Lisa Stampnitzky (speaker) is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and a predoctoral fellow at CISAC. Her dissertation, "The Rise of the Terrorism Expert: The Development of Counterterrorism Expertise in the U.S., 1972-2005," concerns the organization of expert knowledge on terrorism from the 1970s to the present day. It examines how terrorism was first identified as a problem, the role of government in organizing the production of knowledge, and the ongoing efforts of academic and practical experts to define the field. She has also written on the historical construction of cultural capital and its role in elite university admissions. She received her BA in sociology from New College of Florida, and her MA in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley.

John Meyer (respondent) is a professor of sociology (and by courtesy, education) emeritus, at Stanford; a faculty member at CDDRL; and a senior fellow, by courtesy, at FSI. He received his PhD from Columbia University, and taught there for several years before coming to Stanford. His research has focused on the spread of modern institutions around the world, and their impact on national states and societies. He is particularly interested in the spread and impact of scientific activity, and in the expansion and standardization of educational models. He has made many contributions to organizational theory (e.g., Organizational Environments, with W. R. Scott, Sage 1983), and to the sociology of education, developing lines of thought now called neoinstitutional theory. Since the late 1970s, he has worked on issues related to the impact of global society on national states and societies (e.g., Institutional Structure, co-authored with others, Sage 1987). Currently, he is completing a collaborative study of worldwide science and its impact on national societies (Drori, et al., Science in the Modern World Polity, Stanford, 2003), and is working on a study of the rise and impact of the worldwide human rights regime.

Drell Lecture Recording: NA

Drell Lecture Transcript:

Speaker's Biography: Thom Shanker is the national security and foreign policy correspondent for the New York Times. He joined the Times in 1997 and began covering the Pentagon in May 2001, four months before the terrorist attacks. Previously, Shanker was foreign editor of the Chicago Tribune. From 1992 to 1995, as the Tribune's senior European correspondent, based in Berlin, he covered the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina; the departure of American, British, French, and Russian forces from Berlin; and emerging cases of nuclear smuggling in Central Europe.

Shanker spent two years in the master's degree program at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, specializing in strategic studies and international law. He has written on foreign policy, military affairs, and the intelligence community for The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, and American Journalism Review.

Noah Richmond (speaker) is a CISAC Zukerman Fellow and a Stanford Center on International Conflict and Negotiation fellow. His research has focused on the structure and management of the U.S. officer corps, organizing the U.S. military for new domains of warfare including space and cyberspace, and ballistic missile defense. His current research focuses on international, supra-national, and national control regimes for dual-use technologies. Most recently he co-chaired the working group on new domains of warfare for the Beyond Goldwater-Nichols Study conducted at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Richmond has previously consulted for the Institute for Defense Analyses, RAND, and Strategic Decisions Group. He received his BS in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an MS in engineering-economic systems and operations research from Stanford, and a PhD in management science and engineering from Stanford. Richmond is currently a law student at Stanford Law School (class of 2008), where his studies focus on intellectual property and international trade.

David Elliott (respondent) was staff director for science and technology at the National Security Council (NCS) and then vice president at SAIC and SRI. At NCS his portfolio included export control matters, which included the international coordination of our policy. During his time at NCS, major emphases emerged on civilian nuclear issues after the Indian nuclear test and on computer technology as its importance became evident. At CISAC he has contributed to work in cyber security and information technology. Elliott received his BS in physics from Stanford University and both his MS and PhD in experimental high energy physics from the California Institute of Technology.

Alisa Carrigan (speaker) is a PhD candidate in the War Studies Department at King's College, London and a predoctoral fellow at CISAC. For the past three years, she has been researching nuclear non-proliferation policy, with special focus on the training and movement of nuclear human capital under the current non-proliferation regime. At CISAC, Carrigan is working on a project entitled "Strengthening the WMD Non-Proliferation Regime." Carrigan earned her master's degree in international security from the University of St. Andrews (UK), and her BA in government and psychology from Claremont McKenna College. As an undergraduate, she interned at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Alex Montgomery (respondent) was a postdoctoral fellow at CISAC in 2005-2006 and is now an assistant professor of political science at Reed College. He has published articles on dismantling proliferation networks and on the effects of social networks of international organizations on interstate conflict. His research interests include political organizations, social networks, weapons of mass disruption and destruction, social studies of technology, and interstate social relations. His current book project is on post-Cold War U.S. nonproliferation policy, evaluating the efficacy of policies towards North Korea, Iran, and proliferation networks.

Lieutenant Colonel Joseph H. Felter (speaker), a career Special Forces and Foreign Area Officer, is the director of the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point and an instructor in the U. S. Military Academy's terrorism studies program. His military experience includes service as a platoon leader with the 75th Ranger Regiment and as a Special Forces operational detachment-alpha and company commander in the 1st Special Forces Group. As a military attaché in Manila, he planned and coordinated combined efforts to develop the counter terrorist capabilities of the Armed Forces of the Philippines. Felter is a graduate of the United States Military Academy, earned a master's degree from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and received his PhD in political science from Stanford University. His dissertation assesses the impact that variation in quality and structures of state internal security forces has on efforts to combat insurgency and terrorism.

David Patel (respondent) is a 2006-2007 predoctoral fellow at both CDDRL (fall quarter) and CISAC (winter and spring quarters). He is completing a dissertation looking at questions of religious organization and collective action in the Middle East, with a theoretical focus on the relationship of organization and information in particular. Empirically, his study looks at Islamic institutions and their role in political action in a wide range of settings including 7th century garrison cities of the early Islamic empire, through the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq. Patel has spent a great deal of time in the Middle East over the last several years, including extended visits to Yemen, Morocco, Jordan, and Iraq, where he spent seven months in Basra conducting research beginning in the fall of 2003. He works with David Laitin, Jim Fearon, and Avner Greif at Stanford. In fall 2007 he will join the faculty at Cornell University as an assistant professor of political science.

Colin Kahl is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Minnesota, where he teaches courses in international relations, international security, American foreign policy, civil and ethnic conflict, and terrorism. He will be joining the faculty in the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University in the fall of 2007. His current work focuses on U.S. military compliance with the Law of War in Iraq. His research on the topic has been published in Foreign Affairs ("How We Fight," November/December 2006) and International Security ("Rules of Engagement: Norms, Civilian Casualties, and U.S. Conduct in Iraq," forthcoming). His previous research analyzed the causes and consequences of violent civil and ethnic conflict in developing countries. His book on the subject, States, Scarcity, and Civil Strife in the Developing World, was published by Princeton University Press in March 2006, and related articles have appeared in International Security and the Journal of International Affairs. From January 2005 to August 2006, Kahl was a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow conducting research on Law of War issues at the U.S. Department of Defense, where he worked in the office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Stability Operations. He has also been a consultant for the U.S. government's Political Instability Task Force (formerly the State Failure Task Force) since 1999. He received his BA in political science from the University of Michigan in 1993, and his PhD from Columbia University in 2000. In 1997-1998, he was a National Security Fellow at Harvard University's John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies.

David M. Kennedy is the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History at Stanford University and 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).

This talk will explore the formation of Silicon Valley as an industrial district, from its beginnings as the home of a few radio enterprises that operated in the shadow of bigger East Coast firms like RCA through its establishment as a center of the electronics industry and leading producer of vacuum tubes and semiconductors.

Dr. Lecuyer will argue that the emergence and growth of Silicon Valley was made possible by the development of unique manufacturing, product engineering, and management competencies. Entrepreneurs learned to integrate invention, design, manufacturing, and sales logistics, and developed incentives to attract and retain a skilled and motivated workforce. This expertise enabled local firms to adjust rapidly to changes in the marketplace.

Taking advantage of the growing military demand for advanced electronic components, Silicon Valley corporations expanded rapidly during World War II and the Cold War. When the Department of Defense cut back its component expenditures and radically altered its procurement policies in the early 1960s, they redirected their technologies and organizations to commercial markets. As a result, they penetrated a wide range of industrial sectors, transforming the San Francisco Peninsula into a major technological and commercial center.