Between 1870 and 1945, France and Germany fought each other in three bloody wars, each of which left bitter memories and lingering antagonisms in its wake. Bitter memories in turn fed the respective histories of the two neighboring nations, and these became integral features of French and German national identities throughout the first half of the twentieth century. How and when did this begin to change? Siegel will discuss the efforts of twentieth-century French and German historians and teachers to break the intractable cycle of warfare and memory, nationalism and history. Professor Siegel will explore the links between collective memory, scholastic history, and nationalism as well as the complexities of turning history into a tool of international reconciliation. She will explore whether the sequence of events towards reconciliation in France and Germany might be replicable in other environments, notably Asia, in the context of recent events that suggest a rising nationalism in Asia.

Dr. Mona Siegel joined the CSU - Sacramento history faculty in 2003. Her teaching and research interests include modern French history, the history of women and gender, history and memory, peace history, and the history of the world wars. Her current research projects include "The Disarmament of Hatred: History, Truth, and Franco-German Reconciliation from World War I to the Cold War."

Japan Brown Bag Series

Co-hosted with the Center for East Asian Studies and the Stanford Society of Fellows in Japanese Studies. A light lunch will be served.

Ching Kwan Lee is Assistant Professor of Sociology at University of Michigan. She is author of Gender and the South China Miracle (University of California Press, 1998). Her current research is on the transformation of the Chinese working class under market reform.

Jin Hwa Jung is a Research Fellow at the Korea Institute for Industrial Economics and Trade (KIET) in Seoul, Korea, and currently a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender (IRWG), Stanford University. She earned her Bachelor's and Master's degrees at Seoul National University, and Ph.D. degree in economics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Jung has undertaken substantial work on the analysis of the Korean labor market. Her current research focuses on the gender differences in employment and wage structures in the industries with differing knowledge intensity. Abstract: Knowledge-based industries have taken an increasingly large role in the Korean economy since the mid-1980s in terms of value-added, employment, and productivity growth. Compared with traditional industries, knowledge-based industries are characterized by higher ratio of knowledge-intensive jobs, higher wage rates, and higher wage growth in the recent past. In particular, the gender wage gap is less noticeable in knowledge-based industries and, more importantly, less attributable to non-productivity-related discrimination against women. Policies to promote women's employment and career development in knowledge-based sectors are called for.

Youth labor markets in most OECD countries were in disarray by the end of the 1990s. Japan was no exception. Some observers have claimed that Japan's highly institutionalized school-work system, involving close linkages between high schools and employers, has efficiently matched young people to jobs and has helped keep youth unemployment rates low. How is this changing, in the face of Japan's recession as well as structural changes in the labor market? My research examines the role of the school-work system and the pressures the system currently faces. Mary C. Brinton is Professor of Sociology at Cornell University, where she moved in 1998 after teaching at the University of Chicago for 13 years. Her principal interests are in social and economic change in contemporary Japan, the comparative study of labor markets, gender inequality, and the analysis of educational systems. Recent publications include Women and the Economic Miracle: Gender and Work in Postwar Japan (University of California Press, 1993), "Married Women's Labor in Rapidly Industrializing Economies: Examples from East Asia" (with Yean-Ju Lee and William Parish), American Journal of Sociology 93, 1 (1995), and The New Institutionalism in Sociology (edited with Victor Nee; Russell Sage Foundation, 1998). Her current work focuses on how institutions intervene in the Japanese youth labor market.