Stanford University

Laura Stokes

450 Serra Mall, Building 200
Stanford CA 94305-2024

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Associate Professor of History
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Laura Stokes completed their Ph.D. at the University of Virginia in 2006. Their first book, Demons of Urban Reform, examines the origins of witchcraft prosecution in fifteenth-century Europe against the backdrop of a general rise in the prosecution of crime and other measures of social control. In the process they have investigated the relationship between witchcraft and sodomy persecutions as well as the interplay between the unregulated development of judicial torture and innovations within witchcraft prosecution.

Their current research is an examination of quotidian economic culture during the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries. This project, under the working title A Social History of Greed in the Age of the Reformation, is based largely on the examination of court depositions from the city of Basel. Its first fruit will be a microhistory on The Murder of Uly Mörnach, currently in process. Prof. Stokes also directs a digital humanities project "Panic and Pandemic" which maps outbreaks of plague and epidemic in early modern Europe against social and literary responses to disease.

 

Affiliated faculty at The Europe Center
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Europe Center awards student grants

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Research grants from the Europe Center’s first “Graduate Student Grant Competition” were awarded this past October to sixteen Stanford students. The bi-annual competition is part of the Europe Center's efforts to support student research focused on Europe. Winning proposals were selected from a wide range of disciplines, including political science, history, literature, anthropology, psychology and music.  “This is a terrific group of energetic scholars with innovative proposals. I am really looking forward to learning about the results of their research,” stated Ken Scheve, Europe Center director.  For the list of awardees and their research project titles, please visit the grant's awardee page.

The second round of the competition will take place in Spring 2014, and is again open to humanities and social science Ph.D. candidates whose dissertation research or approved dissertation projects focus on Europe.   Professional students whose interests focus on some aspect of European politics, economics, history, or culture are also encouraged to apply. 

 

 

 

 

 

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Journal Article: "Immigration into Europe: Economic Discrimination, Violence, and Public Policy," written by Rafaela M. Dancygier and David Laitin

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The impact of immigration on Western European demographics will be the topic of Stanford political science professor David Laitin and co-writer Rafaela Dancygier's (Princeton University) soon to be published article "Immigration into Europe: Economic Discrimination, Violence, and Public Policy"

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Peter Koudijs

Knight Management Center
Stanford University
655 Knight Way
Stanford, CA 94305-7298

(650) 725-1673
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Assistant Professor of Finance
Assistant Professor, by courtesy, of Economics
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Peter Koudijs is an Assistant Professor of Finance at the Stanford Graduate School of Business where he teaches History of Financial Crises in the MBA program. He joined the GSB in August 2011. Peter received a Bachelor’s degree, cum laude, in Economics from the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands. He earned a PhD degree, summa cum laude, in Economics at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Spain in 2011. Peter has obtained various grants and fellowships from the European Union, the Economic History Association and different Dutch and Spanish scholarship programs.
 

Affiliated Faculty at The Europe Center
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Rethinking the First World War from the Perspective of International Law

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About the Topic: Re-establishing and strengthening the rule of international law in international affairs was a central Allied aim in the First World War. Revisionism in its many forms has erased this from our memory, and with it the meaning of the war. Imperial Germany’s actions and justifications for its war conduct amounted to proposing an entirely different set of international-legal principles from those that other European states recognized as public law. This talk examines what those principles were and what implications they had for the legal world order.

About the Speaker: Isabel V. Hull received her Ph.D. from Yale University in 1978 and has since then been teaching at Cornell University, where she is the John Stambaugh Professor of History. A German historian, her work has reached backward to 1600 and forward to 1918 and has focused on the history of sexuality, the development of civil society, military culture, and imperial politics and governance. She has recently completed a book comparing Imperial Germany, Great Britain, and France during World War I and the impact of international law on their respective conduct of the war. It will appear in Spring 2014 under the title, A Scrap of Paper: Breaking and Making International Law in the First World War. Her talk is based on this latest research.

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Isabel Hull John Stambaugh Professor of History, Cornell University Speaker
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GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES ON URBANIZATION

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China’s record breaking economic growth has yielded an equally startling rate of urbanization, as millions move from the countryside to the cities.  In many villages one finds only the old and the very young.  Old institutions are decaying while new ones may or may not yet exist.   We have brought together an international group of social scientists who are interested in the process and consequences of urbanization and who study a diverse set of countries.   They will discuss challenges of urbanization in different political and economic settings to examine new urban formation that will help put China’s experience in a global perspective.

Topics and Speakers:

Urbanization in Southern Africa: Jim Ferguson, Dept. of Anthropology, Stanford University

Urbanization in India: Thomas Hansen, Dept. of Anthropology, Stanford University

Urbanization in Italy: Sylvia Yanagisako, Dept. of Anthropology, Stanford University

Urbanization in Latin America: Austin Zeiderman, London School of Economics

Urbanization in China: Zhou Qiren, National School of Development, Peking University

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Stanford Center at Peking University

Jim Ferguson Dept. of Anthropology Speaker Stanford University
Thomas Hansen Dept. of Anthropology Speaker Stanford University
Sylvia Yanagisako Dept. of Anthropology Speaker Stanford University
Austin Zeiderman Speaker London School of Economics
Zhou Qiren National School of Development Speaker Peking University
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Is the nonproliferation agenda stuck in the Cold War?

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CISAC affiliate and former postdoctoral fellow, Francesca Giovannini, and SIPRI Arms Control Fellow, Amy J. Nelson, discuss whether the nonproliferation agenda still retains a Cold War mentality.

They argue that a large number of factors shape arms control and nonproliferation efforts, including domestic factors, bureaucratic history and dynamics, as well as organizational psychology. And regional agreements and security institutions play an important role in modernizing the global nonproliferation agenda.

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The Stabilizing State: State Capitalism as a Response to Financial Globalization in East Asia

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One of the most important developments in the modern global economy is financial globalization. This has raised threats to the stability of political regimes in two ways: (1) by enhancing the possibility of a financial crisis that could cause political turmoil; and (2) by easing access to foreign sources of financing for opposition political groups. I argue that state capitalism – defined as state-owned publicly listed corporations -- has risen disproportionately among single party regimes as a way to address these dual threats. Single party regimes have both the motivation and a greater institutional capacity for addressing these threats in comparison to other regimes. Tests are conducted on 607 firms in 1996 and 856 firms in 2008 across seven East Asian economies, and are supplemented with case studies of Malaysia and South Korea.  The evidence suggests that financial globalization is contributing to the rise of the state as a counter reaction.

Richard W. Carney is a Fellow in the Department of International Relations located in the College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University. His research and teaching are in the areas of international and comparative political economy with a focus on corporate governance and finance in East Asia. He has published articles in many academic journals including the Journal of Financial Economics, the Journal of East Asian Studies, and Business and Politics. He is also the author of the book Contested Capitalism: The Political Origins of Financial Institutions, and editor of the book Lessons from the Asian Financial Crisis. He was a Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute in Fiesole, Italy (2003-04), and has held visiting positions at INSEAD. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science (UCSD 2003). Before joining the ANU in 2011, he was an Assistant Professor in Singapore.

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Richard W. Carney Fellow, Department of International Relations Speaker Australian National University
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Counterinsurgency: A Conceptual Reassessment

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ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Niccolò Petrelli is a postdoctoral fellow at CISAC. His research focuses on reassessing the theory and practice of counterinsurgency. Incorporating insights from the contiguous fields of study of "civil wars" and "peacekeeping operations" and employing critical historical analysis of case studies, the research aims to analyze the features, limits and influence of the theory of Counterinsurgency. Before joining CISAC in 2013, Niccolò was a military research fellow at the Military Center for Strategic Studies (Ce.Mi.S.S.) within the Center for Advanced Defense Studies (CASD) in Rome, Italy, and a research assistant at the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism (ICT) in Herzliya. Niccolò received his PhD in Political Science from the University of Roma Tre in 2013. In his dissertation, he examined the impact of strategic culture on the Israeli approach to counterinsurgency.


ABOUT THE TOPIC: In "Counterinsurgency: A Conceptual Reassessment," Niccolò Petrelli will address unresolved issues in the study of counterinsurgency (COIN). The talk will focus on three main questions: How did COIN theory emerge and which are its intellectual sources? To what extent has COIN practice been informed by theory? Is the population-centric COIN paradigm prevalent in scholarly studies and in the contemporary professional discourse historically accurate? In order to answer these questions, the talk will first outline a critical historical analysis of the development of COIN theory, tracing its intellectual roots and fundamental assumptions. Subsequently, it will reassess practice through the qualitative comparative analysis of several case studies of COIN campaigns.

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Niccolo Petrelli Postdoctoral Fellow, CISAC Speaker

Gil-li Vardi

Not in residence

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Lecturer
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Gil-li Vardi joined CISAC as a visiting scholar in December 2011. She completed her PhD at the London School of Economics in 2008, and spent two years as a research fellow at the Oxford Leverhulme Programme on the Changing Character of War at the University of Oxford, after which she joined Notre Dame university as a J. P. Moran Family Assistant Professor of Military History.

Her research examines the interplay between organizational culture, doctrine, and operational patterns in military organizations, and focuses on the incentives and dynamics of change in military thought and practice.

Driven by her interest in both the German and Israeli militaries and their organizational cultures, Vardi is currently revising her dissertation, "The Enigma of Wehrmacht Operational Doctrine: The Evolution of Military Thought in Germany, 1919-1941," alongside preparing a book manuscript on the sources of the Israeli Defence Forces’ (IDF) early strategic and operational perceptions and preferences.

Gil-li Vardi Visiting Scholar, CISAC Commentator
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