Zack Bonzell came to Stanford with a strong interest in human biology and political science. Last summer, the undergraduate had the chance to fuse his interests while doing field research with faculty at the university’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI). 

During a two-week internship, he travelled to Guatemala with FSI senior fellows Paul Wise, Beatriz Magaloni, Alberto Díaz-Cayeros and Scott Rozelle to learn about the country’s rural health care system by shadowing doctors and interviewing mothers in an impoverished area about the issues leading to the area’s high rates of child malnutrition.

“That experience was an ideal way to blend my interests and gave me a better idea of how to craft my course of study at Stanford,” said Bonzell, who is now a junior. “One of the things that really struck me was when Paul Wise said the health outcomes we were seeing are the result of extreme material deprivation. These people are sick because they are poor. That gave me more of an interest in political economy.”

Students conduct interviews about nutrition with REAP in China. Photo Credit: Matt Boswell

FSI is now expanding its educational opportunities for students, like Bonzell, who want to do research on global issues in Asia, Latin America, Europe and Africa.

The Stanford Global Student Fellows program (SGSF) is being funded in large part through a $1.25 million anonymous gift that will help grow existing programs and create new offerings for graduates and undergraduates.

“This program deepens FSI’s commitment to its mission of educating the next generation of leaders in international affairs,” said FSI Director Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar. “It also offers outstanding opportunities for Stanford students to work closely with the leading thinkers on global policy issues.”

The program, which is part of FSI’s efforts to expand student opportunities, will build on the institute’s undergraduate mentorship programs that allow students to work on faculty research projects each quarter. Those positions will now be available during the summer. Some of the positions will be connected to projects in FSI’s new International Policy Implementation Lab, an initiative that gives students a close-up view of how academics and policy influencers can address some of the world’s thorniest issues.

PoliSci 114S students work together in a UN conflict simulation. Photo Credit: Rod Searcey

Building on FSI’s experience placing students in research opportunities, the program will create and expand summer field research internships. The two- to six-week internships this summer will give undergraduates the opportunity to work with FSI senior fellows in China, Guatemala, India and Mexico who study global health, conflict resolution, governance and poverty reduction.  In coming years, the program will likely include additional fieldwork projects in Rwanda, Tanzania and Brazil. The SGSF program covers all travel expenses for students and provides students with an opportunity to work closely with a faculty member and a team of other students on an ongoing research project addressing real-world problems in a specific region. 

“What makes FSI such an incredible institution is that it attracts faculty who have very pragmatic interests,” Bonzell said. “It seeks to wed academic work with a more direct impact, and there’s a lot of potential for more students to think along similar lines.”

The Stanford Global Student Fellows will also allow FSI to work closely with its partners, including the Program in International Relations, the Haas Center for Public Service, and Stanford in Government to provide opportunities for graduate and undergraduate students. 

Mexican Ambassador Eduardo Medina Mora and Jorge Olarte, '13, speaking with students at the US-Mex FoCUS event. Photo Credit: Rod Searcey

One of the program’s new initiatives geared toward undergraduates is the Global Policy Summer Fellowships. The fellowships help secure placement and a $6,000 stipend for students interested in interning at international policy and international affairs organizations. This summer,The Europe Center at FSI is placing students at the Center for European Policy Studies and Bruegel, two Brussels-based think tanks. Future positions will be created with six offerings abroad and two based in the United States.including the Program in International Relations, the Haas Center for Public Service, and Stanford in Government to provide opportunities for graduate and undergraduate students. 

The Stanford Global Student Fellows program will also commit $400,000 to create a Mentored Global Research Fellowship that will provide research opportunities for students to conduct their own overseas research under the close mentorship of a faculty member. The program will award stipends of $6,000 for summer undergraduate projects and $9,000 for summer graduate projects, and $1,500 for smaller projects executed during the school year.

Thomas Hendee '13 chatting with children in rural Guatemala. Photo Credit: Maria Contreras

The faculty advisory committee overseeing the development and implementation of these new programs includes Scott Rozelle, the Helen F. Farnsworth Senior Fellow and the co-director of FSI’s Rural Education Action Program; Stephen Stedman, a senior fellow at FSI and the deputy director of CDDRL; and Lisa Blaydes, assistant professor of political science.

The application deadline for all summer programs is Feb. 28, 2015. The deadline to apply for academic quarterly programs is the end of the first week of each quarter, beginning in the fall of 2014. 

For more information, students should contact Elena Cryst at ecryst@stanford.edu and watch for postings on FSI’s student program Facebook page. Students can also sign up for the program’s distribution and announcement list.

Zack Bonzell came to Stanford with a strong interest in human biology and political science. Last summer, the undergraduate had the chance to fuse his interests while doing field research with faculty at the university’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI). 

During a two-week internship, he travelled to Guatemala with FSI senior fellows Paul Wise, Beatriz Magaloni, Alberto Díaz-Cayeros and Scott Rozelle to learn about the country’s rural health care system by shadowing doctors and interviewing mothers in an impoverished area about the issues leading to the area’s high rates of child malnutrition.

“That experience was an ideal way to blend my interests and gave me a better idea of how to craft my course of study at Stanford,” said Bonzell, who is now a junior. “One of the things that really struck me was when Paul Wise said the health outcomes we were seeing are the result of extreme material deprivation. These people are sick because they are poor. That gave me more of an interest in political economy.”

Students conduct interviews about nutrition with REAP in China. Photo Credit: Matt Boswell

FSI is now expanding its educational opportunities for students, like Bonzell, who want to do research on global issues in Asia, Latin America, Europe and Africa.

The Stanford Global Student Fellows program (SGSF) is being funded in large part through a $1.25 million anonymous gift that will help grow existing programs and create new offerings for graduates and undergraduates.

“This program deepens FSI’s commitment to its mission of educating the next generation of leaders in international affairs,” said FSI Director Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar. “It also offers outstanding opportunities for Stanford students to work closely with the leading thinkers on global policy issues.”

The program, which is part of FSI’s efforts to expand student opportunities, will build on the institute’s undergraduate mentorship programs that allow students to work on faculty research projects each quarter. Those positions will now be available during the summer. Some of the positions will be connected to projects in FSI’s new International Policy Implementation Lab, an initiative that gives students a close-up view of how academics and policy influencers can address some of the world’s thorniest issues.

PoliSci 114S students work together in a UN conflict simulation. Photo Credit: Rod Searcey

Building on FSI’s experience placing students in research opportunities, the program will create and expand summer field research internships. The two- to six-week internships this summer will give undergraduates the opportunity to work with FSI senior fellows in China, Guatemala, India and Mexico who study global health, conflict resolution, governance and poverty reduction.  In coming years, the program will likely include additional fieldwork projects in Rwanda, Tanzania and Brazil. The SGSF program covers all travel expenses for students and provides students with an opportunity to work closely with a faculty member and a team of other students on an ongoing research project addressing real-world problems in a specific region. 

“What makes FSI such an incredible institution is that it attracts faculty who have very pragmatic interests,” Bonzell said. “It seeks to wed academic work with a more direct impact, and there’s a lot of potential for more students to think along similar lines.”

The Stanford Global Student Fellows will also allow FSI to work closely with its partners, including the Program in International Relations, the Haas Center for Public Service, and Stanford in Government to provide opportunities for graduate and undergraduate students. 

Mexican Ambassador Eduardo Medina Mora and Jorge Olarte, '13, speaking with students at the US-Mex FoCUS event. Photo Credit: Rod Searcey

One of the program’s new initiatives geared toward undergraduates is the Global Policy Summer Fellowships. The fellowships help secure placement and a $6,000 stipend for students interested in interning at international policy and international affairs organizations. This summer, The Europe Center at FSI is placing students at the Center for European Policy Studies and Bruegel, two Brussels-based think tanks. Future positions will be created with six offerings abroad and two based in the United States.including the Program in International Relations, the Haas Center for Public Service, and Stanford in Government to provide opportunities for graduate and undergraduate students. 

The Stanford Global Student Fellows program will also commit $400,000 to create a Mentored Global Research Fellowship that will provide research opportunities for students to conduct their own overseas research under the close mentorship of a faculty member. The program will award stipends of $6,000 for summer undergraduate projects and $9,000 for summer graduate projects, and $1,500 for smaller projects executed during the school year.

Thomas Hendee '13 chatting with children in rural Guatemala. Photo Credit: Maria Contreras

The faculty advisory committee overseeing the development and implementation of these new programs includes Scott Rozelle, the Helen F. Farnsworth Senior Fellow and the co-director of FSI’s Rural Education Action Program; Stephen Stedman, a senior fellow at FSI and the deputy director of CDDRL; and Lisa Blaydes, assistant professor of political science.

The application deadline for all summer programs is Feb. 28, 2015. The deadline to apply for academic quarterly programs is the end of the first week of each quarter, beginning in the fall of 2014. 

For more information, students should contact Elena Cryst at ecryst@stanford.edu and watch for postings on FSI’s student program Facebook page. Students can also sign up for the program’s distribution and announcement list.

Former U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry, a William J. Perry Fellow in International Security at CISAC and FSI, says in this KQED radio panel that security during the elections in Afghanistan had greatly improved, but the country will still need support from the international community moving forward.

Asked to summarize his biography and career, Donald K. Emmerson notes the legacy of an itinerant childhood: his curiosity about the world and his relish of difference, variety and surprise. A well-respected Southeast Asia scholar at Stanford since 1999, he admits to a contrarian streak and corresponding regard for Socratic discourse. His publications in 2014 include essays on epistemology, one forthcoming in Pacific Affairs, the other in Producing Indonesia: The State of the Field of Indonesian Studies.

Emmerson is a senior fellow emeritus at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), an affiliated faculty member of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, an affiliated scholar in the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies, and director of the Southeast Asia Program at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center. Recently he spoke with Shorenstein APARC about his life and career within and beyond academe.

Your father was a U.S. Foreign Service Officer. Did that background affect your professional life?

Indeed it did. Thanks to my dad’s career, I grew up all over the world. We changed countries every two years. I was born in Japan, spent most of my childhood in Peru, the USSR, Pakistan, India and Lebanon, lived for various lengths of time in France, Nigeria, Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and the Netherlands, and traveled extensively in other countries. Constantly changing places fostered an appetite for novelty and surprise. Rotating through different cultures, languages, and schools bred empathy and curiosity. The vulnerability and ignorance of a newly arrived stranger gave rise to the pleasure of asking questions and, later, questioning the answers. Now I encourage my students to enjoy and learn from their own encounters with what is unfamiliar, in homework and fieldwork alike. 

Were you always focused on Southeast Asia? 

No. I had visited Southeast Asia earlier, but a fortuitous failure in grad school play a key role in my decision to concentrate on Southeast Asia. At Yale I planned a dissertation on African nationalism. I applied for fieldwork support to every funding source I could think of, but all of the envelopes I received in reply were thin. Fortunately, I had already developed an interest in Indonesia, and was offered last-minute funding from Yale to begin learning Indonesian. Two years of fieldwork in Jakarta yielded a dissertation that became my first book, Indonesia’s Elite: Political Culture and Cultural Politics. I sometimes think I should reimburse the African Studies Council for covering my tuition at Yale – doubtless among the worst investments they ever made. 

Indonesia stimulated my curiosity in several directions. Living in an archipelago led me to maritime studies and to writing on the rivalries in the South China Sea. Fieldwork among Madurese fishermen inspired Rethinking Artisanal Fisheries Development: Western Concepts, Asian Experiences. Experiences with Islam in Indonesia and Malaysia channeled my earlier impressions of Muslim societies into scholarship and motivated a debate with an anthropologist in the book Islamism: Contested Perspectives on Political Islam. 

What led you to Stanford?

In the early 1980s, I took two years of leave from the University of Wisconsin-Madison to become a visiting scholar at Stanford, and later I returned to The Farm for shorter periods. At Stanford I enjoyed gaining fresh perspectives from colleagues in the wider contexts of East Asia and the Asia-Pacific region. In 1999, I accepted an appointment as a senior fellow in FSI to start and run a program on Southeast Asia at Stanford with initial support from the Luce Foundation.

As a fellow, most of your time is focused on research, but you also proctor a fellowship program and have led student trips overseas. How have you found the experience advising younger scholars?

In 2006, I took a talented and motivated group of Stanford undergrads to Singapore for a Bing Overseas Seminar. I turned them loose to conduct original field research in the city-state, including focusing on sensitive topics such as Singapore’s use of laws and courts to punish political opposition. Despite the critical nature of some of their findings, a selection was published in a student journal at the National University of Singapore (NUS). NUS then sent a contingent of its own students to Stanford for a research seminar that I was pleased to host. I encouraged the NUS students to break out of the Stanford “bubble” and include in their projects not only the accomplishments of Silicon Valley but its problems as well, including those evident in East Palo Alto.

That exchange also helped lay the groundwork for an endowment whereby NUS and Stanford annually and jointly select a deserving applicant to receive the Lee Kong China NUS-Stanford Distinguished Fellowship on Contemporary Southeast Asia. The 2014 recipient is Lee Jones, a scholar from the University of London who will write on regional efforts to combat non-traditional security threats such as air pollution, money laundering and pandemic disease.

Where does the American “pivot to Asia” now stand, and how does it inform your work? 

Events in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and now in Crimea as well, have pulled American attention away from Southeast Asia. Yet the reasons for priority interest in the region have not gone away. East Asia remains the planet’s most consequential zone of economic growth. No other region is more directly exposed to the potentially clashing interests and actions of the world’s major states – China, Japan, India and the United States. The eleven countries of Southeast Asia – 630 million people – could become a concourse for peaceful trans-Pacific cooperation, or the locus of a new Sino-American cold war. It is in that hopeful yet risky context that I am presently researching China’s relations with Southeast Asia, especially regarding the South China Sea, and taking part in exchanges between Stanford scholars and our counterparts in Southeast Asia and China. 

Tell us something we don’t know about you.

Okay. Here are three instructive failures I experienced in 1999, the year I joined the Stanford faculty. I was evacuated from East Timor, along with other international observers, to escape massive violence by pro-Indonesian vigilantes bent on punishing the population for voting for independence. The press pass around my neck failed to protect me from the tear gas used to disperse demonstrators at that year’s meeting of the World Trade Organization – the “Battle of Seattle.” And in North Carolina in semifinal competition at the 1999 National Poetry Slam, performing as Mel Koronelos, I went down to well-deserved defeat at the hands of a terrific black rapper named DC Renegade, whose skit included the imaginary machine-gunning of Mel himself, who enjoyed toppling backward to complete the scene. 

The Faculty Spotlight Q&A series highlights a different faculty member at Shorenstein APARC each month giving a personal look at his or her teaching approaches and outlook on related topics and upcoming activities.