The Stanford Program on Energy and Sustainable Development (PESD) is concluding a major study aimed at understanding the future role for natural gas in the rapidly growing economies of China and India. On June 4-5, 2007 PESD will convene a meeting at Stanford to present the results of the study and engage with participants from industry and academia on the implications of this work for global energy markets.

PESD has partnered with leading regional research centers in both China and India to construct detailed assessments of the key drivers for future gas demand in both countries. At the June meeting PESD and its research collaborators will share results from the natural gas study and explore the study's broader implications on China and India's role in the future world energy market. Meeting participants will include representatives from government, industry, academia, and non-government organizations from the United States, China, India, Europe, and others.

Panels at the meeting with focus primarily on the implications of the study on larger questions of energy and global geopolitics, including:

§ Competitiveness of natural gas vis a vis coal in the power sector

§ Geopolitical implications of major supply projects

§ Regulatory reform and pricing

§ Implications for CO2 and climate change

Kurahashi Yumiko's 1985 novel Amanonkoku Okanki (Record of a Round-Trip Journey to Amanonkoku) has been described as fantasy science fiction, feminist literature, political satire, and futurist picaresque. Whatever label one might pin on this novel, its thematic and structural emphasis on sexual adventures as an engine of storytelling is undisputable. The tale centers on the missionary P's journey to and from the land of men on earth to the land of women on Amanonkoku in the heavens, where his mission is to civilize and convert them to the monotheistic (monokami) belief system of men. By the end of the novel, however, the outer space travels of P turn out really to have been inner space travels in a woman's body; consequently, the imperialist plot to control Amanonkoku is revealed also to have been a bio-political plot about reproduction, sexuality, and gender difference.

Kurahashi's satire interrogates the politics of both feminism and anti-feminism even as it never lets the violence of presumptive male superiority off the hook. Professor Knighton will read Amanonkoku Okanki against the backdrop of Kurahashi's late-1960s Anpo and Beiheiren-era protests novel, Sumiyakist Q no Boken (The Adventures of Sumiyakist Q). In doing so, in today's historical moment of feminist backlash in Japan, American exceptionalism, and globalized military and religious war-mongering, Kurahashi's work takes on an almost prescient contemporary relevance.

Mary A. Knighton received her M.A. and Ph.D. in English (American Literature), as well as an M.A. in Japanese, at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research attends to global Modernism, the relationship between politics and aesthetics, and postwar Japanese literature, with a special interest in women writers and feminist theories of race, class and gender.

Ambassador Scharioth, who joined the Foreign Service in 1976, previously served as state secretary of the Federal Foreign Office (2002-2006), political director and head of the Political Directorate-General (1999-2002), head of the International Security and North America Directorate (1998-1999), head of the Office of the Foreign Minister (1998), head of the Defense and Security Policy Division at the Federal Foreign Office (1996-1997), and chef de cabinet to the NATO secretary-general in Brussels (1993-1996). In addition, he worked in the International Law Division of the Federal Foreign Office (1990-1993), the German Permanent Mission to the United Nations in New York (1986-1990), the Policy Planning Staff of the Federal Foreign Office (1982-1986), the German Embassy in Ecuador (1979-1982), and the Asia Division, Press Division and State Secretary's Office at the Federal Foreign Office (1977-1979).

Ambassador Scharioth holds a master's of arts degree, a law degree and a doctorate from the Fletcher School of Diplomacy.

During the strategic modernization program that the Soviet Union undertook in the 1970s, it deployed a large number of multiple-warhead ballistic missiles. This deployment raised concerns in the United States about vulnerability of its land-based missile force and was one of the factors that contributed to the military buildup that the United States undertook in the late 1970s-early 1980s. The newly available documents that contain evidence of the Soviet missile programs demonstrate that the "window of vulnerability" did not exist and provide some insight into the Soviet modernization program.

Pavel Podvig joined CISAC as a research associate in 2004. Before that he was a researcher at the Center for Arms Control, Energy and Environmental Studies at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT). He worked as a visiting researcher with the Security Studies Program at MIT and with the Program on Science and Global Security at Princeton University, and he taught physics in MIPT's General Physics Department for more than ten years.

Podvig graduated with honors from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology in 1988, with a degree in physics. In 2004 he received a PhD in political science from the Moscow Institute of World Economy and International Relations.

His research has focused on technical and political issues of missile defense, space security, U.S.-Russian relations, structure and capabilities of the Russian strategic forces, and nuclear nonproliferation. He was the head of the Russian Strategic Nuclear Forces research project and the editor of a book of the same title, which is considered a definitive source of information on Russian strategic forces.