About the speaker
George C. Herring is Alumni Professor of History, Emeritus at the University of Kentucky. A leading authority on U.S. foreign relations, he is the former editor of Diplomatic History and a past president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. He is the author of America's Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975, among other books.

Dr. Herring’s From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 is the twelfth and latest book in the Oxford History of the United States, and the first book in the series to focus on a single subject, U.S. foreign policy.

Dr. Herring earned a PhD in history from the University of Virginia, and has been a Visiting Fulbright Scholar at the University of Otago in New Zealand.

About the moderator
David M. Kennedy is the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History at Stanford University, a senior fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment, and co-director of The Bill Lane Center for the Study of the North American West. Professor Kennedy is the winner of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for his book, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War. Reflecting his interdisciplinary training in American Studies, which combined the fields of history, literature, and economics, Kennedy's scholarship is notable for its integration of economic and cultural analysis with social and political history. His 1970 book, Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger, embraced the medical, legal, political, and religious dimensions of the subject and helped to pioneer the emerging field of women's history. One of his later books, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (1980), used the history of American involvement in World War I to analyze the American political system, economy, and culture in the early twentieth century. He is a graduate of Stanford University (BA, history) and Yale University (MA, PhD, American Studies).

About From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776:

The newest volume in the acclaimed Oxford History of the United States series – a sweeping chronicle of American foreign relations from the nation’s founding to the present

From the American Revolution to the fifty-year struggle with communism and conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations since 1776 tells the dramatic story of America’s emergence as a superpower—its birth in revolution, its troubled present, its uncertain future.

» Buy it from Oxford University Press: "From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776" (Oxford University Press, 2008)

The Oxford History of the United States is the most respected multi-volume history of our nation in print. The series includes three Pulitzer Prize winners, a New York Times bestseller, and winner of prestigious Bancroft and Parkman prizes. From Colony to Superpower is the only thematic volume commissioned for the series.  Here, George C. Herring uses foreign relations as the lens through which to tell the story of America’s dramatic rise from thirteen disparate colonies huddled along the Atlantic coast to the world’s greatest superpower.

Quotes in praise of From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776:

“George Herring’s well-paced, readable, and up-to-date history of U.S. foreign relations will be the authoritative account for this generation.”
- Emily S. Rosenberg, University of California, Irvine
“In this splendidly detailed account, George Herring expertly guides us through the rich and fascinating story of America’s foreign relations. This is history on a grand scale, clearly and elegantly rendered. Anyone who wants to understand how the Untied States has come to occupy its current place on the world stage should read this magisterial book."
- Fredrik Logevall, co-author of A People and a Nation

Dr. Forsberg will present findings from studies in China and Vietnam and put those findings into a broader comparative perspective regarding the future role of the private sector in improving health service delivery and population health.

Birger Carl Forsberg is a public health specialist and lecturer in International Health at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden from where he holds an MD and a PhD. He is also trained in economics and has health economics as one of his areas of work. Dr Forsberg has more than 20 years experience from international health from around 25 low- and middle-income countries as an adviser to bilateral donors and international organisations. Since 2002 he has been a consultant to the World Bank on public private sector collaboration in health. He is also coordinator since 2002 of a joint Harvard-Karolinska research programme called Private Sector Programme in Health (PSP). The programme has coordinated studies of the private health sector in five countries in Asia and Africa. In his talk Dr Forsberg will present findings from PSP studies in China and Vietnam and put those findings into a broader perspective on the future role of the private sector in health service delivery for increased access to health services and improved health.

Pascal Lamy has served as Director-General of the World Trade Organization since September 2005.

Previously, he was the Trade Commissioner of the European Union in Brussels from 1999 to 2004.

From 1994 until 1999, he served as Director-General of the team responsible for restructuring the Credit Lyonnaise.

The beginnings of Mr. Lamy’s career are marked by time spent in civil service at the French Finance Ministry, the Inspection Générale des Finances, and the Treasury Department.

He later became adviser to Economics and Finance Minister, Jacques Delors, and to Prime Minister Pierre Mauroy. From 1984 to 1994, Mr. Lamy worked in Brussels as chief of staff to Commission President, Jacques Delors.

A member of the French Socialist Party, Mr. Lamy is also politically active in the Mouvement Europeen. In 1999, he was the recipient of the Officier de la Legion d’Honneur and has been honored with several international orders of merit.

THIS EVENT IS CO-SPONSORED BY ICA

This is a CDDRL seminar within our Democracy in Taiwan Program.

Cliff Tan is Consulting Professor and formerly Visiting Scholar at the Stanford Center for International Development. At SCID, Mr. Tan is writing a book on financial market retrospectives of the Asian financial crisis, how those might or might not differ from well-recorded views of policymakers and academics, and if they differ, whether they offer lessons for the financial market crises of today.  Mr. Tan is also a founding partner in a new charity that will partly invest in global microfinance, and occasionally consults to hedge funds

Prior to SCID, Mr. Tan headed up local markets strategy in fixed income and foreign exchange for Citigroup in Asia. Over 19 years of research on Asia and Japan, Mr. Tan worked as FX/Interest Rate Strategist and co-head of Asian Economics at Warburg Dillon Read (now UBS), Japan/Asia Economist at Wellington Management Company, LLC, and proprietary trading/credit risk economist at Bankers Trust Company. Mr. Tan has been voted a top five currency strategist several times by Asiamoney (including a #1 ranking in 2003) and has also been cited for work as both an economist and strategist by The Asset magazine.

Before entering financial markets, Mr. Tan covered Greater China at the US Federal Reserve Board, was a Lecturer at the University of Hong Kong and was a Visiting Fellow at the Korea Development Institute.

Mr. Tan received M.Phil. and M.A. degrees in Economics from Yale University, an A.M. in East Asian Regional Studies from Harvard University and an A.B. (magna cum laude) in Journalism and East Asian Studies from the University of Southern California.

Professor Schaede's seminar will focus on the themes of her new book, Choose and Focus: Japanese Business Strategies for the 21st Century (Cornell UP, 2008). She will argue that Japan has undergone a strategic inflection point so fundamental that relying on what we used to know about Japan from the 1980s is insufficient to understand the new Japanese competitiveness.

In addition to analyzing this recent shift away from diversification to focused, lean organizations among Japan's leading companies, Professor Schaede will also discuss the newly emerging takeover market in Japan, as well as the changing role of venture capital and startups in Japan's newly emerging open system of innovation.

Ulrike Schaede is Professor of Japanese Business at UC San Diego's School of International Relations and Pacific Studies. Schaede has written extensively on business organization and the financial system in Japan. Her recent working papers discuss changes in business groups and Japan's main bank system; investment funds, institutional investors and hostile takeovers; legal reform and "revitalization", as well as changing employment strategies and non-regular work. She is also an investigator for SPRIE's Japanese Entrepreneurship project.