Join Scholars at Risk at Stanford University on Wednesday, April 28 at 12:00 PM for a behind the scenes look at struggles for freedom of speech around the world and the courageous individuals who challenge attempts to control what people think. The goal of this event is to increase awareness and interest in institutionalizing a Scholars at Risk program at Stanford and to encourage faculty and administration to begin thinking about hosting at-risk scholars.This event is cosponsored by the Scholars at Risk Network, the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies (CREEES), and the Hamid and Christina Moghadam Program in Iranian Studies.

Robert Quinn is the founding Executive Director of the Scholars at Risk Network, a collaboration of more than 220 universities and colleges in 29 countries dedicated to protecting threatened intellectuals and promoting respect for freedom of inquiry, expression and university values. 

The Scholars at Risk Network seeks to bridge the gap between the human rights and higher education communities, building local, regional and global capacity to defend the intellectual space. The Network provides direct assistance to gravely threatened intellectuals, and conducts education and advocacy to target root causes of intellectual repression and to promote systemic change.

Mr. Quinn currently serves on the Steering Committee of the Network for Education and Academic Rights (NEAR), based in London, UK; the governing Council of the Magna Charta Observatory, based in Bologna, Italy; and is a fellow with the Woodrow Wilson Visiting Fellows Program in Washington, DC.  He previously served as a member of the Committee on Scientific Freedom and Responsibility of the American Association for the Advancement of Science; a member of the Human Rights Committee of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York; and an adjunct professor of law at Fordham Law School.  He received his A.B. cum laude from Princeton in 1988, and his J.D. cum laude from Fordham in 1994. 

Fatemeh Haghighatjoo is an expert on Iran's internal affairs and a prominent advocate of political reform, human rights and women's rights. She was a member of the Iranian Parliament from 2000-2004 and chaired the Student Movement Caucus. She was a deputy of the Mosharekat Caucus in the 6th Parliament as well as a member of the political bureau of the Mosharekat party in Iran.  Dr. Haghighatjoo was one of the most courageous in standing up publicly to the hard-line Iranian leadership. She resigned in 2004 after a crackdown on reformers, and left Iran in 2005. More recently, Dr. Haghighatjoo has held several academic posts in the United States: Assistant Professor In-Residence at the University of Connecticut, Fellow in the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, and Visiting Scholar at the Center for International Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr. Haghighatjoo earned her Ph.D. in Counseling from Tarbiat Moalem University, served as a Professor at the National University of Iran, and authored Search for Truth (2002). She has served as Vice President of the Psychology and Counseling Organization in Iran and has been honored as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. Dr. Haghighatjoo has been extensively interviewed and quoted in the U.S. and international media on Iran's domestic politics.

Mohsen Sazegara is an Iranian dissident, writer and political activist. His PhD thesis at the University of London, Royal Holloway focused on religious intellectuals in Iran. He has been a visiting professor at several universities in Iran, and has held visiting scholar positions at Yale University and Harvard University. A founding member of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, he served as political deputy in the prime minister's office and held several other political offices. He became disillusioned with the revolutionary government and left it in 1989. He later served as publisher of several reformist newspapers closed by regime hardliners and was also managing director of Iran's press cooperative company. Dr. Sazegara was recently appointed as the second Visiting Fellow in Human Freedom at the George W. Bush Institute at the Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. He is the president of Research Institute on Contemporary Iran (RICI).

Natalia Koulinka joins CREEES as a Visiting Scholar from January - December 2010. She is the recipient of a Scholar Rescue Fund fellowship grant from the Institute of International Education, and supported by more than a dozen Centers, Departments, and Programs in the School of Humanities and Sciences and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford.

Koulinka was born and raised in Oshmiany in the Republic of Belarus. She graduated from the Belarusian State University in Minsk with both undergraduate and graduate degrees. From 1992-1996, she helped create and run the "Women's Newspaper," the only independent women's paper in Belarus which soon became popular in Russia too. As the paper's editor-in-chief, she focused on women in business and politics. Since 2006, she has been the news editor for the radio station Unistar in Minsk. In addition to her work as a journalist, Koulinka was an associate professor at Belarusian State University 2001-08. She is also the co-editor of the book, Krasnim po Belomy ("Red on White"), which is a collection of texts by murdered Belarus journalist, Veronika Cherkasova. In 2008-09, Koulinka was the Lyle and Corinne Nelson International Fellow, John S. Knight Fellowship for Professional Journalists at Stanford University. During her fellowship year at CREEES she will work on the research project topic "A Social History of the Soviet School of Journalism."

In the wake of 9/11 and the so-called War on Terror there has been in recent years an immense interest in Hannah Arendt's thought in a variety of disciplines ranging from Political Science through History to Cultural Criticism. While Arendt's political analysis, especially her insights into the nature of totalitarian ideologies and regimes has received much attention, relatively little has been said on the possible impact of her unique philosophical vocabulary in such works as The Human Condition, Between Past and Future or The Life of the Mind or on our understanding of literature and the arts as they address contemporary society and politics. Giorgio Agamben, as only one example, makes references to Origins of Totalitarianism, but leaves out The Human Condition or Hannah Arendt's writing on literature or culture. A recent collection of Arendt's writings on literature and culture provides a first opportunity to reflect on the status of literature and the arts in Arendt's work, and on the usefulness of her concepts for an understanding of contemporary society and culture (Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb (ed.), Hannah Arendt, Reflections on Literature and Culture (Stanford UP, 2007). But it is precisely Arendt's conviction that literature and the arts contribute indispensably to our understanding of politics and history that calls for an examination of how Arendt's work opens new perspectives and adds a critical vocabulary to address literature and the arts.

The relative dearth of attention to Arendt's possible relevance and impact on our thinking about literature and the arts is especially peculiar given Arendt's reliance on literary texts throughout her writing. The aim of the Stanford Workshop is to consider if Hannah Arendt's work offers a productive vocabulary for thinking about literature, the arts and culture at the intersection of history, politics, and ethics.

Our question is: what may be the usefulness of such concepts, terms, and figures of speech as "natality," or Arendt's conception of the "world," or of the distinction between the "public," the "private," and the "social"? We would like to consider together: what happens when one puts Arendt's thought in contact with the study of culture in its widest sense (and not exclusively within the discipline of political theory)? What may be the implications of Arendt's reliance on literature and culture, at key moments in her analysis of political and social reality, to our understanding of their possible significance to contemporary society and politics? The workshop aims to examine the relevance of Arendt's work for the humanities in the broadest sense, and to examine Arendt's work in light of some recent advances in critical thinking in turn.