Stern Speaks at Harvard Symposium on Aggression
Jessica Stern, Research Professor at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, spoke at a March 1, 2019 symposium hosted by the Mind Brain Behavior Interfaculty Initiative at Harvard University.
The symposium, entitled “Hatred And Aggression: An MBB Perspective,” focused on both inter-personal and inter-group forms of aggression. Participants heard from researchers studying regional brain activity, social psychology, and foreign relations, to better understand the structures of hatred and aggression, the paths to these emotions in the brain, their manifestations in behavior, and how they interact with larger social forces.
Stern’s talk, entitled “My War Criminal, Dr. Radovan Karadzic,” focused on her interview with Radovan Karadzic, President of the Serb entity inside Bosnia who was indicted for genocide and other crimes. Stern spoke about what it was like to interview Karadzic between 2014 and 2016, both before and after he was found guilty.
Stern has held fellowships awarded by the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Erik Erikson Institute, and the MacArthur Foundation. She was a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow, a National Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and a Fellow of the World Economic Forum. Stern taught as a Lecturer at Harvard University from 1999-2015. Prior to joining the Harvard faculty, she worked in government, serving on President Clinton’s National Security Council Staff and as an analyst at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Stern has nearly completed her training as an Advanced Academic Candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Psychoanalysis. Learn more about her here.