Workshops

Student Attending Dissertation Workshop

Dissertation Workshops

The meetings of the CES Dissertation Workshop offer graduate students at Harvard and MIT the opportunity to present their current research to their peers and faculty interested broadly in the study of Europe. It is a student-run, student-centered project and papers will be pre-circulated to the audience in advance.

Dissertation Workshop Schedule 2020-2021

All sessions will be virtual and require pre-registration (see below).

Fall 2020

Friday, December 4, 2020 - 12:00pm - 1:15pm

Jan Burzlaff (History): "After the Dutch Paradox: Jews and non-Jews in the Netherlands (1940–1945)"

Friday, December 11, 2020 - 12:00pm - 1:15pm

Bo Yun Park (Sociology): "Is S(H)e Presidential? The Changing Scripts of Political Leadership, 1995-2020"

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Spring 2021

Friday, February 12, 2021 - 12:00pm - 1:15pm

Aden Knaap (History): "Judging the League: The Permanent Court of International Justice and the League of Nations, 1922-1939"

The CES Dissertation Workshop is a graduate educational seminar and is open only to graduate students and their advisors. Zoom links for the workshop will be distributed a day in advance.

If you are interested in attending a workshop or to present your research, please contact CES Dissertation Workshop coordinators Clare Bradford Anderson and Armando Miano.

External Funding Workshop

Each year, CES offers the Workshop on External Funding which 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.

Past Dissertation Workshops

Dissertation Workshops 2019-2020

Louis Gerdelan (History): "Disaster tabulation and miraculous deliverances in the eighteenth century"
Tugba Bozcaga (Political Science MIT): "The Social Bureaucrat: How Social Proximity among Bureaucrats Affects Local Governance in Turkey"
Christopher Havasy (Government): "The Last Invention of Governance: The Rise of Bureaucracy and its Reception in Western Europe"
Joseph la Hausse de Lalouvière (History): "The experience of re-enslavement in French Guiana, 1794–1809"
Frank Blibo (History of Science): "The French and Ivorian Heart Care Specialists at the Institut de Cardiologie d’Abidjan, 1976-2017"
Katarzyna Balug (Landscape & Architecture): "Animating Air and the Body at Its Limits"
Note: Unless otherwise noted, all graduate students are Ph.D. candidates at Harvard University.

Dissertation Workshops 2018-2019

Elissa Berwick (Comparative Politics and Methodology, MIT): “Substate nationalism and the scope of redistribution: Evidence from Spain”
Louis Gerdelan (History): “Prophecies of doom or the doom of prophecy? Debates over the astrological prediction of disasters in the Atlantic world, c.1650-1700”
Ian Kumekawa (History): “Lugers and Londonderry: World War I, Ireland, and the origins of modern British gun control”
Deirdre DeBruyn Rubio (Islamic Studies, Religion and Society): “Sacred/secular space: The politics of space and interfaith for French Muslim communities in Paris”
Mikko Silliman (Education Policy & Program Evaluation): “Can schools help close immigrant-native gaps in later outcomes?”
Mina Mitreva (History): “Anarcho-syndicalism from Wilhelmine to Weimar Germany, 1914-1930”
Lucas Melvin Mueller (History, Anthropology, Science, Technology, and Society (HASTS), MIT): “Risk on the negotiation table: Contaminants, global commodity trade, and experts after empire”
Note: Unless otherwise noted, all graduate students are Ph.D. candidates at Harvard University.

Dissertation Workshops 2017-2018

Brandon Bloch (History): "Conscientious Objection and the Revaluation of Resistance: West Germany, 1949-1961"
Josh Ehrlich (History): "The Anglicist-Orientalist Controversy Revisited: Education and the Ends of the Company State in British India"
James McSpadden (History): “National Parliamentarians on the International Stage: Private Diplomacy and Political Cooperation in Interwar Europe”
Andrew Bellisari (History): "Twelve Anxious Men: Re-Examining Algeria's Transition to Independence"
Brandon Bloch (History): "The Law of Reconciliation: German Protestants and International Law in a Divided World, 1957-1965"
Yukako Otori (History): "Family Passports: Migration and Traffic in Children in the 1920s"
Joshua Ehrlich (History): "Knowledge and the East India Company State, 1785-1795"

Dissertation Workshops 2016-2017

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

Dissertation Workshops 2015-2016

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

Dissertation Workshops 2014-2015

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