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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Europe Center grants support student research focused on Europe. For some of the awardees, this means the opportunity to study in European archives, libraries and museums, such as the British Library shown here. | Reuters
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"
Stanford associate professor of German Studies, Adrian Daub, presents a new study on German opera in his book Tristan's Shadow: Sexuality and the Total Work of Art after Wagner.
For more information, please visit the publication's webpage by clicking on the book title below.
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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.
That the Cairo Conference has been overshadowed by the wartime summits at Teheran and Yalta is understandable given the start of the Cold War in Europe almost immediately after the German surrender in May 1945. To understand the collapse of relations between the Anglo-American allies on the one hand and the Soviet Union on the other, it is important to look at the conferences at Teheran and Yalta, the interactions between Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin, the understandings they reached, and their misunderstandings. That said, the Cairo Conference also marked an important turning point in the relations between the allies in the war against Japan: China, Great Britain, and the United States, the consequences of which were critical to the defeat of Japan and the post-war order in East Asia.
The interaction of Churchill, Roosevelt, and Chiang in Cairo is every bit as compelling from a human interest perspective as the interplay between Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin at Teheran and Yalta, albeit less studied, and offers a sobering reminder of what can happen when policy is made at the very highest level by individuals who know relatively little about the culture of their partners and are not able to separate myths and stereotypes from realities. Summit conferences may make for good theater, but do not necessarily result in good policies as an examination of the Cairo Conference reveals.
Each of the parties at the Cairo Conference came with their own agendas, frequently contradictory. Generalissimo and Madame Chiang hoped to obtain a commitment to make the China-Burma-India theater of war the focal point in the war against Japan, a matter not only of strategic importance to them but also of poetic justice. They also sought to redress grievances against Japan and Great Britain in the post-war era. Roosevelt hoped to buoy the ego and spirits of Chiang and to insure that the Kuomintang regime would not make a separate peace with Japan thus allowing the Japanese to redeploy the nearly one million troops they had stationed in China. Churchill had no real interest in meeting with Chiang and his wife at Cairo at all, but felt obliged to humor Roosevelt and to make sure that no agreements would be reached in Cairo that would in any way prejudice British colonial interests in Southeast Asia in the post-war era. Given these conflicting agendas, it is no wonder that none of the participants would be satisfied with the results of their labors in Cairo.
Speaker Bio:
Ronald Heiferman is Professor of History and Director of the Asian Studies Program at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut, and a Fellow of Berkeley College at Yale University. He has also taught at Connecticut College and the City University of New York. Dr. Heiferman was educated at Yale and New York University (Ph.D.). Professor Heiferman has authored or co-authored more than a dozen books, including Flying Tigers (New York: Ballantine, 1971), World War II (London: Hamlyn, 1973), Wars of the Twentieth Century (London: Hamlyn, 1974), The Rise and Fall of Imperial Japan (New York: Military Press, 1981), the Rand-McNally Encyclopedia of World II (New York: Rand-McNally, 1978), and The Cairo Conference of 1943: Roosevelt, Churchill, Chiang Kai-shek and Madame Chiang (McFarland, 2011). His latest book, The Chinese Idyll of Franklin D. Roosevelt, will be published in 2014. Professor Heiferman was a Yale-Lilly Fellow in 1978, a Yale-Mellon Fellow in 1984, and has also been the recipient of five National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships: Duke University (1974), University of Chicago (1977), Stanford University (1980), Harvard University (1987), and the University of Texas (1991).
On November 7, Stanford economist Takeo Hoshi presented a coauthored paper "Will the U.S and Europe Avoid a Lost Decade? Lessons from Japan's Post Crisis Experience" at the Fourteenth Jacques Polak Annual Research Conference at the International Monetary Fund headquarters in Washington DC.
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Sakura, the bank of Japan, April 2009 | Flickr user saitomo
As cited in Victoria McGrane's blog in the Wall Street Journal, Stanford economist Takeo Hoshi argues in a coauthored paper that Europe is making the same mistakes that Japan did during the 1990s and as a result is likely to suffer a similarly prolonged period of stagnant growth.
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Property in Europe, June 2011 | Flickr user Images Money
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Ran Abramitzky is a Professor of Economics at Stanford University and incoming Senior Associate Dean for the Social Sciences. His research is in economic history and applied microeconomics, with focus on immigration and income inequality. He is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. He is the vice chair of the economics department, and the co-editor of Explorations in Economic History. He was awarded an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, as well as National Science Foundation grants for research on the causes and consequences of income inequality and on international migration. His book, The Mystery of the Kibbutz: Egalitarian Principles in a Capitalist World (Princeton University Press, 2018) was awarded by the Economic History Association the Gyorgi Ranki Biennial Prize for an outstanding book on European Economic History. He has received the Economics Department’s and the Dean’s Awards for Distinguished Teaching. He holds a PhD in economics from Northwestern University.
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
Tech City in East London is the fastest growing tech cluster in Europe, beginning with 15 tech companies in 2008 and now boasting now more than 1300 startups as well as leading global firms including Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Intel.
On October 30, 2013, the Silicon Valley Project of Stanford Graduate School of Business hosted a seminar on London as a hub of innovation featuring Eze Vidra, Head of Campus London and Google for Entrepreneurs European Outreach, and Samantha Evans, Vice Consul for Software of UK Trade and Investment (UKTI).
Vidra spoke about London from the perspective of Campus London, Google's first physical startup hub worldwide, which launched in March of 2012 with the mission statement “let’s fill this town with startups!” Campus London sees itself as an “open source” building, working with many partners, and offering the benefits that come with a dedicated working space to as many potential entrepreneurs as possible. Since its opening, over 1,000 startups have benefited from programs and more than 200,000 people have attended over 1,500 events. Perhaps the most unexpected statistic offered by Vidra was the number of cups of coffee sold in the basement of Campus London, which is a co-working space that anyone can register to use. “I believe there’s a correlation between innovation and coffee, and we have pretty damn good coffee,” Vidra exclaimed. They sold more than 90,000 cups of coffee in their first year of operation.
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Speaking from the vantage point of a national government trade and investment organization, Evans offered insights into how government policy can impact the growth of Tech City as a development hub, identifying key policy changes such as reducing the corporate tax rate and creating new R&D tax credits. Evans emphasized that the UK government’s support of Tech City isn’t about creating a new innovation hub from scratch through top-down dictates. The government, she said, recognized a naturally occurring and organically growing cluster of technology companies in East London and made a conscious decision to “help businesses evolve and grow” in a “long-lasting” manner.
Vidra said that Google also “noticed that there was an organic cluster forming in East London.” The company, he said, is trying to provide some of the necessary infrastructure and helping to foster growth and to build up the community. “What we’re trying to do is not to build a new Silicon Valley or try to create something artificially,” said Vidra, “we should build bridges, not valleys.”
Google, with all its resources, couldn’t create something out of nothing, Vidra recognized. He pointed out that “in London everything is encapsulated in one city … every brand, every bank, every organization you can think of.” Vidra argued that London represents an ideal confluence of talent, capital, and ideas, so Google is attempting to act in an enabling role. “We don’t replace universities, we don’t replace accelerators. We actually work with all of these partners and set up a discussion and the environment for them to be active and help entrepreneurs.”
Vidra admits that London still has a ways to go in terms of competing with other innovation hubs like Silicon Valley, New York, and Israel, particularly when it comes to liquidity and exits, but is optimistic about London’s future. He says that London is an “underserved market by startups,” with lower costs, less competition for talent, and much less competition between startups.
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The government’s involvement in promoting Tech City has met with some positive feedback on policy measures. “There’s two policies that have really changed the game in London,” Vidra said about the Enterprise Investment Scheme (EIS) and Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme (SEIS). These government programs have “unlocked unprecedented amounts of capital” for early stage startups. He also praised the government’s Tech City Investment Organization (TCIO) for championing the tech sector through offering grants, bringing in investments from international companies, helping international VCs to set up offices, promoting startups, and assisting companies in going public.
“You can debate what’s the role of government to create entrepreneurship or foster innovation, but we need all the help we can get.” These government policies don’t result in “fake growth,” insists Vidra, “it’s not going to make or break their businesses … but if there’s actually something there it’s going to be much easier for them to grow.”
