January 22, 2008
In this issue
- Coming up at the Mershon Center
- Other events
- Mershon Center grant deadline extended
- 'Origins' examines Second Amendment
- Congressional research awards offered
If you are having trouble reading this newsletter, you can read it online.
Thursday, January 24, 2008
Peter Liberman
"Just Deserts in Iraq: Vengeance for 9/11 and American Public Support for the Iraq War"
Noon, Mershon Center for International Security Studies, 1501 Neil Ave.
Peter Liberman has taught at Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City
University of New York since 1998. He is the author of Does Conquest
Pay? The Exploitation of Occupied Industrial Societies (Princeton, 1996), as well as journal articles on political psychology,
alliance politics, the causes of war, trade conflict, and nuclear
proliferation, secrecy, and strategy. Liberman is currently working on a book
manuscript on the moral psychology of punitive war, segments of which appear
in two recently published articles. He serves on the editorial board of Security Studies and the Among
Nations anthology texts (Foreign Affairs/Pearson).
Liberman has a Ph.D. in Political Science from Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, and a B.A. from Reed
College. Read more
and RSVP
Monday, January 28, 2008
Leonard Smith
"Who Gets to be a People?: Reconfiguring the Ottoman Empire in the King-Crane Commission Report of 1919"
Noon, Mershon Center for International Security Studies, 1501 Neil Ave.
Leonard Smith (Ph.D.
Columbia, 1990) is Frederick B. Artz Professor of History at Oberlin College. His most recent book is The Embattled
Self: French Soldiers' Testimony of the Great War (Cornell, 2007). He is also the author of France and the Great War, 1914-1918; Between Mutiny
and Obedience: The Case of the French Fifth Infantry Division During World
War I; and co-editor of France at War: Vichy and the Historians. Smith will speak about the
the King-Crane Commission, the 1919 investigation conducted by the United
States into the circumstances and conditions in Palestine, Syria, Lebanon and
Anatolia, in order to inform American policy with regard to the partitioning
of the former Ottoman Empire. Read more and
RSVP
Friday, February 1, 2008
Michael Tomz
"The Credibility of International Commitments"
3:30 p.m., Mershon Center for International Security Studies, 1501 Neil Ave.
Michael Tomz is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Stanford University, where he is also a Faculty Fellow at the Stanford Center for International Development and an affiliate of the Social Science History Institute and the Institute for Research in the Social Sciences. Tomz is author of Reputation and International Cooperation: Sovereign Debt across Three Centuries, and Modern Political Economy and Latin America: Theory and Policy, edited with Jeffry Frieden and Manuel Pastor. In this lecture, Tomz will present material from "The Credibility of International Commitments," a multi-year project supported by an NSF CAREER grant in which he examine what makes threats and promises believable to international audiences. Read more and RSVP
Friday, February 8, 2008
Melvyn Leffler
"For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War"
Noon, Mershon Center for International Security Studies, 1501 Neil Ave.
Melvyn Leffler is Edward Stettinius Professor of American History at the University of Virginia. He is author most recently of an analysis of the Cold War, For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War. Drawing on extensive research in American and Soviet archives, Leffler offers an account of the forces that constrained Soviet and American leaders in the second half of the 20th century. The book examines four crucial episodes when American and Soviet leaders considered modulating, avoiding, or ending hostilities and asks why they failed: Stalin and Truman devising new policies after 1945; Malenkov and Eisenhower exploring the chance for peace after Stalin's death in 1953; Kennedy, Khrushchev, and LBJ trying to reduce tensions after the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962; and Brezhnev and Carter aiming to sustain detente after the Helsinki Conference of 1975. Read more and
RSVP
Thursday, February 7, 2008
Bill Ellis
"From Satanic Cults to Latino Gangs: The Hazleton Illegal Immigration Crusade as Rumor Panic"
5:30-8 p.m., Mershon Center for International Security Studies, 1501 Neil Ave
Sponsored by the Center for Folklore Studies
Bill Ellis, Associate Professor of English and American Studies at Pennsylvania State-Hazleton, is an authority on urban legend and contemporary versions of the occult. His books include Lucifer Ascending: The Occult in Folklore and Popular Culture (Kentucky, 2003); Raising the Devil: Satanism, New Religions, and the Media (Kentucky, 2000) and Aliens, Ghosts, and Cults: Legends We Live (Mississippi, 2001). He has served as President of the International Society for Contemporary Legend and on the Executive Board of the American Folklore Society. All members of the Ohio State community are welcome to attend, but space for dinner is limited. If you wish to attend, please respond to Sheila Bock (bock.42@osu.edu) by Friday, February 1.
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
Peter Brimelow and Richard D. Kahlenberg
"Are Unions Destroying American Education?"
5:30 p.m., Faculty Club Grand Lounge, 181 S. Oval Drive
Sponsored by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute and John Glenn School of Public Affairs
Do teacher unions create more harm than good in the American education system? Peter Brimelow and Richard D. Kahlenberg will explore this topic at a public debate. Brimelow is a British American financial journalist, author, and founder of VDARE.com, an anti-illegal alien website. Brimelow has been the editor of many publications, including Forbes, the Financial Post, and National Review. His books include Alien Nation: Common Sense about America's Immigration Disaster, and The Worm In The Apple: How The Teacher Unions Are Destroying American Education. Kahlenberg is a Senior Fellow at The Century Foundation, where he writes about education, equal opportunity, and civil rights. He is the author of Tough Liberal: Albert Shanker and the Battles Over Schools, Unions, Race and Democracy; All Together Now: Creating Middle Class Schools through Public School Choice; The Remedy: Class, Race, and Affirmative Action; and Broken Contract: A Memoir of Harvard Law School. This debate is free and open to the public, but seating is limited and reservations are required. Please visit http://glennschool.osu.edu/rsvp/ISI_debate.php by February 8, 2008.
Each year the Mershon Center for International Security Studies holds a competition for Ohio State faculty and students to apply for research grant funds. Grants may be used for a variety of research purposes including travel, seminars, conferences, interviews, experiments, workshops and more.
Applications must be for projects that relate to one or more of the Mershon Center's three areas of focus: the use of force and diplomacy; the ideas, identities and decisional processes that affect security; and the institutions that manage violent conflict.
Junior faculty members and graduate students are especially encouaged to apply. For more information, including application forms and instructions, please see the Grants section of the Mershon Center website.
Because the center has not received enough applications from Ohio State faculty and students, the usual deadline in early January has been extended. The new deadline is January 28, 2008.
Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective is pleased to announce the publication of its February 2008 issue. Origins can be found at http://ehistory.osu.edu/osu/origins/ (the podcast is found at http://ehistory.osu.edu/osu/origins/podcasts.cfm)
Few issues divide Americans as thoroughly and angrily as gun control and the Second Amendment. With the Supreme Court agreeing to hear a Second Amendment case for the first time in almost 70 years, Saul Cornell takes a look at the issues at stake and the history of American interpretations of this amendment, and offers some thoughts on the outcomes.
Origins is a monthly online news magazine published by the Public History Initiative and eHistory in the History Department at The Ohio State University.
In each issue of Origins, an academic expert will analyze a particular current issue -- political, cultural, or social -- in a larger, deeper historical context. In addition to the analysis provided by each month's feature, Origins will also include podcasts, images, maps, graphs, timelines, and other material to compliment the essay.
Recent issues of Origins include:
- The Politics of International Adoption, by Peter Conn
- Conflict Termination: How to End -- and Not to End -- Insurgencies, by John Guilmartin
- Tradition vs Charisma: The Sunni Shi'i Divide in the Muslim World, by Stephen Dale
- Populism and Anti-Americanism in Modern Latin America, by Justin Lance
Next month's feature is After Putin? Russia's Presidential Elections, by Marlene Laruelle.
The Dirksen Congressional Center invites applications for grants to fund research on congressional leadership and the U.S. Congress. A total of up to $30,000 will be available in 2008. Awards range from a few hundred dollars to $3,500.
The competition is open to people with a serious interest in studying Congress. Political scientists, historians, biographers, scholars of public administration or American studies, and journalists are among those eligible. The center encourages graduate students who have successfully defended their dissertation prospectus to apply and awards a significant portion of the funds for dissertation research.
The awards program does not fund undergraduate or pre-Ph.D. study. Organizations are not eligible. Research teams of two or more people are eligible. No institutional overhead or indirect costs may be claimed against a Congressional Research Award.
There is no standard application form. Applicants are responsible for showing the relationship between their work and the awards program guidelines. Applications that exceed the page limit and incomplete applications will not be considered.
All application materials must be received on or before February 1, 2008. Awards will be announced in March 2008. Complete information about eligibility and application procedures may be found at the center's website: http://www.dirksencenter.org/print_grants_CRAs.htm. Frank Mackaman is the program officer -- fmackaman@dirksencenter.org
The center, named for the late Senate Minority Leader Everett M. Dirksen, is a private, nonpartisan, nonprofit research and educational organization devoted to the study of Congress and its leaders. Since 1978, the Congressional Research Awards program has paid out $680,000 to support 350 projects.
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