This workshop is part of the Economic History Workshop series in the Department of Economics and is co-sponsored by The Europe Center.
351 Landau Economics Building
579 Serra Mall
Stanford, CA 94305-6072
The social and political process that a significant part of Catalan society is engaged in needs to be explained analyzing its origins some ten years ago and its current state of development. At present no one can reasonably predict the future evolution and eventual outcome of this impressive democratic challenge to twenty-first century Europe.
The first cultural analysis of the secret literature of sixteenth-century Spain’s Muslim communities.
Covert Gestures reveals how the traditional Islamic narratives of the moriscos both shaped and encoded a wide range of covert social activity characterized by a profound and persistent concern with time and temporality. Using a unique blend of literary analysis, linguistic anthropology, and phenomenological philosophy, Vincent Barletta explores the narratives as testimonials of past human experiences and discovers in them evidence of community resistance.
Now available in its first English translation, Núñez Muley’s account is an invaluable example of how Spain’s former Muslims made active use of the written word to challenge and openly resist the progressively intolerant policies of the Spanish Crown. Timely and resonant—given current debates concerning Islam, minorities, and cultural and linguistic assimilation—this edition provides scholars in a range of fields with a vivid and early example of resistance in the face of oppression.
Though Alexander the Great lived more than seventeen centuries before the onset of Iberian expansion into Muslim Africa and Asia, he loomed large in the literature of late medieval and early modern Portugal and Spain. Exploring little-studied chronicles, chivalric romances, novels, travelogues, and crypto-Muslim texts, Vincent Barletta shows that the story of Alexander not only sowed the seeds of Iberian empire but foreshadowed the decline of Portuguese and Spanish influence in the centuries to come.
Death in Babylon depicts Alexander as a complex symbol of Western domination, immortality, dissolution, heroism, villainy, and death. But Barletta also shows that texts ostensibly celebrating the conqueror were haunted by failure. Examining literary and historical works in Aljamiado, Castilian, Catalan, Greek, Latin, and Portuguese, Death in Babylon develops a view of empire and modernity informed by the ethical metaphysics of French phenomenologist Emmanuel Levinas. A novel contribution to the literature of empire building, Death in Babylon provides a frame for the deep mortal anxiety that has infused and given shape to the spread of imperial Europe from its very beginning.
To RSVP, please send email to luisrr@stanford.edu. You may request a copy of the workshop paper at the same time.
On March 27, 1492, a few days before the Edict that expelled the Jews from Spain, the royal chronicler Alfonso de Palencia (1423-1492) published his Castilian translations of two works by the famous Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, The Jewish War and Against Apion. Palencia’s volume, Guerra judaica con los libros contra Appion, thus exemplifies the tension between two facets of Josephus’s writing: his fierce critique of Jewish sectarianism and stubborn resistance to Imperial order and his eloquent defence of their religious and cultural traditions. This paper explores the cultural and political significance of these Spanish translations in the light of the events leading up to 1492 and it considers whether Palencia appropriated this Romanized Jewish historian in order to open up a space for religious minorities in the new imperial order ushered in by the Catholic Monarchs. To do this, I read Palencia’s translations against other contemporary texts by and about Jews and conversos, and consider the marginalia of sixteenth-century readers found in extant copies of the 1492 edition.
The broader issues raised include: the ambivalent alignment between the ‘intellectual’ and the ‘State’ (both terms need to be historicised); anti-judaism as a ‘way of thinking’ (to borrow David Nirenberg’s term); the meaning and limits of early modern tolerance.
This talk is part of the Theoretical Perspectives of the Middle Ages workshop.
Co-sponsored by The Europe Center, Stanford Humanities Center, Iberian and Latin American Cultures and the Department of Religious Studies.
Building 260, Room 215
616 Serra Street
Encina Hall, 2nd floor, C206-10
Stanford, CA 94305
Jessie Marino, a DMA candidate in Composition at Stanford, recently returned from Copenhagen’s SPOR festival, where she was selected as one of five artists from a field of 140 (representing 34 nationalities) to perform her original work, titled “Heartfelt bird, vivid and great in style.” “I was commissioned by the SPOR Festival to compose a new piece featuring percussionist Serge Vuille and pianist Mark Knoop (photo inset) which was featured in a concert of all world premiere works,” writes Marino. “This event allowed me to meet new musicians, artists, curators, and composers who are working under similar guises and to exchange ideas about how our art can expand and develop in the 21st century.” 
Marino (inset) is also a recipient of a summer travel grant from the Center’s Graduate Student Grant Program. She will be traveling to Germany to attend the 2014 Darmstadt International Summer Course for New Music. Marino writes that the opportunity will give her the chance to “practice and perform my own compositions,” to “work and develop new ideas with composers and academics,” and to “attend lectures on current research, developments and discoveries in sound production and music technology.”
David Laitin and his co-author Rafaela Dancygier’s article in the Annual Review of Political Science, “Immigration into Europe: Economic Discrimination, Violence, and Public Policy,” investigates and reviews recent research on changing Western European demographic patterns, and its implications for labor-market discrimination, immigrant-state relations, and immigrant-native violence. The authors “discuss some of the methodological challenges that scholars have not fully confronted in trying to identify the causes and consequences of discrimination and violence,” and propose pathways to resolve contradictory results in existing studies regarding the economic consequences of immigration policymaking. Laitin is the James T. Watkins IV and Elise V. Watkins Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. We welcome you to visit our website for additional details. Here is wishing you a pleasant and productive summer.
Screening of the film Forasters (Outsiders) directed by Catalan film director Ventura Pona, and followed by a Q&A session led by Joan Ramon Resina. Dr. Resina is a professor of Iberian and Latin American Cultures, and Comparative Literature, and the director of the Iberian Studies Program and research affiliate of The Europe Center.
Forasters portrays a family's experiences with two traumatic events, with a forty year gap between them, and how they affect family members as well as their ideal of social harmony.
Forasters received eight nominations at the 2009 Gaudi Awards, including Best Film in Catalan Language, Best Director (Ventura Pons), and Best Screenplay (Ventura Pons). Anna Lizaran received the Gaudi Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role for her portrayal of the family matriarch Emma.
This screening is part of the summer film series "Beyond Boundaries: Race, Gender and Culture Across the Globe" organized by the Stanford Global Studies Division (SGS).
Braun Corner (Building 320), Room 105
450 Serra Mall
On the first day, develop a set of research interventions (surveys, experiments, archival searches, participant observations, etc.) that will gain some leverage in measuring differential policies in Europe and their impact on integration, however specified; or in examining the various immigrant populations to measure their differential success in integration, however specified. Each of the participants (either singly or in collaboration) will write up one or two research proposals that lay out the outcomes of interest and the strategy for explaining variation on those outcomes. Discuss problems and opportunities for each of the submitted proposals and fulfill this first goal.
The second goal of the workshop, and the subject for the second day, to think through three related issues. The first is how to frame the set of proposals in a way that they all fit into a well-defined framework, as if each proposal were a piece of a coherent puzzle. The second is to think through funding sources for this set of interventions that would allow us to conduct the research we proposed and to continue collaborating across these projects. The third is to explore whether there are scholars whose work we know who should be invited to join our group and become part of the grant proposing team.
Discussion on what investments in collective goods might advance this research perspective productively. We might look at favorable granting institutions and how we might combine our memos into a macro proposal; or we might think about building a common research infrastructure (in the way J-PAL has done for experimental development studies). Working towards a jointly authored volume might be another way to aggregate our research projects. All of this discussion depends on the complementarities that emerge from our discussions on Wednesday. David will chair the Thursday discussion.
Reuben W. Hills Conference Room
Department of Political Science
Stanford University
Encina Hall, W423
Stanford, CA 94305-6044
David Laitin is the James T. Watkins IV and Elise V. Watkins Professor of Political Science and a co-director of the Immigration Policy Lab at Stanford. He has conducted field research in Somalia, Nigeria, Spain, Estonia and France. His principal research interest is on how culture – specifically, language and religion – guides political behavior. He is the author of “Why Muslim Integration Fails in Christian-heritage Societies” and a series of articles on immigrant integration, civil war and terrorism. Laitin received his BA from Swarthmore College and his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.
616 Serra Street
Encina Hall West, Room 100
Stanford, CA 94305-6044
Jens Hainmueller's research has appeared in journals such as the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of the American Statistical Association, Review of Economics and Statistics, Political Analysis, International Organization, and the Journal of Statistical Software, and has received awards from the American Political Science Association, the Society of Political Methodology, the Midwest Political Science Association.
Hainmueller received his PhD from Harvard University and also studied at the London School of Economics, Brown University, and the University of Tübingen. Before joining Stanford, he served on the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.