Invitation-only Seminar at

The Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology (RCAST) Open Laboratory for Emergence Strategies (ROLES), the University of Tokyo in cooperation with Keio Center for Strategy (KCS)

 

 

 

 

"Analysis and Remodeling of 'Western' Logic" Study Group” at the ROLES of the University of Tokyo will host a closed-door seminar on geopolitics and intelligence history on 1 October 2025. We invite leading historians Professor Brendan Simms, Professor Jonathan Haslam and Dr. Karina Urbach at Komaba, Tokyo.

 

Date:            1 October, Wednesday, 2025, 14:00-17:30

Venue:          RCAST Building 3, M2 Floor, Seminar Room 1

Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology (RCAST), the University of Tokyo 

4-6-1 Komaba, Meguro-ku, Tokyo 153-8904 JAPAN

 

Access Map to RCAST of the University of Tokyo

Google Map location of the venue Building 3
https://maps.app.goo.gl/DhL8NiAw3F34GCf77

 

14:10-15:10

Speakers:

Professor Brendan Simms (the University of Cambridge), "Revisiting Towards A Westphalia for the Middle East"

Reference：
https://www.hurstpublishers.com/book/towards-a-westphalia-for-the-middle-east/ 

Professor Satoshi Ikeuchi (the University of Tokyo, ROLES), "Towards A Khaldunian Moment in the Middle East?”

 

15:30-17:30

Speakers

Karina Urbach (historian/novelist), "The Third Man: Cold war intelligence operations in Vienna."

Reference:
https://www.amazon.co.jp/gp/video/detail/amzn1.dv.gti.8eb93781-ee2b-56d9-53d2-0f17b7e95095?autoplay=0&ref_=atv_cf_strg_wb

 

Jonathan Haslam (the University of Cambridge), “The Significance of the Cambridge Five (spies)
Reference:
https://www.amazon.co.jp/Near-Distant-Neighbours-History-Intelligence/dp/0198708491

 

 

Brendan Simms is the founder and Director of the Centre for Geopolitics. He works on European geopolitics, past and present, and his principal interests are the German Question, Britain and Europe, Hitler’s global anti-semitism, Humanitarian Intervention and state construction. He teaches at both undergraduate and graduate level in the Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS); he also supervises history undergraduates at Peterhouse, Cambridge. His MPhil courses on the History of European Geopolitics use scenarios as part of the teaching and learning process. He has supervised PhD dissertations on subjects as diverse as Intervention and State Sovereignty in the Holy Roman Empire, Sinn Fein, the American colonists and the eighteenth-century European state system, the Office of the UN High Representative in Bosnia, and German Civil-Military relations. Professor Simms is a frequent contributor to print and broadsheet media. 

 

Dr Karina Urbach is a German/British historian and novelist who lives in Cambridge, England.  She has taught here and in Germany. From 2015-20 she researched at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study. She is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Historical Research at London University. Karina has worked on numerous BBC, PBS and ZDF documentaries. Her non-fiction work includes Go-Betweens for Hitler, Queen Victoria and Alice’s Book: How the Nazis stole my grandmother’s cookbook, which has been translated into six languages and turned into an award-winning TV documentary. Her first novel Cambridge 5: Zeit der Verräter won the 2018 Crime Cologne Award.

 

Jonathan Haslam was the George F. Kennan Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study from 2015 to 2021. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and Professor Emeritus in the History of International Relations at Cambridge University. Haslam is the author of a biography of a celebrated and controversial public intellectual and historian of Soviet Russia, E.H. Carr. His most recent book is Hubris: The Origins of Russia’s War Against Ukraine (London: Head of Zeus, 2024).  He is now completing a history of the Cambridge Five based on new archival findings in Russia as well as the latest releases of MI5 material from the UK national archives. 

 

Contact:

Hiroyuki Kobayashi (Project Researcher of RCAST, University of Tokyo) 

Yuichi Hosoya (Study Group Leader, ROLES/ Professor, Keio University)