Reuben W. Hills Conference Room
This seminar will focus on Susanna Rabow-Edling's book project about three governor's wives, who accompanied their husbands to Russian Alaska in the period 1829-1864. Dr. Rabow-Edling will explore how they tried to fulfill sometimes conflicting roles as wives, mothers, and representatives of empire in this distant colony and how contemporary notions of womanhood affected them. The seminar will focus on one of these women, Anna Furuhjelm.
Susanna Rabow-Edling is a research fellow at the Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Uppsala University. She received her PhD from Stockholm University and spent a year as a visiting scholar at Cornell University before taking up a position at the department for East European Studies at Uppsala. She is the author of Slavophile Thought and the Politics of Cultural Nationalism (SUNY Press, 2006) as well as several articles about cultural and civic aspects of Russian nationalism.
Her main research interests are: Russian political thought, nationalism, imperialism (especially the civilizing mission), identity issues, and gender studies.
Audio Synopsis:
Dr. Rabow-Edling's talk traces the journeys of three women - Elizabeth, Margareta, and Anna - from mainland Russia to Sitka, the capital of Russian Alaska, as governors’ wives. The presentation draws upon the women's diaries and letters home to explore the experience of being a Russian governor's wife in Alaska, including what was expected of the women as wives and mothers, as representatives of the Russian empire, and as participants in the "civilizing mission" of Russian Alaska. Dr . Rabow-Edling also explores how the women, especially Anna, experienced the social and religious environment of the time.
Elizabeth, Margaret and Anna had more in common than being governors' wives. All three came from the Western periphery of the empire - Finland, and the Baltics - thus representing ethnic minorities. As Lutherans, they were also religious minorities. All three married Finnish governors. Each was young and newly married when they began their journey, and each gave birth to their first child en route to or upon arrival in Sitka.
While all three women were unprepared for the isolation of Sitka life, they adjusted differently to their new environment. Anna, the least confident, was overwhelmed by the harsh weather, the wilderness, and the native as well as Russian residents. She shunned a public role and took refuge in the sphere of home and family. Margareta was more self-confident, highly educated, and comfortable in Sitka society. However, her arrival was marred by the death of her firstborn son, which drove her in to a lonely depression. Elizabeth was brave, energetic, and curious, as well as less enthusiastic about religion and motherhood. Dr. Rabow-Edling describes how the women engaged differently with the Russian 'civilizing mission,' which was premised on the idea that only European women could civilize native women. She also describes how interactions with the local orthodox church could be difficult, as when Anna was prevented from distributing Bibles to convert the local people.
In conclusion, Dr. Rabow-Edling highlights the clash between the ideals of “true womanhood” prevalent at the time – emphasizing piety, purity and domestication - and the realities and demands of frontier life.
A discussion session following the presentation raised questions regarding the effects of the French invasion of Russia in 1812, the differences in gender roles between mainland Russia and Alaska, why these three governors chose Lutheran wives, and why Russia appointed so many Finnish governors.
Richard and Rhoda Goldman Conference Room
616 Serra Street
Encina Hall C205-7
Stanford, CA 94305-6165
Susanna Rabow-Edling is a research fellow at the Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Uppsala University. She received her PhD from Stockholm University and spent a year as a visiting scholar at Cornell University before taking up a position at the department for East European Studies at Uppsala. She is the author of Slavophile Thought and the Politics of Cultural Nationalism (SUNY Press, 2006) as well as several articles about cultural and civic aspects of Russian nationalism.
Her main research interests are: Russian political thought, nationalism, imperialism (especially the civilizing mission), identity issues, and gender studies.
Susanna is currently working on a book project about three governor’s wives, who accompanied their husbands to Russian Alaska and lived there in the period between 1829 and 1864. She is interested in how they tried to fulfill sometimes conflicting roles as wives, mothers, and representatives of empire in this distant colony and how contemporary notions of womanhood affected them.
David Lobell will be giving two talks this week at the AGU fall meeting:
Towards accurate models of global crop-climate interactions
This talk will provide a brief overview of the major links between climate and crops that are most in need of representation in global models. The talk will then focus on one of the key links - the effect of climate variation on crop productivity across a range of cropping systems and regions. I will present some recent work to use historical datasets to build statistical models at the scale of individual countries. The effects of different datasets and modeling assumption will be explored, to identify areas where statistical models provide robust representation of crop responses to climate. A sample application of these models - estimating the net regional and global impacts of recent trends in climate - will be presented.
Assessing the future of crop yield variability in the United States with downscaled climate projections
One aspect of climate change of particular concern to farmers and food markets is the potential for increased year-to-year variability in crop yields. Recent episodes of food price increases following the Australian drought or Russian heat wave have heightened this concern. Downscaled climate projections that properly capture the magnitude of daily and interannual variability of weather can be useful for projecting future yield variability. Here we examine the potential magnitude and cause of changes in variability of corn yields in the United States up to 2050. Using downscaled climate projections from multiple models, we estimate a distribution of changes in mean and variability of growing season average temperature and precipitation. These projections are then fed into a model of maize yield that explicitly factors in the effect of extremely warm days. Changes in yield variability can result from a shift in mean temperatures coupled with a nonlinear crop response, a shift in climate variability, or a combination of the two. The results are decomposed into these different causes, with implications for future research to reduce uncertainties in projections of future yield variability.
CDDRL
616 Serra St.
Encina Hall
Stanford, CA 94305
The Development of Civil Society in Russia: The Role of the Orthodox Church
The Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University has awarded six seed grants in the first round of funding from the Global Underdevelopment Action Fund. The grants are intended to jumpstart early-stage multidisciplinary research projects that tackle persistent problems of global underdevelopment. The Action Fund, which is supported by expendable gifts from FSI donors, matching funds from the Office of the President, and FSI, grew out of the Institute's spring 2010 conference on Technology, Governance, and Global Development, which featured keynote speaker Bill Gates, together with leaders from business, government, and nonprofit organizations, the media, and the academic community, to examine novel integrative approaches to poverty alleviation and human development around the world. The Action Fund projects range across disciplines, focusing primarily on problems in developing and transitioning societies. The majority of the projects have a health dimension, reflecting the degree to which poor health outcomes mirror a country's development status.
"Stanford is uniquely placed among American universities to bring cutting edge research to bear on practical problems of development. No other institution has lower barriers to multidisciplinary work. The Action Fund award recipients are drawn from many different parts of the university but united in their concern for promoting development," said Stephen D. Krasner, the Graham H. Stuart Professor of International Relations, Senior Associate Dean of the Social Sciences at H&S, and deputy director of FSI.
Six multidisciplinary research teams led by Stanford faculty from across the university will receive a total of $236,000 in seed grants. The projects were selected by a faculty committee chaired by Stephen Krasner, with a focus on early-stage, multidisciplinary, policy-relevant research. All, projects are required to have a training component for Stanford undergraduate or graduate students.
The award-winning projects and their principal investigators are:
Building 460, Room 418
Main Quad
Stanford University
Nancy Ruttenburg is the William Robertson Coe Professor of American Literature in the English Department at Stanford. She also holds courtesy appointments in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. She received the PhD in Comparative Literature from Stanford (1988) and taught at Harvard, Berkeley, and most recently at NYU, where she was chair of the Department of Comparative Literature from 2002-2008. Her research interests lie at the intersection of political, religious, and literary expression in colonial through antebellum America and nineteenth-century Russia, with a particular focus on the development of liberal and non-liberal forms of democratic subjectivity. Related interests include history of the novel, novel theory, and the global novel; philosophy of religion and ethics; and problems of comparative method, especially as they pertain to North American literature and history.
Prof. Ruttenburg is the author of Democratic Personality: Popular Voice and the Trial of American Authorship (Stanford UP, 1998) and Dostoevsky's Democracy (Princeton UP, 2008), and she has recently written on the work of J. M. Coetzee and on Melville’s “Bartleby.” Books in progress include a study of secularization in the postrevolutionary United States arising out of the naturalization of “conscience” as inalienable right, entitled Conscience, Rights, and 'The Delirium of Democracy'; and a comparative work entitled Dostoevsky And for which the Russian writer serves as a lens on the historical development of a set of intercalated themes in the literature of American modernity. These encompass self-making and self-loss (beginning with Frederick Douglass's serial autobiographies); sentimentalism and sadism (in abolitionist fiction); crime and masculinity (including Mailer's The Executioner's Song); and the intersection of race, religious fundamentalism, and radical politics (focusing on the works of James Baldwin and Marilynne Robinson). Her courses will draw from both these projects.
Prof. Ruttenburg is past president of the Charles Brockden Brown Society and has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Humanities Center Fellowship, a University of California President's Research Fellowship, as well as fellowships from the Social Science Research Council for Russian and East European Studies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council for Learned Societies.
An international forum on North Korea was held in Palo Alto on October 26, 2010, in an effort to educate the public on reunifying the two Koreas. The San Francisco Chapter of the National Unification Advisory Council organized the forum. Approximately 150 audience members heard panelists speak about the economic, social, and political challenges that face South Korea today in its preparation for a peaceful reunification, as well as about their visions for the future of North Korea.
Gi-Wook Shin, the director of the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC), moderated the presentations and the panel discussion. The panel of four experts included John Everard, 2010-2011 Pantech Fellow at APARC and a former British ambassador to North Korea, speaking about diplomacy and security; Greg Scarlatoiu, director of public affairs and business issues at the Korea Economic Institute, on economic issues; Sang-Hun Choe, 2010-2011 Fellow in Korean Studies at APARC and a reporter at the International Herald Tribune, on factionalism; and Jung Kwan Lee, the South Korean Consul General in San Francisco, on South Korea's policy toward North Korea.
Everad analyzed North Korea's development during the Cold War of a diplomatic technique by which it repeatedly attempted to play one ally off against another in its relationships with the Soviet Union and China. While arguing that North Korea continues to make effective use of this technique against South Korea, the United States, and the European Union, Everad noted that North Korea's current political uncertainty, following the succession, and its ongoing economic concerns will together create a situation in which it may be very difficult for North Korea to maintain political solidarity.
Scarlatoiu, meanwhile, contended that North Korea's is a post-Stalinist, neo-patrimonial economy. Thus, with recent efforts such as the 2002 market reforms and the 2009 currency reform, the North Korean regime has found itself confronted with a major dilemma. According to Scarlatoiu, while economic reforms are necessary to the long-term survival of the regime, they could also lead to the regime's collapse. This predicament, he added, must be considered as the regime undergoes a leadership transition in the succession to Kim Jong-un.
Choe spoke on the process of succession to Kim Jong-un as well, pointing out that while Kim Jong-un is indisputably the heir to the leadership of North Korea, he has yet to prove his competency as North Korea's future leader. In addition, Choe emphasized that difficulties judging North Korea's intentions and anticipating its behavior stem from the outside world's inability to understand the North Korean leadership and the goals that it truly has in mind.
Finally, Lee stressed that the basic objectives of South Korea's policy on North Korea are to promote a common prosperity and to peacefully resolve North Korean nuclear issues. However, he also made it clear that the South Korean government is seeking to keep North Korean nuclear issues distinct from the issue of inter-Korean relations.
On Monday, an undersea earthquake shook Indonesia's remote Mentawai Islands and triggered a 10-foot tsunami: It has killed at least 272 people, and left 412 missing. The first cargo plane with humanitarian supplies arrived today. Hundreds of miles away in eastern Java, the volcanic Mount Merapi erupted Tuesday and killed at least 30 people.
That's two disasters in less than 24 hours.
Indonesia is no stranger to catastrophe. It is located along the Pacific Ring of Fire, which is one of the most seismically and volcanically volatile areas in the world. Its last sizeable earthquake and tsunami duo struck in December of 2004, killing more than 225,000 people in 14 countries.
But despite the death and destruction of the last 48 hours, Indonesian Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa said today that he doesn't yet see a need for foreign aid or rescue assistance.
So far, only the Philippines and the United States have offered to help Indonesia. But Natalegawa's behavior seems counter-intuitive. In the face of disaster, why would any country preemptively say no to aid?
A look into Indonesia's history reveals latent political sensitivities that may have influenced Natalegawa's decision. Indonesia's first president, Sukarno, was a founding member of the Non-Aligned Movement, an organization of countries who are not aligned with or against any major world power.
Indonesia prides itself on its "independent and active" foreign policy, which was first developed by then Vice President Mohammad Hatta on September 2, 1948 in Central Java. "Do we, Indonesians, in the struggle for the freedom of our people and our country, only have to choose between Russia and America?" he asked. "Is not there any other stand that we can take in the pursuit of our ideals?"
The "other stand" became known as "mendayung antara dua karang" or "rowing between two reefs."
Indonesia doesn't want to appear incompetent, or weak, to outside governments, and may also be wary to accept aid for fear of undermining its national legitimacy.
In 2004, Indonesia's acceptance of aid had an arguably negative effect on its citizens. "Though the post-tsunami reconstruction efforts in Aceh were generally successful, the amount of aid did engender some resentment in Jakarta over whether the national government had lost control of the reconstruction, and also potentially altered the economy in Aceh," explains Josh Kurlantzick a fellow for southeast Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations. "So people remember that."
Donald Emmerson, the director of the Southeast Asia Forum at Stanford University's Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, cites several reasons for Natalegawa's response. First, he says, if the Indonesian government solicited foreign aid, it would be inundated with offers. Coordinating offers of assistance right now would be a severe burden on the government.
Then there's the question of scale: so far, the destruction seems manageable in comparison to the 2004 disaster. Still, it's unclear whether Indonesia will be able to adequately respond on its own. "Indonesia is a large country, and its infrastructure is overstretched," Emmerson says. "Its capacity to respond effectively to domestic disasters is not as good as it might be."
The world first became concerned about North Korea's nuclear development program in 1989 through satellite photos of a facility under construction near the town of Yongbyon. Since then, there have been on-again, off-again negotiations with North Korea by the United States, the Republic of Korea (ROK), and other countries in the region to halt and dismantle North Korea's nuclear weapons program.
A consistent strategy focused on dialogue and diplomacy is essential to get out of the current quagmire, urged Song Min-soon, a member of the Korean National Assembly and a former Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade, at a Korean Studies Program public seminar on October 18. Although the United States and the ROK must lead efforts, China's active involvement is also crucial. Resolving the nuclear issue is necessary to help ensure the long-term peace and prosperity of not only the Korean Peninsula but also the entire East Asia region.
Song explored reasons why
previous negotiation attempts failed, especially the lack of a shared vision
among the concerned countries for the future of the peninsula and region. He
suggested that this rendered China less willing to play a stronger role in the
negotiations. The imbalance of power among the negotiating countries is another
significant factor. North Korea's only effective bargaining card is its nuclear
weapons program, argued Song, while countries like the United States have the
capability to offer or withhold important aid, such as energy and development assistance.
Song advocated a firm, direct approach, stating that the United States has not adopted
a real strategy for effecting nuclear disarmament. Instead, it has opted for the
"slogan" of "strategic patience." He cautioned against taking a hard line, such
as the current ROK administration is pursuing. Song expressed the hope that the
United States would focus more on developing a well-planned diplomatic strategy
for resolving the nuclear issue and that the ROK would adopt a more
conciliatory approach toward North Korea.
To move forward in the Six-Party Talks-negotiations among the United States,
the ROK, North Korea, China, the Russian Federation, and Japan-and effectively resolve
the North Korea nuclear issue, Song made several recommendations. He pointed to
the long-term benefit of building trust incrementally by fulfilling small,
strategic commitments to North Korea. To balance the asymmetry of negotiating
cards, Song suggested that the other countries proceed with fulfilling their
commitments and allow North Korea more time to fulfill its own obligations.
Bringing China fully on board by building a logical basis for its involvement
is also a crucial element of the negotiations, he offered. Finally, Song
asserted that the United States, the ROK, and China must develop a shared,
solid vision for peaceful coexistence on the peninsula, taking into account different
scenarios and the roles each country should play.
Song expressed confidence that the approach he outlined would not only eventually resolve the nuclear issue but would also open the way for stability and prosperity for everyone in East Asia, including North Korea.
