treaty was voted down by Ireland in 2008 (before later being ratified), and much progress on actual policy is slowed by the reluctance of member state representatives to vote against the views of their constituents. Areas for optimism, Crombez explains, include two clauses that enable progress without a change to the treaty:

1.     Passerelle Clause: 8 articles outlining new policy areas previously requiring unanimous decisions which can now be decided through majority voting, except on defense-related issues.

2.     Flexibility Clause: decisions can now be made on issues where the EU lacks explicit authority if those issues promote the goals of the treaty. Unanimity is required, but not a formal change of the treaty.

Professor Crombez then turns his focus to trade policy under the Lisbon Treaty. An important change is that Parliament now has the option of codecision, in addition to the existing procedure of consultation (where the Council approves the Commission's proposal by unanimous decision). Codecision, in contrast, allows for qualified majority voting - leading the Commission to propose policies it may not think are ideal but which will more likely pass. In this way, Crombez feels codecision has made EU trade policy resemble US trade policy, wherein the executive branch may desire more liberal policies than what the legislature will accept. Crombez predicts this system may "lower the bar" and lead to more protectionist trade policies.

Dr. von Vacano’s teaching and research interests are in political philosophy and the history of political thought. He is especially interested in modern European and Latin American political theory. His current research for a monograph focuses on the problem of racial identity in relation to citizenship in the Hispanic tradition, focusing on the themes of Empire, Nation, and Cosmopolis in various thinkers. The ancillary aim of The Color of Citizenship: Race, Modernity and Latin American Political Thought (Oxford University Press, forthcoming) is to develop a normative conceptualization of race for modern multicultural societies.

Professor von Vacano is also beginning research on a book project that defends globalization through an examination of the development of immigrant identity. This uses the dialectical tradition in German political philosophy and empirical evidence from immigrants in global cities such as New York, Paris, Tokyo, and Buenos Aires.