2011-2012 Calendar of Events
Past Events 2010-2011
Past Events 2009-2010
Past Events 2008-2009
| London, 19-21 April 2012 | Call for Papers: 2012
International
Graduate Student Conference on the Cold War
The LSE IDEAS Cold War Studies Programme (CWSP), The Center for Cold War Studies (CCWS) of the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the George Washington University Cold War Group (GWCW) are pleased to announce the 2012 International Graduate Student Conference on the Cold War, to take place at the London School of Economics, April 19-21, 2012. Click on the link above for more details. |
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Wednesday,
October 26, 4 pm McCune Room |
Elizabeth
Cobbs Hoffman, “The Empire Fallacy: A New Interpretation of American
Foreign Relations From George Washington to Barack Obama” In this talk,
Professor Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman challenges the assumption that
America is an empire. Rather, it acts as an arbiter and enforcer in a
world system where goals and rules are increasingly universal. Over the
past three centuries, most nations have become republics and many
democracies. Almost all have embraced free market economic
policies in some form. After World War II, numerous voluntary pacts
prohibited conquest and placed limits on the right of states to abuse
their populations. The primary challenge to nationalism lay no longer
in imperialism but in universalism. The U.S. did not cause these
changes, Professor Hoffman argues, but it hastened them. The global
role toward which it gravitated was rooted in domestic American
experience, where the historical tension between states' rights and
federal authority prefigured the later tension between state
sovereignty and supranational authority.Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman is Dwight E. Stanford Professor of American Foreign Relations at San Diego State University. She is the author of The Rich Neighbor Policy: Kaiser and Rockefeller in Brazil (Yale, 1992) and All You Need is Love: The Peace Corps and the Spirit of the 1960s (Harvard, 2000). Her first book won the Allan Nevins Prize from the Organization of American Historians and the Stuart Bernath Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. Professor Hoffman is now completing a book, for Harvard University Press, on U.S. foreign relations since 1776. |
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Wednesday,
January 11, 4 pm McCune Room |
David C.
Kang, "They Think They're Normal: North Korea Beyond the Nuclear
crisis."
North Korea remains both a practical problem and an intellectual
puzzle,with actions that sometimes appear self-defeating, aggressive,
and
unpredictable. This talk will make two overarching arguments that help
make sense of North Korea. First, North Korea is more "normal" than is
often expected, and its domestic politics, economy, and society
function in ways familiar to, if not exactly identical to, other
countries around the world. The institutions, economic life, and most
importantly, the human beings who live in North Korea act and function
in ways that are not only similar to the ways many people around the
world live and act, but differ from them only by degree. Second, North
Korea's continuing nuclear and military challenge is only one aspect of
its overall relations with the world, and policies designed to affect
its security policy may work at cross-purposes with policies designed
to affect its economy and lives of its people. The complexities that
arise in dealing with North Korea lead to a number of contradictory
policy choices, and making progress in one issue area has often meant
overlooking a different issue area or even allowing it to worsen.
David C. Kang is Professor of International Relations and Business at the University of Southern California, with appointments in both the School of International Relations and the Marshall School of Business. At USC he is also director of the Korean Studies Institute. Kang's latest book is East Asia Before The West: Five Centuries Of Trade And Tribute (Columbia University Press, 2010). He is also author of China Rising: Peace, Power, and Order in East Asia (Columbia University Press, 2007); Crony Capitalism: Corruption and Development in South Korea and the Philippines (Cambridge University Press, 2002), and Nuclear North Korea: A Debate on Engagement Strategies (co-authored with Victor Cha) (Columbia University Press, 2003). Kang has published numerous scholarly articles in journals such as International Organization and International Security, and his co-authored article "Testing Balance of Power Theory in World History" was awarded "Best article, 2007-2009" by the European Journal of International Relations. A regular consultant for U.S. government agencies, Kang has also written opinion pieces in the New York Times, the Financial Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times, as well as writing a monthly column for the Joongang Ilbo in Korean. He received an A.B. with honors from Stanford University and his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley. |
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Thursday, February
23, 4 pm HSSB 4020 |
Bradley
Simpson, "The Cold War, Human Rights and Self-Determination." During
the Cold War countless peoples and movements in both the decolonizing
world and the advanced industrial states mobilized under the banner of
self-determination, and sought to institutionalize its status as a
human right in international law. in this talk, focusing on the end of
European empire in the 1970s, Professor Simpson explains why
self-determination came to have such expansive and potentially
disruptive meaning in the post-WWII era, serving as a short-hand for a
wide range of claims to sovereignty.
Bradley Simpson received his Ph.D. in history from Northwestern University in 2003. He is assistant professor of history and international affairs at Princeton University and the author of Econonmists With Guns: Authoritarian Development and U.S.-Indonesian Relations, which was published by Stanford University Press in 2008. Professor Simpson is currently working on two book projects, an international history of the idea self-determination, and a study of U.S.-Indonesian-international relations during the Suharto era (1966-1998). The talk is sponsored by the Center for Cold War Studies and International History (CCWS) and cosponsored by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center and by the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies. |
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Thursday, March 1 6 pm McCune Room (HSSB 6020) The film will be followed by a Q and A, and feature commentary from History Professor Salim Yaqub. |
Films of
the Cold War: Countdown
to Looking Glass (1984)
For over forty years, "Looking Glass" was the nickname of the Airborne
Command Post--an essential element in the command and control of the
Strategic Air Command's forces. Countdown
to Looking Glass,
a made-for-TV docudrama, is a fictionalized account of how quickly a
nuclear war could break out between the United States and the Soviet
Union over Middle East oil. This fast-paced film feels as though you
are watching breaking news, and features cameos by famous diplomats
such as Paul Warnke, and a young Georgia Congressman, and current
presidential candidate, Newt Gingrich. Relive the Cold
War from
the window of 1984, or come experience it for the first time!
 |
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Friday, April 6, HSSB 4020 |
Lorenz Lüthi, "The Non-Aligned Movement and the Cold War, 1961-1973"
 The
Non-Aligned Movement was created to stand apart from the Cold War.
Lorenz Luthi argues, however, that the Non-Aligned Movement was a
product of the Cold War and was almost torn apart by it during the
1961-1973 period. From the start, Cold War issues--such as the division
of Germany, nuclear weapons, the Middle East conflict, and the
Indochina war--impaired the cohesion of the Non-Aligned Movement.
Internal weakness and the lack of a clear agenda were also responsible
for the movement's political demise by the early 1970s.
Lorenz Lüthi received his PhD from Yale University in 2003 and is now associate professor of history at McGill University. His first book, The Sino Soviet Split, was published by Princeton University Press in 2008. Professor Lüthi is currently working on a book on the regional Cold Wars in Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. |
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Monday, April 9, HSSB 4080 |
David
Sneer, "Through Soviet Jewish Eyes: Photography, War, and the Holocaust"
In January 1942, three years before Americans arrived at Buchenwald and
Dachau, Jewish photographers working for the Soviet press became the
first liberators to photograph the unprecedented horror we now call the
Holocaust. These photographers participated in a social project in
which they were emotionally and intellectually invested; they had been
dispatched by the Stalinist state to document Nazi atrocities. David
Shneer tells the stories of these photographers and highlights their
work through their own images; he has amassed never-before-published
photographs from families, collectors, and private archives.
David Shneer is the Singer Chair of Jewish History at the University of
Colorado, Boulder. His most recent books include New Jews: The End of the Jewish
Diaspora (NYU, 2005) and the award-winning Through Soviet Jewish Eyes:
Photography, War, and the Holocaust (Rutgers,
2011). Professor Shneer has published scholarly articles in leading
journals like The American Historical Review and in the popular press
such as the Huffington Post and The
Jewish Daily Doward.
The talk is sponsored by the Center for Cold War Studies and International History (CCWS) and cosponsored by the Jewish Studies Program and by the Department of Germanic, Slavic, and Semitic Studies. |