New FSI/SHC International Scholars Chosen for 2010-11
The Stanford Humanities Center and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) are pleased to announce that four international scholars have been chosen to come to Stanford in 2010-11 as part of a jointly sponsored international program entering its second year. Nominated by Stanford departments and research centers, the international scholars will be on campus for four-week residencies. They will have offices at the Humanities Center and will be affiliated with their nominating unit, the Humanities Center, and FSI.
A major purpose of the residencies is to bring high-profile international scholars into the intellectual life of the university, targeting scholars whose research and writing engage with the missions of both the Humanities Center and FSI.
The following four scholars have been selected for the upcoming academic year.
- Anies Baswedan, currently President of Paramadina University in Jakarta, is a leading intellectual figure in Indonesia. In 2008, the editors of Foreign Policy named him one of the world's "top 100 public intellectuals." As an advisor to the Indonesian government, he is a leading proponent of democracy and transparency in Indonesia, a creative thinker about Islam and democracy, as well as a charismatic leader in the educational field. He was nominated by the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies.
- Stephane Dudoignon is a political scientist/senior research fellow at the EHESS in Paris. He is one of the world's leading scholars of Muslim politics and societies from the Caucasus to Central Asia. He is the author of pioneering work on Muslim movements, including the historical study of Sufi networks from the Volga River to China, Muslim intellectuals' debates about gender, and modern Sunni revivalist movements in Eastern Iran. While on campus, he will give lectures on Islam in Eurasia and Iran, among other things. He was nominated by CREEES, the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies.
- Monica Quijada is a high-profile public intellectual and historian of Spain and Latin America at the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas (CSIC) in Madrid. Her engagement with the UN in Argentina (working with refugees) and her directorship of the investigation carried out in the late 1990s regarding Nazi activities during the Second World War and in post-war Argentina shows her commitment to the public space. She has written extensively on dictatorship, populism, and war and their effect on the public sphere in Argentina and Spain as well as on the relationship between nineteenth-century Latin American states and their indigenous populations. She was nominated by the History Department and the Center for Latin American Studies.
- Patrick Wolfe is a historian at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. He is a premier historian of settler colonialism, currently working on a comparative transnational history of settler-colonial discourses of race in Australia, Brazil, the United States, and Israel/Palestine. While at Stanford, he will give lectures based on his core work on Australia and also on his forthcoming book Settler Colonialism and the American West, 1865-1904 (Princeton University Press). He was nominated by the Bill Lane Center for the American West.
While at Stanford, the scholars will offer informal seminars and public lectures and will also be available for consultations with interested faculty and students. For additional information, please contact Marie-Pierre Ulloa, mpulloa@stanford.edu.
Remembering the Gulag: Varlam Shalamov's Poetics of Memory
In the Soviet Union speaking about the Gulag was forbidden until the period of perestroika. Nevertheless survivors of the Stalinist concentration camps wrote about the Stalinist practices of terror against the official politics of forgetfulness. Varlam Shalamov’s (1907-1982) prose, especially his “Kolyma Tales”, must be named along with Primo Levi or Jorge Semprun. But his texts rested unpublished for a long time and his aesthetic position is not as well-known as Solshenicyn.
Shalamov understood his own writing as an effort to find a new aesthetic after Kolyma, Auschwitz and Hiroshima. From his point of view, the author should be like Pluto, who came out of the Hades and told the truth about the fragility of man and civilization. The seminar will discuss Shalamov’s strategy of literary memory.
Dr. Franziska Thun-Hohenstein is a researcher at the Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung (ZfL, Centre for Literary and Cultural Studies), Berlin. Since 2008, she has been head of the East Europe department at ZFL, and manager of projects on "The Topography of Europe's Plurale Cultures in View of its Eastward Shift," and "Aporias of Forced Modernization: Figurations of the National in the Soviet Empire." Her research topics include memory and autobiographical writing in 20th century Russian literature, cultural topographies, secularization and resacralization between East and West, and figurations of the national in the Soviet Empire. Dr. Thun-Hohenstein studied Russian language and literature at Lomonossow University Moscow.
Her publications include Gebrochene Linien: Autobiographisches Schreiben und Lagerzivilisation (Broken lines: Autobiographical writing and camp-civilisation, Berlin Kadmos 2007). She is editor of the Collected Works of Varlam Shalamov; and, with W. St. Kissel, of Exklusion: Chronotopoi der Ausgrenzung in der russischen und polnischen Literatur des 20. Jahrhunderts (München 2006).
German Studies Library
Pigott Hall, Building 260
Room 252