Speakers

Keynote Speakers

• Jon Elster, Columbia University
• Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Columbia University

Invited Contributors

• Michael Suk-Young Chwe, UCLA
• John Dupré, Exeter, UK
• Regenia Gagnier, Exeter, UK
• Dan Hausman, University of Wisconsin
• Alan Liu, UC-Santa Barbara
• Paisley Livingston, Lingnan University, Hong Kong, and Department of Philosophy, The University of Copenhagen
• Julie Nelson, Tufts University

Stanford Contributors

• Kenneth Arrow, Professor of Economics Emeritus and Professor of Management Science and Engineering Emeritus, Stanford University
• John Bender, Departments of English and Comparative Literature, Stanford University
• Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Professor of French and Political Science, Stanford, and Philosophy, École Polytechnique, Paris
• Hazel Markus, Psychology, Stanford University
• Muriel Niederle, Economics, Stanford University

Respondents/Introducers

• Karen Cook, Sociology, Stanford University
• Paula England, Sociology, Stanford University
• Mark Granovetter, Sociology, Stanford University
• Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, French and Italian, Comparative Literature, Stanford University
• Akhil Gupta, Cultural and Social Anthropology, Stanford University
• David Kreps, Graduate School of Business, Stanford University
• Colleen Lye, UC Berkeley
• David Palumbo-Liu, Comparative Literature, Stanford University
• Debra Satz, Philosophy, Stanford University
• Peter Stone, Political Science, Stanford University
• Lindsay Waters, Harvard University
• Sylvia Yanagisako, Cultural and Social Anthropology, Stanford University

Conference Organizer

• Sarah Richardson, Program in Modern Thought and Literature, Stanford University

Kenneth Arrow

Kenneth J. Arrow is Professor of Economics Emeritus and Professor of Management Science and Engineering Emeritus at Stanford University. His research interests have largely been devoted to applications of rational choice theory. Among these fields have been the theory of social choice, general economic equilibrium, the economics of information, inventory analysis, the economics of medical care, the consequences of market failure, the measurement of environmental impacts, and the impact of social interactions on economic behavior. He is the author or co-author of Social Choice and Individual Values, General Competitive Analisys, The Limits of Organization, Essays in Theory of Risk Bearing, and numerous papers. He has been president of several learned societies and received several awards and honorary degrees.

Title of Talk: Economists and Glory

John Bender

John Bender is Jean G. and Morris M. Doyle Professor in Interdisciplinary Studies and Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Stanford and the director of the Stanford Humanities Center. His research interests include the relationship of literature to the visual arts, to philosophy and science, as well as to the sociology of literary production and critical theory. Bender is the author of Spenser and Literary Pictorialism (1972), and Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of Mind in 18th-Century England (1987), which received the Gottschalk Prize of the American Society for 18th-Century Studies. He has published articles on Shakespeare, Piranesi, Hogarth, Hume, Goldsmith, Blake, Godwin, and on theoretical issues including fictionality and scientific inquiry. He is co-editor of The Ends of Rhetoric: History, Theory, Practice (1990), Chronotypes: The Construction of Time (1991), The Columbia History of the British Novel (1994), the Oxford World Classics edition of Tom Jones (1996), and Regimes of Description: In the Archive of the Eighteenth Century (2004).

Title of Talk: Rational Choice in Love

Michael Suk-Young Chwe

Michael Suk-Young Chwe is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles. He specializes in game theory and its applications to collective action, communication, social networks, monetary theory, and violence. His book "Rational Ritual: Culture, Coordination, and Common Knowledge," which analyzes public rituals in terms of game theory, was published in 2001 by Princeton University Press. He has held positions at the University of Utah, New York University, and the University of Chicago, did undergraduate work at the California Institute of Technology, and received his doctorate in economics from Northwestern University in 1992. His web site is www.chwe.net/michael.

Title of Talk: Rational Choice and the Humanities: Excerpts and Folktales

John Dupré

John Dupré is Professor of Philosophy of Science at the University of Exeter, and Director of the ESRC Centre for Genomics in Society (EgenIS). He has formerly been a Professor of Philosophy at Stanford University and at Birkbeck College, London. His publications include The Disorder of Things: Metaphysical Foundations of the Disunity of Science (Harvard, 1993); Human Nature and the Limits of Science (Oxford, 2001); Humans and Other Animals (Oxford, 2002); and Darwin's Legacy: What Evolution Means Today (Oxford, 2003). His main current research project is an investigation of the ontology of contemporary biology, and he is collaborating with the sociologist of science Barry Barnes on a book on genomics.

Title of Talk: Rational Choice in the Age of the Genome

Jean-Pierre Dupuy

Jean-Pierre Dupuy is Professor of French and Political Science, Stanford, and Philosophy, École Polytechnique, Paris. His recent books include The Mechanization of the Mind--On the Origins of Cognitive Science, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2000, and Self-Deception and Paradoxes of Rationality, C.S.L.I. Publications, Stanford University, 1998. Prof. Dupuy's current research program concerns the paradoxes of rationality, or the classical philosophical problem of the antinomies of Reason at the age of rational choice theory, analytic philosophy, and cognitive science; the ethics of nuclear deterrence and preemptive war; the philosophy of risk and uncertainty; the philosophical underpinnings and the future societal and ethical impacts of the convergence of nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, and cognitive science.

Title of Talk: Rational Doomsaying

Jon Elster

Jon Elster teaches political science and philosophy at Columbia University. His books include Ulysses and the Sirens (1979), Sour Grapes (1983), Making Sense of Marx (1985), The Cement of Society (1989), Local Justice (1992), Alchemies of the Mind (1999), Ulysses Unbound (2000) and Closing the Books (2004). His main current research interests are the comparative study of constitution-making and the microfoundations of civil war.

Title of Talk: Interpretation and Rational Choice

Paula England

Paula England is Professor of Sociology at Stanford University. Her research and teaching deal with gender, households and families, and labor markets. She is interested in integrating sociological, economic, and feminist perspectives. She is author of Households, Employment, and Gender: A Social, Economic, and Demographic View (1986, with George Farkas) and Comparable Worth: Theories and Evidence (1992). She is a former editor of the American Sociological Review and the 1999 winner of the American Sociological Association's Jessie Bernard Award for career contributions to the study of gender. Her current research projects include a quantitative analysis of what causes women versus men to initiate divorces (with Liana Sayer and Paul Allison), and a qualitative analysis of conflicts among cohabiting unmarried parents (with Kathryn Edin).

Regenia Gagnier

Regenia Gagnier is a social theorist and cultural historian of 19C Britain. Her books include Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public (Stanford, 1986), Subjectivities: A History of Self-Representation in Britain 1832-1920 (Oxford, 1991), Critical Essays on Oscar Wilde (Boston, 1991), The Insatiability of Human Wants: Economics and Aesthetics in Market Society (Chicago, 2000) and guest-edited special issues of New Literary History (Economics, Culture and Value [2000]) and Victorian Literature and Culture(Victorian Boundaries [2004]). She has been Professor of English at the University of Exeter since 1996, Dean of the Graduate School 2001-2004, and was Director of the Programme in Modern Thought and Literature at Stanford University from 1992 to 1996. Her current research is on transatlantic models of individualism in relation to larger social units.

Title of Talk: 'Semi-Detached Marriages' and Literary Alternatives to Rational Choice

Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht is the Albert Guérard Professor of Literature at Stanford University. Among his books on literary theory and literary and cultural history are Eine Geschichte der spanischen Literatur (1990; Spanish translation forthcoming); Making Sense in Life and Literature (Minnesota University Press, 1992); In 1926--Living at the Edge of Time (Harvard University Press, 1998); Corpo e forma (Italy / Mimesis, 2001); Vom Leben und Sterben des großen Romanisten (Germany/Hanser, 2002), The Powers of Philology (University of Illinois Press, 2003; German translation, 2003), and The Production of Presence (Stanford University Press, 2004; German/Spanish translations forthcoming), and In Praise of Athletic Beauty (forthcoming).

Gumbrecht is a regular contributor to the Humanities-section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, NZZ (Zürich), and the Folha de São Paulo. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and has recently been named Professeur attaché au Collège de France. He is currently a Visiting Professor at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa.

Akhil Gupta

Akhil Gupta is Associate Professor of Cultural and Social Anthropology at Stanford University. He is the author of Postcolonial Developments: Agriculture in the Making of Modern India (Duke Univ. Press, 1998), Caste and Outcast (with Gordon Chang and Purnima Mankekar; Stanford Univ. Press, 2002); Culture, Power, Place (with Jim Ferguson; Duke Univ. Press, 1997); and Anthropological Locations (with Jim Ferguson; Univ. of California Press, 1997). He is currently writing a book on the developmental state in India and editing The Anthropology of the State (with Aradhana Sharma; Blackwell, 2005).

Dan Hausman

Dan Hausman was born in Chicago in 1947 and grew up in the Chicago suburbs. After graduating from Harvard in 1969, where he studied biochemistry and then English history and literature, he taught public school in New York City and received a Master of Arts in Teaching degree from New York University. He then did a second BA in philosophy at Cambridge University before receiving his Ph.D. from Columbia in 1978. His dissertation (later published as Capital, Profits and Prices) addressed questions in philosophy of science raised by economics, and a large portion of his research has focused on economic methodology. Partly as a result of editing the journal Economics and Philosophy (from 1984-1994, jointly with Michael McPherson), he has also worked on issues concerning ethics and economics and foundational questions concerning the nature of rationality. His interest in economic methodology has also led to a long and continuing research interest concerning the nature of causation. He is the Herbert A. Simon Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin.

Title of Talk: Rational Choice Theory and Consequentialism

David M. Kreps, Theodore J. Kreps Professor of Economics

Appointed to the Theodore J. Kreps Professorship in Economics at the Graduate School of Business in 2003, Professor David Kreps currently serves as the Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs. He is an economic theorist of international reputation whose concerns dynamic choice behavior and economic contexts where dynamic choices are key. He has contributed to the literatures of axiomatic choice theory, financial markets, dynamic games, bounded rationality, and human resource management.

Professor Kreps is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Econometric Society. In 1989, he was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal by the American Economic Association.

Alan Liu

Alan Liu is professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and author of Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information (Chicago, 2004), Wordsworth: The Sense of History (Stanford, 1989), and essays on literary theory, cultural studies, information culture, and romanticism. He is the creator of Voice of the Shuttle: Web Site for Humanities Research and director of the NEH funded project, Transcriptions: Literary History and the Culture of Information. He is also a member of the Board of Directors of the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) and chair of the Technology/Software Committee of the ELO's PAD Initiative (Preservation /Archiving/ Dissemination of Electronic Literature).

Title of Talk: Rational Choice and the Contemporary Problem of Creativity

Paisley Livingston

Paisley Livingston (BA Stanford, PhD Johns Hopkins) is Professor of Philosophy at Lingnan University, Hong Kong, and Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Copenhagen. His books include Ingmar Bergman and the Rituals of Art (Cornell UP), Literary Knowledge (Cornell UP), Models of Desire (Johns Hopkins UP), Literature and Rationality (Cambridge UP), and Art and Intention (Oxford UP, forthcoming). With Berys Gaut he edited The Creation of Art (Cambridge UP). He has published papers on a range of topics in philosophy and literature, aesthetics, and cinema studies.

Title of Talk: Rationality and Creativity in the Arts

Colleen Lye

Colleen Lye is associate professor of English at UC Berkeley. Her research and teaching involve the study of race and historical materialism. Her book America's Asia: Racial Form and American Literature, 1893-1945 (Princeton University Press, 2004) traces the relationship between racial construction and social redress in early twentieth century U.S. culture. Currently she is working on a new project on problems of historicism in ethnic literary history. She serves on the editorial boards of Inter-Asia Cultural Studies and Representations.

Hazel Markus

Hazel Rose Markus has been a professor of psychology at Stanford University since1994. Previously, she was a faculty member in the Department of Psychology at the University of Michigan and also a research scientist at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. Her research focuses on the role of the self in regulating behavior and on the ways in which the self is shaped by the social world. She has written on self-schemas, possible selves, the influence of the self on the perception of others, and on the constructive role of the self in adult development. Her most recent work is in the area of cultural psychology and explores the interdependence between psychological structures and processes and sociocultural environments. She received her B.A. from California State University at San Diego and her Ph. D. from the University of Michigan. She is a fellow of the American Psychological Society and the American Psychological Association. She was also a member of the MacArthur Research Network on Successful Midlife Development. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1994 and was named the Davis-Brack Professor in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. In 2002 she received the Donald T. Campbell award for contributions to social psychology. She currently serves as the Director of Stanford's Research Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. Recently she has co-edited a book entitled Engaging Cultural Differences: The Multicultural Challenge in Liberal Democracies and is the author of papers on the influence of sociocultural contexts on self, competence, choice, and well-being.

Julie Nelson

Julie A. Nelson is currently a Senior Research Associate with the Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University, Massachusetts. She received her Ph.D. degree in Economics from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1986 and began her career at the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Since then, she has held several posts including Associate Professor of Economics at the University of California-Davis and at Brandeis University, Visiting Associate Professor of Women's Studies at Harvard University, and Fellow at the Center for the Study of Values in Public Life at Harvard Divinity School.

Nelson's major research interest is in the ethical and epistemological ramifications of feminist theory for economics. Nelson is the author of Feminism, Objectivity, and Economics (Routledge, 1996), and co-editor of Beyond Economic Man: Feminist Theory and Economics (University of Chicago Press, 1993) and Feminist Economics Today: Beyond Economic Man (University of Chicago Press, 2003). Her writings on feminist theory and economics, and on the empirical study of household behavior, have appeared in many leading journals in economics (including Econometrica, American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, and Journal of Economic Perspectives), as well as in journals and edited volumes related to women's studies, philosophy, and sociology.

Title of Talk: Rationality and Humanity: A View from Feminist Economics

Muriel Niederle

I studied mathematics in Vienna, before finishing my PH.D at Harvard in 2002. Since then I have been assistant professor at Stanford (www.stanford.edu/~niederle). My first line of research is on gender differences in economic environments, specifically in performance under competition. I use experiments to examine whether women are as prone to compete and opt for competitive as men. In my second line of research, matching (and market design), I focus on the organization of entry level labor markets. A fair number of those use a centralized matching system, such as the NRMP, which organizes the market of medical residencies and some fellowships in the US.

Title of Talk: Performing in Tournaments and Choosing Hard Tasks: Gender Differences

David Palumbo-Liu

David Palumbo-Liu is professor of comparative literature and director of the program in Modern Thought and Literature at Stanford University, David Palumbo-Liu's fields of interest include social and cultural criticism, literary theory and criticism, East Asian and Asia Pacific American studies. He has published widely in each of these areas, including four books and numerous articles that have been translated into Chinese, German, French and Portuguese. His current project addresses the role of contemporary humanistic literature with regard to economistic and market discourse. He has been a fellow of the American Council of Learned Socities, the Social Science Research Council, Kyoto University, and the Research Institute for Humanistic Study (Jimbun kagaku kenskyosho) in Japan. He is on the editorial boards of positions: east asia culture critique, and The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, and the former chair of the Editorial Board of Stanford University Press.

His publications include The Poetics of Appropriation: the literary theory and practice of Huang Tingjian (1045-1105); The Ethnic Canon: Histories, Institutions, Interventions; Streams of Cultural Capital: Transnational Cultural Studies; and Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier, as well as numerous book chapters and articles in journals such as Poetics Today; diacritics; differences: a journal of feminist cultural studies; New Literary History; Cultural Critique; Public Culture, and others.

Sarah Richardson

Sarah Richardson is a PhD student in the Program in Modern Thought and Literature at Stanford University. Her interests include the philosophical and historical dimensions of twentieth century debates over the social, political, and cultural character of scientific knowledge, critical projects in science studies, and conceptual problems of race, gender, and sexuality in biology and the biomedical sciences.

Debra Satz

Debra Satz is Associate Professor of Philosophy and, by courtesy, of Political Science at Stanford University. She is also Director of the interdisciplinary program in Ethics in Society. She teaches courses in ethics, social and political philosophy, and philosophy of the social sciences. Within these fields, her research has focused on the ethical limits of markets, theories of rational choice, democratic theory, feminist philosophy, and issues of international justice. Her articles have appeared in Ethics, Philosophy and Public Affairs, the Journal of Philosophy and the World Bank Economic Review.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities and Director of the Center for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University, teaches English and the Politics of Culture. She was educated at the University of Calcutta, and came to Cornell University in 1961 to finish doctoral work. Her books are Myself Must I Remake (1974), In Other Worlds (1987), The Post-Colonial Critic (1988), Outside in the Teaching Machine (1993), A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999), and Death of a Discipline (2003). Red Thread is in press. She has translated Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology (1976) and Mahasweta Devi's Imaginary Maps (1994), Breast Stories (1997), Old Women (1999), and Chotti Munda and his Arrow (2002). She is active in the International Women's Movement, the struggle for ecological justice, and rural literacy. Her influence has been felt in Art and Architecture, Law and Political Science, in curatorial practices here and abroad. Her work has been translated into many languages. Her focus has remained education in the Humanities as the best lasting weapon to combat imperialism.

Title of Talk: Speaking for the Humanities

Peter Stone

Peter Stone is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. His areas of interest include theories of justice, democratic theory, rational choice theory, and the philosophy of the social sciences. He is currently conducting research on lotteries as a means of achieving distributive justice.

Sylvia Yanagisako

Sylvia Yanagisako is Professor of Cultural and Social Anthropology at Stanford University. Her most recent book, Producing Culture and Capital: Family Firms in Italy (Princeton University Press, 2002) traces the processes through which the gendered sentiments and desires of the members of Italian capitalist families incite and shape the Italian silk industry. In addition to numerous articles and essays in scholarly journals, Professor Yanagisako has published Transforming the Past: Kinship and Tradition among Japanese Americans (1985) and co-edited two volumes on kinship and gender theory-- Gender and Kinship: Essays Toward a Unified Analysis (1987) and Naturalizing Power: Essays in Feminist Cultural Analysis (1995). She is currently engaged in ethnographic research on the cultural production of transnational capitalism between Italians and Chinese in textile and garment manufacturing in Shanghai, China. She chaired the Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology from 1998-2001 and the Program in Feminist Studies from 1988-1991, and she has served as president of the Society for Cultural Anthropology.