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DUE TO THE OVERWHELMING RESPONSE FOR THIS EVENT, WE ARE NOW FULLY BOOKED AND UNABLE TO TAKE FURTHER RSVPS.

Are mass violence and catastrophes the only forces that can seriously decrease economic inequality? To judge by thousands of years of history, the answer is “Yes.” Tracing the global history of inequality from the Stone Age to today, Walter Scheidel shows that inequality never dies peacefully. Periods of increased equality are usually born of carnage and disaster and are generally short-lived, disappearing with the return of peace and stability. The Great Leveler is the first book to chart the crucial role of violent shocks in reducing inequality over the full sweep of human history around the world.

Ever since humans began to farm, herd livestock, and pass on their assets to future generations, economic inequality has been a defining feature of civilization. Over thousands of years, only violent shocks have significantly lessened inequality. The “Four Horsemen” of leveling—mass-mobilization warfare, transformative revolutions, state collapse, and catastrophic plagues—have repeatedly destroyed the fortunes of the rich. Scheidel identifies and examines these processes, from the crises of the earliest civilizations to the cataclysmic world wars and communist revolutions of the twentieth century. Today, the violence that reduced inequality in the past seems to have diminished, and that is a good thing. But it casts serious doubt on the prospects for a more equal future.

An essential contribution to the debate about inequality, The Great Leveler provides important new insights about why inequality is so persistent—and why it is unlikely to decline any time soon.

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Walter Scheidel is the Dickason Professor in the Humanities, Professor of classics and history, and a Kennedy-Grossman Fellow in Human Biology at Stanford University. The author or editor of sixteen previous books, he has published widely on premodern social and economic history, demography, and comparative history.

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Lecture by Joan Wallach Scott, Harold F. Linder Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Studies.

Sponsored by the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies, Clayman Institute for Gender Research, Humanities Center, France-Stanford Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, The Europe Center, History Department, Department of Anthropology.

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Formal organizational structures have expanded, worldwide, over recent decades, particularly in the neo-liberal period. In the background are the scientization of many aspects of social life, expanded conceptions of human empowerment, and the consequent explosive expansion of education.  Educational systems have a great deal in common worldwide, so expanding international organizational structures are also common. Prof. Meyer will discuss the domestic and international expansion of organizations, including for-profit, non-profit, and public agencies of all sorts, and the consequential rise of social movements for organizational “social responsibility.” 

John W. Meyer is Professor of Sociology (and, by courtesy, Education), emeritus, at Stanford.  He has contributed to organizational theory, comparative education, and the sociology of education, developing sociological institutional theory.  Since the 1970s, he has studied the impact of global society on national states and societies. In 2003 he completed a collaborative study of worldwide science and its national effects. He is currently working on a collaborative project on the impact of globalization on organizational structures.  

For registration, please email your name, affililiation, number and event title to: sanjiu39@stanford.edu 

Dr. Cohen is the Associate Vice Chancellor for Global Health, and the Yeargan-Bate Distinguished Professor of Medicine in Microbiology and Immunology, and Epidemiology at University of North Carolina. He received his BS from the University of Illinois, Urbana, and MD from the Rush Medical College. His research focuses on the transmission and prevention of transmission of STD pathogens including HIV. Much of his work has been conducted at the research sites he and his group have developed in Lilongwe, Malawi and Beijing, China. Dr. Cohen and his coworkers have identified the concentration of HIV in genital secretions required for transmission of HIV, and the effects of genital tract inflammation on HIV. Dr. Cohen is currently studying Zika as a sexually transmitted disease.

For registration, please send your name, affiliation, phone number and event name to: sanjiu39@stanford.edu

Professor Khosla is the recipient of multiple distinguished awards including the Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award (2009) and Pure Chemistry Award (2000) of the American Chemical Society, and the Alan T. Waterman Award of the National Science Foundation (1999).

In addition to his role as the founding Director of Stanford ChEM-H, he serves on the Board of Directors of Protagonist Therapeutics (PTGX) and is a member of the Scientific Policy Committee of the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. His laboratory research focuses on problems where deep insights into enzymology and metabolism can be harnessed to improve human health. 

For registration, please send your name, affiliation, number and event title to: sanjiu39@stanford.edu 

Vast amounts of molecular data characterizing the genome, epi-genome and transcriptome are becoming available for a wide range of cancers. In addition, new computational tools for quantitatively analyzing medical and pathological images are creating new types of phenotypic data.  Now we have the opportunity to integrate the data at molecular, cellular and tissue scale to create a more comprehensive view of key biological processes underlying cancer. This integration can have profound contributions toward predicting diagnosis and treatment. Prof. Gevaert will discuss current work in progress to tackle challenges in biomedical multi-scale data fusion. Olivier Gevaert is an assistant professor at Stanford University focusing on developing machine-learning methods for biomedical decision support from multi-scale biomedical data. 

For registration, please send your name, affiliation, number and event title to: sanjiu39@stanford.edu