Past Fellows at the Institute of International Studies

Allan Sharlin Memorial Award Fellows, 1998-1999

James Daughton, History: A Rural Drama: Peasants and National Identity in France, 1914-1940. What motivated and shaped the quick and substantial change in the role and symbolic significance of the peasantry in French popular and political culture between 1914 and 1940? And what, if any, relationship did this new image have to the daily life of men and women living in the countryside? This study will examine how the First World War fundamentally altered the means by which the French defined and represented both the peasantry and national identity in the 1920s and '30s. By examining sources from popular culture, such as novels, radio, and film, Mr. Daughton will explore how the peasantry was transformed from a dangerous, foreign class before 1914 to harmless, folksy, and decidedly assimilated in the 1920s and '30s, and ultimately to the personification of hard work and virtue by the eve of the Second World War. Further, by examining political rhetoric and debates, this study will consider how and why various political parties, both on the left and the right, employed the concepts of urban and rural, as well as the image of the peasantry itself, to define the nation during the interwar years. Finally, with the use of prefectural reports and other local archives, this study will compare the popular idealization of the peasantry to the actual social changes in the countryside between 1914 and 1940.

Julia Lynch, Political Science: The Politics of Intergenerational Resource Distribution in OECD Countries. This dissertation project investigates the distribution of public resources between the elderly and the young in OECD countries. Public pensions are widely recognized as a means of transferring resources across the life cycle, but we know very little about the age-redistributive effects of other welfare and fiscal policies, or about the soical, political, and economic consequences of a distribution that is skewed either towards the elderly or towards the non-elderly. In the current context of rapidly aging populations in many countries, understanding why different countries distribute resources differently across age categories, and what are the consequences of these decisions, takes on special urgency. This project combines statistical analysis of support trends in 21 OECD countries with historical case studies of the development of specific age biases in social polity in Italy, the Netherlands, and the United States.

Jan Plamper, History: Representing the Leader: Images of Stalin, 1929-1953. From Mussolini to Mao, from Kim Il Sung to Saddam, leader cults have been a staple feature of twentieth-century authoritarian politics. Atavisms into premodern politics at first glance, these leader cults have been objects of description rather than analysis. In his dissertation on the Stalin Cult, Mr. Plamper argues that this prime exemplar of twentieth-century leader cults must be understood as a hybrid yielded by modernity and dictatorial governance and cannot simply be explained away by residual Russian Orthodoxy. The dissertation investigates the rhetoric and mechanisms of the Stalin Cult in the Soviet Union and one post-War Eastern European satellite state (East Germany). It examines the contents of the images, the institutions involved in deliberating and disseminating them, and the processes of image production in a case study of one cultural mode~painting. Shifting the focus from Cult-ural products to the modes of Cult-ural production, the dissertation should not only add a critical dimension to explaining governance in the Soviet Union, but also provide an explanatory model for leader cults in general, a salient feature of twentieth-century authoritarian politics.

Diana Selig, History: Children at the Crossways: Childhood and Race in America, 1904 - 1954. This dissertation explores the convergence of the child study movement and the movement for racial liberalism in the first half of the twentieth century. The study examines the work of parents, teachers, church leaders, and researchers who were concerned with the origins of racial prejudice and racial tolerance. They drew attention to children's development in an effort to explain and solve the nation's most pressing social problems. The dissertation places this alliance in thte context of social science, immigration and migration, Depression and war, with the aim of illuminating the ways in which the private worlds of childrearing and racial identity formation became deeply embedded in public life.