Stanford University

Karol Berger

Department of Music
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-3076

(650) 725-2693 (650) 725-2686
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Osgood Hooker Professor in Fine Arts, Emeritus
Professor of Musicology, Emeritus
Professor, by courtesy, of German Studies, Emeritus
Karol_Berger2.jpg PhD

Karol Berger (Ph.D. Yale 1975) is the Osgood Hooker Professor in Fine Arts, Emeritus at the Department of Music, as well as an affiliated faculty at the Department of German Studies, and an affiliated researcher at the Europe Center.  A native of Poland, he has lived in the U.S. since 1968 and taught at Stanford since 1982.  He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, American Council of Learned Societies, the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Study and Conference Center, and Stanford Humanities Center.  In 2011-12 he has been the EURIAS Senior Fellow at the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna.  In 2005-2006, he was the Robert Lehman Visiting Professor at Villa I Tatti, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies.  He is a foreign member of the Polish Academy of Sciences, an honorary member of the American Musicological Society, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a foreign member of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences (Cracow), and a foreign member of the Academia Europaea.  His Musica Ficta received the 1988 Otto Kinkeldey Award of the American Musicological Society, his Bach's Cycle, Mozart's Arrow the 2008 Marjorie Weston Emerson Award of the Mozart Society of America, and his Beyond Reason the 2018 Otto Kinkeldey Award of the American Musicological Society.  In 2011 he received the Glarean Prize from the Swiss Musicological Society and in 2014 the Humboldt Research Award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

Selected publications:

  • Musica Ficta:  Theories of Accidental Inflections in Vocal Polyphony from Marchetto da Padova to Gioseffo Zarlino (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987; paperback 2004).
  • A Theory of Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000; paperback 2002; also available in the Oxford Scholarship Online philosophy series). Polish translation: Potega smaku. Teoria sztuki, trans. Anna Tenczynska (Gdansk: slowo/obraz terytoria, 2008).
  • Bach's Cycle, Mozart's Arrow:  An Essay on the Origins of Musical Modernity (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007; paperback 2008). 
  • Beyond Reason: Wagner contra Nietzsche (Berkeley and Los Angeles:  University of California Press, 2017).

 

Affiliated faculty at The Europe Center

Stalin und der Genozid

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Stalin und der Genozid, in German from Suhrkamp Verlag, follows Professor Norman Naimark's lecture of the same title in Berlin on December 2, 2009. Professor Naimark, Robert and Florence McDonnell Professor of East European Studies, professor of history, FCE research affiliate, and FSI senior fellow, delivered the address as part of the Stanford-Suhrkamp lecture and publication series.

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Norman M. Naimark
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978-3-518-42201-4

Awudu Abdulai

Department of Food Economics and Consumption Studies
University of Kiel, Olshausenstrasse 40,
24098 Kiel, Germany

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Cargill Visiting Fellow
Awudu_abdulai.png MA, PhD

Awudu Abdulai, chair of food economics at the University of Kiel, Germany, was FSE's Cargill visiting scholar from October 2010 - March 2011. While at Stanford he pursued three research themes. The first looked at how farmers risk preferences influence their decisions to adopt water conservation technologies and how that impacts farm productivity. The second examined how social capital, property rights and tenure duration affect farmers' investment decisions on sustainable management practices. The third involved an analysis of the welfare impacts of cultivating export crops in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Prior to joining the faculty at the University of Kiel, Professor Abdulai taught at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich (ETH) and also held visiting positions at the Departments of Economics at Yale University and Iowa State University, as well as the International Food Policy Research Institute, Washington, DC. Abdulai is originally from Ghana and his fields of interests span development economics, consumer economics and industrial organization.

Edith Sheffer

Department of History 200-120

(650) 724-0074
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Former Assistant Professor of Modern European History
Former Assistant Professor, by courtesy, of German Studies
edith_sheffer_-_1.jpg PhD

Edith Sheffer joined the History Department faculty in 2010, having come to Stanford as an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in the Humanities in 2008.  Her first book, Burned Bridge: How East and West Germans Made the Iron Curtain (Oxford University Press, 2011), challenges the moral myth of the Berlin Wall, the Cold War’s central symbol. It reveals how the barrier between East and West did not simply arise overnight from communism in Berlin in 1961, but that a longer, lethal 1,393 kilometer fence had been developing haphazardly between the two Germanys since 1945.

Her current book, Soulless Children of the Reich: Hans Asperger and the Nazi Origins of Autism, investigates Hans Asperger’s creation of the autism diagnosis in Nazi Vienna, examining Nazi psychiatry's emphasis on social spirit and Asperger's involvement in the euthanasia program that murdered disabled children. A related project through Stanford's Spatial History Lab, "Forming Selves: The Creation of Child Psychiatry from Red Vienna to the Third Reich and Abroad," maps the transnational development of child psychiatry as a discipline, tracing linkages among its pioneers in Vienna in the 1930s through their emigration from the Third Reich and establishment of different practices in the 1940s in England and the United States. Sheffer's next book project, Hidden Front: Switzerland and World War Two, tells an in-depth history of a nation whose pivotal role remains unexposed--yet was decisive in the course of the Second World War.

Affiliated faculty at The Europe Center

Beginning September 1, 2010, FSI launches The Europe Center

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Fall 2010 marks the launch of The Europe Center (formerly the Forum on Contemporary Europe/FCE), housed jointly within the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and the Division of International, Comparative and Area Studies (ICA). The Europe Center will continue to serve as Stanford's main center for research on European affairs, trans-Atlantic relations, and the role of Europe and the United States in addressing today's most pressing global economic, political, and security issues.

The Europe Center is dedicated to new thinking about Europe and the global context of trans-Atlantic relations in the new millennium. The increasingly complex challenges facing Europe and its global relations—including labor migrations, strains on welfare economies, local identities, globalized cultures, expansion and integration, and threats of terrorism—coupled with Europe’s recent struggle to ratify a single constitution, underline the challenges that Europe and the United States share, and the need to bring Stanford’s finest multidisciplinary research into practical policy dialogue with an engaged public.

Europe Center Director Amir Eshel (German Studies, Comparative Literature), outlines the importance of the new center in FSI's forthcoming 2010 Annual Report: “As the United States and Europe face new challenges in the international arena, they share lasting economic and political interests as well as a set of values that is crucial for the future of a prosperous, free humanity. In the next decade, the peaceful ascendance of new powers will depend on the stability of the trans-Atlantic alliance and its commitment to solving conflicts such as those that destabilize the Middle East or impede efforts to combat hunger and poverty in Africa.”

Founded in 1997, first as the European Forum, and now as a full research center, The Europe Center gathers Stanford’s most distinguished Europeanists across all disciplines, encourages them to speak on our most pressing issues, and brings them into policy dialogue with public leaders.

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Slovenian Filmmaker Karpo Godina at Stanford

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This event will feature a screening of Slovenian director Karpo Godina's 1980 film Medusa's Raft, preceded by a short film and followed by a Q&A session with the director in conversation with Pavle Levi, Assistant Professor of Art and Art History (Film and Media Studies).

Co-sponsored by CREEES, the Department of Art and Art History, Film and Media Studies.

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Annenberg Auditorium
Cummings Art Building
Stanford University

Pavle Levi Assistant Professor of Art and Art History, Stanford University Moderator
Karpo Godina Slovenian filmmaker, director of "Medusa's Raft" Speaker
Conferences

Revisiting the Original Purpose of the ROK-U.S. Alliance

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Song Min-soon will discuss the role of the ROK-U.S. alliance in addressing the North Korean nuclear issue and promoting security cooperation in Northeast Asia. He will share his views on the need for the ROK-U.S. alliance to employ strategic approaches in dealing with the North Korean nuclear problem, including ways to engage China and North Korea. In addition, Song will present his thoughts on why it is essential for the ROK-U.S. alliance to come up with a vision for the future of the Korean Peninsula and Northeast Asia that can be shared by countries in the region.

Song Min-soon, a former career diplomat, was Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade in the administration of President Roh Moo-Hyun and prior to that his National Security Advisor. Song was chief negotiator in the Six Party Talks when the September 19 Joint Statement was adopted in 2005. He participated in the Korean Peace Talks in Geneva as well as the inter-Korean Defense Ministers’ Talks, both in the late 1990s. Song negotiated numerous ROK-U.S. bilateral issues, including a revision of the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA). Song was elected to the National Assembly in June 2008 and currently serves on the Foreign Affairs, Trade & Unification Committee. He has a BA in German literature from Seoul National University.

Philippines Conference Room

Song Min-soon Korean National Assembly Member and former Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Speaker
Seminars

The German National Archive for Literature at Marbach: A Vision of 21st Century Culture

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Born in 1950, Professor Raulff studied philosophy and history (Doctorate from Marburg in 1877, Habilitation at Humboldt University, Berlin, in 1995. Since 1994, he has been an editor in the arts pages of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and culture editor since 1997. Since 2001, Professor Raulff has been Executive Editor in the arts section of the Süddeutsche Zeitung. In summer 1996, he was a fellow of the Getty Research Institute in Santa Monica (USA), and in the winter of 2003/2004 a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin. Since November 2004, he has been Director of the German Literature Archive Marbach and since November 2005 a Member of the Presidium of the Goethe-Institut. Professor Raulff is the winner of the Anna-Krüger prize of the academic staff in Berlin for scientific prose (1996), the Hans-Reimer Prize of the Aby-Warburg-Stiftung in Hamburg (1997) and the Prize of the Leipzig Book Fair 2010 (nonfiction).

Sponsored by The Europe Center at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, the Department of German Studies, SULAIR, and the Stanford Humanities Center.

Green Library, Bender Room

Ulrich Raulff Director, German National Archive for Literature at Marbach Speaker
Lectures

Performance of Trimpin's Drama, The Gurs Zyklus

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The Gurs Zyklus, performance of Trimpin's stirring and uncategorizable reflection on memory and remembrance, tragedy and renewal, exploration and wonder.From the astonishing mind of MacArthur "Genius Award"- winning inventor and sound sculptor, Trimpin: A stirring and uncategorizable reflection on memory and remembrance, tragedy and renewal, exploration and wonder.

Combining live performance with kinetic sculpture, and world history with personal biography, The Gurs Zyklus ("Gurs Cycle") represents the fruits of a lifetime of curiosity, investigation, inspired tinkering, and riveting invention on the part of Trimpin, the brilliant artist of one name and no definable genre.

As a youth in southwestern Germany in the 1950s, Gerhard Trimpin (as he was then known) was haunted by the fact that, in the Nazi era, the Jews from his town had all been deported to the internment camp at Gurs, near the Spanish-French border. Decades later, Trimpin worked with maverick composer Conlon Nancarrow, who revealed that he, too, had been interned at Gurs-during the Spanish Civil War. More recently, a 2006 New Yorker profile of Trimpin mentioned this Gurs connection. Trimpin was contacted shortly thereafter by Victor Rosenberg, a descendant of a family interned at Gurs, who, having read the article, offered the artist the use of more than 200 of his family's letters mailed from the camp.

These and other elements, united by history, profound coincidence, and the power of Trimpin's imagination, weave together in a stage performance truly like no other: Vocalists sing and speak texts drawn from the Rosenberg letters into "fire organs" of Trimpin's invention. Projections of historic images from Gurs meld with film from Trimpin's own retracing of the journey by train to the camp. The music of Nancarrow meets sounds derived from bark patterns of the trees near Gurs-among the last living "witnesses" to the camp's dark history. Throughout, Gurs Zyklus offers a novel perspective on an important story now at the edges of living memory, as well as a stage experience that is immersive and deeply moving.

POST-PERFORMANCE DISCUSSION with Trimpin and Jenny Bilfield.

This event is sponsored by Stanford Lively Arts.

For more information, please visit the Stanford Ethics and War Series website.

Stanford Memorial Auditorium
551 Serra Mall
Stanford Univeristy
Stanford, CA 94305

Seminars
Stanford Ethics & War Series (2010-2011)
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