Margot Gerritsen is an Associate Professor in Energy Resources Engineering. Originally from the Netherlands, she left the country after receiving her MSc degree from Delft University of Technology. She earned her PhD in Computational Mathematics from Stanford in 1996. After teaching at the University of Auckland in New Zealand for five years, she returned to Stanford in 2001. Together with her colleagues and students, Margot works to develop computational tools to optimize the development of energy resources. She is active in large-scale solar development, wind farm optimization, marine energy, as well as mitigation of the harmful environmental impacts of oil and gas production. Margot is an expert in energy resources, fluid dynamics and computational mathematics, and teaches courses in these areas. She regularly advises NGOs, VCs, policymakers and the energy industry. Margot produces a podcast show on energy issues at http://www.smartenergyshow.com.

Ian Hsu has been director of Internet Media Research at Stanford since 2007. A graduate of Stanford's class of 1998 in electrical engineering, Ian went on to earn a master's in management science and engineering in 2001. He previously worked at Advanced Micro Devices and Spansion, AMD's spinoff, the latter as a manager of internet marketing, before joining a startup called FilmLoop in 2006. For his work on Stanford's university Facebook strategy, Ian was awarded the 2009 Excellence in New Communcations Award by the Society for New Communication Research (SNCR), a global non-profit research and education think-tank dedicated to the understanding of new media.  Ian's work at Stanford has been covered by many educational and new media publications including The Chronicle of Higher Education, CASE Currents, Mashable and Inside Facebook.

Some 700,000 Koreans, 40,000 Chinese and 35,000 Allied POWs performed forced labor for private companies within Japan during the Asia Pacific War. Kyushu coal mines were a wartime center of this injustice and Fukuoka is a major locus of ongoing redress efforts, which the presenter has closely observed. A front-row account of the interaction between community activists in Japan, Korea, China and North America will be provided and key results will be discussed. The Japanese government has been prodded into sending the remains of Korean labor conscripts to South Korea and handing over the long-suppressed records that Seoul needs to fully implement its own compensation program. Lawsuits in Japanese courts stemming from forced labor by Chinese proved partially successful, raising expectations that more Japanese firms may voluntarily settle the especially strong Chinese claims. Amid the controversy surrounding former Prime Minister Aso's admission that there were POWs at Aso Mining, Japan issued new official apologies and is expanding a POW reconciliation program. Fluid networks of independent researchers and Internet-empowered activists continue to influence developments within Japan's changing political landscape. This transnational grassroots activism also faces barriers and limitations.

Mr. Underwood's doctoral research at Kyushu University analyzed the reparations movement for Chinese forced labor in Japan during World War Two, locating it within the global trend toward repairing historical injustices. His articles for The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus (www.japanfocus.org) provide the fullest descriptions of forced labor redress activities involving Chinese as well as Korean victims. He played a key role in forcing former Japanese Prime Minister Aso Taro to admit there were Allied POWs at Aso Mining during the war. His Web site is www.williamunderwood.org.

The aphorismic and fragmentary quality of Rabbinic discourse creates theological nuggets that are both wonderfully compact and enigmatic. Rather than read Rabbinic statements as fragments of an elusive systematic theological undergrid I will, in a Wittgensteinian mode, examine Rabbinic religious language from within a frame of life. Specifically, I will examine the way the Mishnah, the formative text of Rabbinic Judaism, as a relatviely restricted and enclosed language game, speaks about God. The discussion will focus on "makom," "place," as a name of God treating it as a constitutive metaphor of this religious way of life.

Co-sponsored by the Forum on Contemporary Europe, Taube Center on Jewish Studies, and Department of Literatures, Cultures and Languages.

Introduction by Michael McGriff, Jones Lecturer in Creative Writing, Stanford University.

The Stanford China Program in cooperation with the Center for East Asian Studies will host a special series of seminars to mark 60 Years of the People's Republic of China (PRC). Over the course of the winter and spring terms, we will have six leading scholars, each examining one of the six decades of the PRC's history. Our premise is that history matters. The speaker on each decade will characterize their decade, note shifts within that time, identify the pivotal events, and discuss how the decade shaped what happened afterwards.

Jospeh Fewsmith is the author of four books: China Since Tiananmen: The Politics of Transition (2001), Elite Politics in Contemporary China (2001), The Dilemmas of Reform in China: Political Conflict and Economic Debate (1994), and Party, State, and Local Elites in Republican China: Merchant Organizations and Politics in Shanghai, 1980-1930 (1985). He is very active in the China field, traveling to China frequently and presenting papers at professional conferences such as the Association for Asian Studies and the American Political Science Association. His articles have appeared in such journals as Asian Survey, Comparative Studies in Society and History, The China Journal, The China Quarterly, Current History, The Journal of Contemporary China, Problems of Communism, and Modern China. He is also a research associate of the John King Fairbank Center for East Asian Studies at Harvard University.

The Stanford China Program in cooperation with the Center for East Asian Studies will host a special series of seminars to mark 60 Years of the People's Republic of China (PRC). Over the course of the winter and spring terms, we will have six leading scholars, each examining one of the six decades of the PRC's history. Our premise is that history matters. The speaker on each decade will characterize their decade, note shifts within that time, identify the pivotal events, and discuss how the decade shaped what happened afterwards.

Barry Naughton is an authority on the Chinese economy, with an emphasis on issues relating to industry, trade, finance, and China's transition to a market economy. Recent research focuses on regional economic growth in the People's Republic of China and the relationship between foreign trade and investment and regional growth. He is also completing a general textbook on the Chinese economy. Recently completed projects have focused on Chinese trade and technology, in particular, the relationship between the development of the electronics industry in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong, and the growth of trade and investment among those economies. His book, Growing Out of the Plan: Chinese Economic Reform, 1978-1993, which was published in 1995, is a comprehensive study of China's development from a planned to a market economy that traces the distinctive strategy of transition followed by China, as well as China's superior growth performance. It received the Ohira Memorial Prize in 1996. Naughton is the author of numerous articles on the Chinese economy and is editor or co-editor of three other books: Reforming Asian Socialism: The Growth of Market Institutions, Urban Spaces in Contemporary China, and The China Circle: Economics and Technology in the PRC, Taiwan and Hong Kong. Naughton joined IR/PS in 1988 and was named to the Sokwanlok Chair in Chinese International Affairs in 1998.

The Stanford China Program in cooperation with the Center for East Asian Studies will host a special series of seminars to mark 60 Years of the People's Republic of China (PRC). Over the course of the winter and spring terms, we will have six leading scholars, each examining one of the six decades of the PRC's history. Our premise is that history matters. The speaker on each decade will characterize their decade, note shifts within that time, identify the pivotal events, and discuss how the decade shaped what happened afterwards.

Andrew Walder is the Denise O'Leary and Kent Thiry Professor in the Department of Sociology at Stanford, where he is also a Senior Fellow in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI). He is currently the Director of the Division of International, Comparative and Area Studies in Stanford's School of Humanities and Sciences, and in past years has served as Chair of Stanford's Department of Sociology and Director of FSI's Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center.  

A political sociologist, Walder has long specialized on the sources of conflict, stability and change in communist regimes and their successor states. His current research focuses on changes in the ownership and control of large Chinese corporations and the parallel emergence of a new corporate elite with varied ties to state agencies. He also continues his research interest in Mao-era China, with a focus on the mass politics of the Cultural Revolution of 1966-1969.

The Stanford China Program in cooperation with the Center for East Asian Studies will host a special series of seminars to mark 60 Years of the People's Republic of China (PRC). Over the course of the winter and spring terms, we will have six leading scholars, each examining one of the six decades of the PRC's history. Our premise is that history matters. The speaker on each decade will characterize their decade, note shifts within that time, identify the pivotal events, and discuss how the decade shaped what happened afterwards.

Professor Teiwes is a scholar with an international reputation in his main area of research, Chinese elite politics. He has written extensively on re-evaluations of Chinese Communist Party history, 1935-76, and is currently researching leadership politics in the post-Mao era. His wider areas of interest lie in Chinese politics more broadly, communist and post-communist systems, the international communist movement, and American foreign policy. He is the author of several works, including Politics and Purges in China (1979, 2nd ed. 1993), Politics at Mao's Court (1990), The Tragedy of Lin Biao (1996), China's Road to Disaster (1999), and The End of the Maoist Era (2007) (the latter three studies co-authored with Warren Sun).

The Stanford China Program in cooperation with the Center for East Asian Studies will host a special series of seminars to mark 60 Years of the People's Republic of China (PRC). Over the course of the winter and spring terms, we will have six leading scholars, each examining one of the six decades of the PRC's history. Our premise is that history matters. The speaker on each decade will characterize their decade, note shifts within that time, identify the pivotal events, and discuss how the decade shaped what happened afterwards.

Roderick MacFarquhar is the Leroy B. Williams Professor of History and Political Science and formerly Director of the John King Fairbank Center for East Asian Research. His publications include The Hundred Flowers Campaign and the Chinese Intellectuals, The Sino-Soviet Dispute, China under Mao; Sino-American Relations, 1949-1971; The Secret Speeches of Chairman Mao; the final two volumes of the Cambridge History of China (edited with the late John Fairbank); The Politics of China 2nd Ed: The Eras of Mao and Deng; and a trilogy, The Origins of the Cultural Revolution. He was the founding editor of "The China Quarterly, and has been a fellow at Columbia University, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the Royal Institute for International Affairs. In previous personae, he has been a journalist, a TV commentator, and a Member of Parliament. His most recent, jointly-authored book on the Cultural Revolution entitled Mao's Last Revolution was published by the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press in 2006.

The Stanford China Program in cooperation with the Center for East Asian Studies will host a special series of seminars to mark 60 Years of the People's Republic of China (PRC). Over the course of the winter and spring terms, we will have six leading scholars, each examining one of the six decades of the PRC's history. Our premise is that history matters. The speaker on each decade will characterize their decade, note shifts within that time, identify the pivotal events, and discuss how the decade shaped what happened afterwards.

David Bachman is Professor of Chinese Domestic and Foreign Politics and US-China Relations at the Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington. He received his BA in History at Swathmore College and both his MA and Ph.D in Political Science at Stanford University.