About the Topic: Re-establishing and strengthening the rule of international law in international affairs was a central Allied aim in the First World War. Revisionism in its many forms has erased this from our memory, and with it the meaning of the war. Imperial Germany’s actions and justifications for its war conduct amounted to proposing an entirely different set of international-legal principles from those that other European states recognized as public law. This talk examines what those principles were and what implications they had for the legal world order.

About the Speaker: Isabel V. Hull received her Ph.D. from Yale University in 1978 and has since then been teaching at Cornell University, where she is the John Stambaugh Professor of History. A German historian, her work has reached backward to 1600 and forward to 1918 and has focused on the history of sexuality, the development of civil society, military culture, and imperial politics and governance. She has recently completed a book comparing Imperial Germany, Great Britain, and France during World War I and the impact of international law on their respective conduct of the war. It will appear in Spring 2014 under the title, A Scrap of Paper: Breaking and Making International Law in the First World War. Her talk is based on this latest research.

ABOUT THE TOPIC: Culture is often understood as a system of "shared understandings." But what does that mean? Amir Goldberg argues that having a shared understanding with others does not necessarily imply espousing similar beliefs or attitudes. Rather, culture prescribes which beliefs and attitudes go with one another; sharing an understanding therefore suggests being in agreement about the structures of relevance and opposition that make symbols and actions meaningful. Amir uses relational class analysis - a network-based method for analyzing survey data - to map these structures, and find groups of people who share distinctive cultural schemes. This approach lends new insights into understanding the social underpinnings of Americans' complex understandings of music, politics, economic morality, and more.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Professor Goldberg received bachelors' degrees in Computer Science and Film Studies from Tel Aviv University, and an MA in Sociology from Goldsmith’s College, University of London. Before pursuing a PhD in Sociology at Princeton University, he worked for several years as a software programmer, an IT consultant and a technology journalist. An Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior in Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, his research projects all share an overarching theme: the desire to understand the social mechanisms that underlie how people construct meaning, and consequently pursue action. His work has been published in the American Journal of Sociology, and he was awarded Princeton University’s Harold W. Dodds Honorific Fellowship.

ABOUT THE COMMENTATOR: Marc Ventresca is University Lecturer in Strategic Management at Said Business School (University of Oxford), England's foremost graduate school of business. Dr. Ventresca, who earned his PhD in Sociology at Stanford, specializes in governance, entrepreneurship, market and network formation, and technology strategy.

About the Topic: Recent revelations indicate the extent to which the government has used data-mining as a tool for surveillance, and the lengths to which it used official secrecy to conceal the scope and nature of its activities, all in the name of national security. What if data-mining could also be a tool for citizens to ensure government accountability? This talk will describe new research using computational methods to explore large corpora of declassified documents. It includes efforts to detect unstudied events, identify topics deemed particularly sensitive, and measure how official secrecy shapes the official record. This work is still exploratory in nature, and the challenges to be overcome are political and ethical, and not just technical. But it is already clear that computational methods will be essential if the government is to adopt a more enlightened, risk-management approach to official secrecy.

About the Speaker: Matthew Connelly’s work seeks to offer new, more productive ways to think about the history – and future – of world politics. He works with computer scientists and statisticians to try to uncover the scope and nature of official secrecy, and venture predictions about what a fuller accounting might reveal about major global threats. His publications include A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria's Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-Cold War Era (2002), and Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population (2008). He has written research articles in Comparative Studies in Society and History; The International Journal of Middle East Studies and The American Historical Review, and published commentary for The Atlantic Monthly and The National Interest. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1997.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: James Cameron, Stanton Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Fellow at CISAC for 2013-14, completed his PhD in July 2013 at the University of Cambridge. James is very interested in the contribution history can make to informing today’s debates on nuclear strategy and U.S.-Russian relations. After completing his master’s in Russian and East European Studies at the University of Oxford, he was a business consultant specializing in the former Soviet Union. 

His dissertation, “The Development of United States Anti-Ballistic Missile Policy, 1961-1972”, used the transformation of the American anti-ballistic missile (ABM) program from John F. Kennedy to Richard M. Nixon as a prism through which to examine changing patterns of presidential nuclear leadership during this period. Employing both new American and Russian sources, the thesis shows how successive occupants of the Oval Office and their most trusted advisers managed the tension between their publicly articulated nuclear strategies and their inner convictions regarding the utility of nuclear weapons during this pivotal decade of the Cold War.

ABOUT THE TOPIC: Richard Nixon did not believe in mutual assured destruction. Yet he signed the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty in 1972, which enshrined MAD as a central fact of the U.S.-Soviet strategic nuclear balance. Conversely his predecessors, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, publicly defended American nuclear superiority and pushed ahead with ABM, despite their private skepticism regarding the utility of both and desire to moderate the arms race. Employing newly available evidence from declassified telephone recordings and documents, this paper attempts to account for this contradiction. It does so by placing the perpetual presidential struggle to reconcile private convictions with public demands at the center of the emergence of assured destruction and the limitation of ABM as elements of U.S.-Soviet détente through strategic arms control.