Joint Princeton-Columbia Graduate Student Workshop, September 29 - October 1, 2000

National Identity and Public Policy in Comparative Perspective

Organizers

Julian Dierkes is a doctoral candidate in Sociology at Princeton. His dissertation, Teaching Portrayals of the Nation - Postwar History Education in the Germanys and Japan, analyzes postwar textbooks and curricula for middle-school history instruction in the Germanys and Japan as to their portrayals of the German and Japanese nation, respectively. His analytic model focuses on the institutional framework of decision-making in educational policy and the consequences of this framework in terms of the substantive orientations of portrayals of the nation in the examined materials.

Sophie Mützel is a graduate student in Sociology at Columbia. In her dissertation, The Emergence of a City Capital Journalism - Constellations of Power and Symbolic Regimes during the Founding of the Berlin Republic, she analyzes the intersection of politics and journalism as the German capital moves from Bonn to Berlin, a foundational act of what has been called the "Berlin Republic". She conducted research as a dissertation fellow of the Hamburg Institute for Social Research until January 2000 focusing on the structures and strategies of the political-journalistic professionals as well as the representations and narratives accompanying the move. Currently, she is a Fellow at the Institute of Social and Economic Research and Policy, Columbia University.

Andrew Oros is a doctoral candidate in Political Science at Columbia. His dissertation, Grand Visions of the State: The Politics of National Identity in Foreign Policy-Making in Japan, focuses on national identity (or a state's "grand vision") as a causal variable in specific foreign policy decisions in postwar Japan, using cases from both the security and economic realms. He spent eighteen months in Tokyo as a Mombusho research fellow at the University of Tokyo and currently is a Junior Japan Fellow at Columbia's East Asia Institute.

Back