On May 16, 2012, President Dilma Rousseff inaugurated the Truth Commission (Comissão da Verdade) and announced the Access to Information Law (Lei de Acesso à Informação).  Inspired by other Truth Commissions in other countries such as Argentina, Chile, Peru, Guatemala and El Salvador, the Brazilian Truth Commission has its own distinctive characteristics that respond to specific national political culture and costumes. Understanding these characteristics is fundamental to recognize how these laws may represent and advance the process of accountability for human rights violations in Brazil and the challenges that still persist due to opposing positions between the Legislative and Executive powers that have recognized these violations and a conservative Judiciary supported by the military.

Yair Mintzker is an assistant professor of history, specializing in German-speaking Central Europe from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries.  Born and raised in Jerusalem, Professor Mintzker received his M.A. in history cum laude magna from Tel-Aviv University (2003) and his Ph.D. from Stanford University (2009).  His broad interests include urban history as well as intellectual, cultural, and political history of Early Modern and Modern Europe.

Prof. Mintzker’s dissertation, The Defortification of the German City, 1689-1866 (winner of the Fritz Stern Prize of the German Historical Institute, 2009), tells the story of the metamorphosis of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German cities from walled to defortified places. By using a wealth of original sources, the dissertation discusses one of the most significant moments in the emergence of the modern city: the dramatic—and often traumatic—demolition of the city’s centuries-old physical boundaries and the creation of the open city.  The research and writing of the dissertation were supported by grants from the School of Sciences and Humanities at Stanford, the DAAD, the Ms. Giles Whiting Foundation, and the Geballe Dissertation Prize at the Stanford Humanities Center.

Co-sponsored by the Department of History and the Taube Center for Jewish Studies.

Note:  The RSVP deadline has been extended to Oct. 12th

Good politics does not for good economics make, especially not in a sub-optimal currency area. Ten years into the euro, the skeptics were proven right. Instead of forcing all members into fiscal discipline and domestic reform, the common currency did neither; indeed it encouraged profligacy and business-as-usual. Now, the Eurozone has become a transfer and debt union. Europe, whose growth has been slowing for 40 years, will not regain competitiveness under the new dispensation.

This seminar is part of the European and Global Economic Crisis Series.

Rose McDermott is a Professor of Political Science at Brown University. McDermott received her Ph.D.(Political Science) and M.A. (Experimental Social Psychology) from Stanford. McDermott has also taught at Cornell, UCSB and Harvard and has held fellowships at Harvard’s Olin Institute for Strategic Studies and Harvard’s Women and Public Policy Program. She was a 2008-2009 fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University and a 2010-2011 fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.  She is the author of three books, a co-editor of two additional volumes, and author of over ninety academic articles across a wide variety of academic disciplines encompassing topics such as experimentation, identity, emotion, intelligence, decision making, and the biological and genetic bases of political behavior.   She has served on the American Political Science Association Counsel and Administrative Counsel, as well as the publications committee for APSA and the International Studies Association. She is President of the International Society of Political Psychology.  She has taught courses in undergraduate and graduate International Relations Theory, graduate and undergraduate International Security, American Foreign Policy, and War in Film and Literature. 

Seminar presentation on John Bender's new book, "Ends of Enlightenment."  In his book, Professor Bender explores three realms of eighteenth-century European innovation that remain active in the twenty-first century: the realist novel, philosophical thought, and the physical sciences, especially human anatomy.

Commentary will be provided by William B. Warner, Professor of English, University of California at Santa Barbara.

Books will be available for sale at this event by the Stanford Bookstore.

Co-sponsored by the Department of Comparative Literature, Department of English and the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages.

Professor Jang-Jip Choi argues that South Korean politics are characterized by extreme uncertainty and that this is exemplified by the campaign for the presidential election on December 19. Succeeding generations of politicians have failed to organize parties on a new social basis, to represent the interests and passions of the voters, or to develop their own competence in dealing with urgent social and economic problems. Professor Choi seeks to explain this phenomenon from historical and structural perspectives.

Specializing in the contemporary political history of Korea, the theory of democracy, comparative politics and labor politics, Professor Choi is the author of numerous books, scholarly articles and political commentaries on Korean politics, including Democracy After Democratization: The Korean Experience (forthcoming), From Minjung to Citizens (2008), and Which Democracy? (2007). He holds a BA from Korea University, and an MA and a PhD, both in political science, from the University of Chicago, and was a professor in the department of political science at Korea University until his retirement in 2008.

Population aging in Asian societies is accompanied by changes in intergenerational living arrangements, which can have substantial health and economic implications for the elderly parents and their adult children. Dr. Young Kyung Do will present some of his recent works related to elderly living arrangements in South Korea. These works include the effect of coresidence with an adult child on depressive symptoms among older widowed women; the relationship between adult children's coresidence with parents and their labor force participation; and interrelations between expectations about bequests and informal care with special emphasis on the role of intergenerational coresidence. In these studies, Dr. Do attempted to account for a common methodological issue: living arrangements are not always randomly assigned but may be jointly decided with the outcome of interest taken into account by either the elderly parents or their adult children. While this seminar will focus on the South Korean context, the significance and implications apply to many other Asian societies undergoing population aging and marked transitions in elderly living arrangements.

Dr. Young Kyung Do is an assistant professor at the Duke-National University of Singapore Graduate Medical School (Duke-NUS), Program in Health Services and Systems Research. His research interests include the economic and health system impact of population aging and noncommunicable disease; interactions between self-care, informal care, and formal care interfaces; and health, education, and labor market outcomes over the life course. He received his MD (1997) and master of public health (2003) degrees from Seoul National University, subsequently completing his PhD in Health Policy and Management (2008) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He was the inaugural Asia Health Policy postdoctoral fellow at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center,(2008−9).