Workshops

The meetings of the CES Dissertation Workshop offer graduate students at Harvard a collegial and stimulating environment in which to present their current research to peers and faculty interested broadly in the study of Europe. It is a student-run, student-centered project. Graduate students and faculty are encouraged to attend. Papers will be pre-circulated on the e-mail list. Refreshments will be served. Students attending the workshop will be entitled to dine for free at CES’s in-house, delicious Friday lunch. All meetings will be held on Fridays, 2-4 pm in the Goldman Room at the Center for European Studies (Busch Hall, 27 Kirkland Street).

2016-2017 Dissertation Workshop Schedule
All meetings will take place from 2:00 - 4:00pm in Goldman Room
- September 23: Elizabeth Cross (History): "The Pen and the Sword: Visions of Revanche and the Problem of Company Governance in the French Indian Ocean"
- October 7: Tomasz Blusiewicz (History): “Überseehafen Rostock: East Germany’s Window to the World under Stasi Watch, 1961-1989”
- October 21: Rachel Friedman (Government): “The Collectivization of Risk and the Early Welfare State”
- November 4: Adriana Alfaro Altamirano (Government): “Adam Smith and Max Scheler on Sympathy”
- December 2: Jamie McSpadden (History): “A Radical Change? Female Parliamentarians’ Influence on European Politics, 1918-1940”
- December 9: Joshua Ehrlich (History): "Wellesley and the Politics of Fort William College"
- Feb. 17: Lydia Walker (History): "Politics of Plaint: Nagas, Namibians, and the United Nations System of the early 1960s"
- March 10: Kristen Loveland (History): “Replacing God: Reproductive Technologies in German Religious and Legal Thought in the 1980s”
- March 24: Liat Spiro (History): “Drafting Empire: American and German Capital Goods and the Mission Industrialisatrice in the Shandong-Kyushu Corridor, 1880-1914”
- April 7: Andrew Bellisari (History): “Yesterday’s Enemies: Decolonization and the Role of the Mixed Ceasefire Commissions in French Algeria”
- April 21: Brandon Bloch (History): “Institutionalizing Protestant Ethics: Families, Schools, and the West German Basic Law, 1949-1957”
2017-2018 Dissertation Workshop Schedule

All meetings will take place from 2:00 - 4:00pm in Goldman Room; the meeting on December 8th will meet in Hoffmann Room
September 29: Brandon Bloch (History), "Conscientious Objection and the Revaluation of Resistance: West Germany, 1949-1961"
Abstract:
This paper is the fourth chapter of my dissertation, "Faith for This World: Protestantism and the Reconstruction of Constitutional Democracy in Germany, 1933-1968." The chapter shows how a network of Protestant theologians, jurists, and politicians in 1950s West Germany petitioned the federal government and constitutional court for an expansion of the right of conscientious objection to military service, beyond members of historically pacifist churches. Central to Protestant claims, I argue, was an ongoing reappraisal of the legacy of the resistance to the Nazi state, in particular the failed coup d'état of July 20, 1944 in which a number of conservative Protestants had participated. Resistance against National Socialism challenged the conventional boundary German Protestants drew between political and spiritual affairs, engendering debate about the proper scope of the church's political action in postwar West Germany.
October 13: Josh Ehrlich (History), "The Anglicist-Orientalist Controversy Revisited: Education and the Ends of the Company State in British India"
Abstract:
The "Anglicist-Orientalist Controversy" (1833-5) has long been considered a seminal episode in the history of British empire in South Asia. Its supposed outcome, associated in posterity with T. B. Macaulay's minute on education, was the decisive replacement of an eastward-facing ("Orientalist") cultural outlook with a westward-facing ("Anglicist") one among officials of the East India Company. Tracing the growth of British-Indian education policy from 1819, however, this paper argues that the larger significance of the controversy, and of debates over education before and after, lay in the gradual replacement of a politics of elite conciliation by one of mass education. The primary significance of education policy lay in facilitating the Company state's transformation into a territorial sovereign, divorced from old mercantile associations and deriving legitimacy from its supposed hold on Indian society at large.
November 17: Jamie McSpadden (History): “National Parliamentarians on the International Stage: Private Diplomacy and Political Cooperation in Interwar Europe”
Abstract:
This chapter examines interwar European parliamentarians’ private missions abroad as informal diplomats and analyzes the party-political and other deals they made across the continent. The chapter focuses on the specific case of the British Labour Party politician and Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, as well as networks of interwar socialists and conservatives.
December 8: Andrew Bellisari (History): TBD

CES Workshop on External Funding discusses a range of external grants relevant for doctoral students in social sciences and looks into strategies for developing a strong proposal. In addition, it parses specific proposals, both successful and less effective, in an attempt to offer some hands-on tools for mastering the skill of successful proposal writing. In the past, CES graduate students who won some of the most competitive external grants have joined the student programs advisor and shared their insights and prose samples during the workshop.

To subscribe for workshop information or to be a presenter contact the workshop organizers:

Brandon Bloch Maxim Botstein

Dissertation Workshop 2015-2016
- October 23: Adriana Alfaro Altamirano (Government), “Great Expectations: Henri Bergson and the Morality of Uncertainty”
- November 6: Tae-Yeoun Keum (Government), “An Enlightenment Fable: Leibniz and the Boundaries of Reason”
- November 20: Elizabeth Cross (History), “The French Revolution of the Compagnie des Indes: 1789-1792”
- December 4: Lydia Walker (History), “In the Shadow of Katanga”
- February 26: John Harpham (Government), “From Freedom to Slavery” [Dissertation: “The Intellectual Origins of American Slavery”]
- March 11: Colleen Anderson (History), “Cosmic Visitors: The Space Race in East and West Germany, 1957-1969”
- April 1: Guillaume Wadia (History), “The Deep State and the Imperial Spring, 1934-1937”
- April 15: Tomasz Blusiewicz (History), “Contraband, bribes, drugs and big bucks: Why was Solidarność born on the Polish Baltic Coast?”
- April 29: Jamie McSpadden (History), “Constructing and Contesting an Interwar Parliamentary International: The Inter-Parliamentary Union and Conférence parlementaire internationale du commerce”

Dissertation Workshop Spring 2015
- March 6: Kristen Loveland (History), "Reproducing Dignity: German and American Law and the Politics of Reproductive Technologies at the Millennium"
- March 27: Carolin F. Roeder (History), "Geographies of Alpine Knowledge: 1857-1932"
- April 6: Sarah Shortall (History), "The Weapons of the Spirit: Catholic Theology and the Resistance to Nazism"
- April 17: James R. Martin (History), "The Origins of International Economic Governance: Food, Finance, and Shipping during the First World War, 1916-1920"
- May 1: Mircea Raianu (History), "Between Paternalism and Technocracy: The Tata Iron and Steel Company and the Circulation of Expertise in the British Empire, 1900-1950"