Go global in summer 2025! Global Internships give you valuable international work experience in fields spanning global development, climate and sustainability, international relations, communication, business, governance, and more.

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The Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies hosts info sessions for graduate and for undergraduate students to learn more about funding opportunities, international travel, research, and internships. View the full calendar of fall semester sessions.

Undergraduate Global Scholars are student leaders in the campus community. This competitive fellowship program is open to students from all colleges and majors with a passion for big global questions and speaking across differences. The Global Scholars program provides a toolkit of resources for weighing challenging questions and builds your practical skills in public debates. For the 2024-2025 school year, Scholars will bring their skills as writers, scholars, activists and artists, poets, hands-on practitioners, and more to study and promote democracy building. By the end of the program, you'll be an active global citizen and champion for social impact.

Applications are due Friday, September 20.

Can’t attend? Contact programs@einaudi.cornell.edu.

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The Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies hosts info sessions for graduate and for undergraduate students to learn more about funding opportunities, international travel, research, and internships. View the full calendar of fall semester sessions.

Speaker: Laura T. Murphy, Policy Advisor, Department of Homeland Security and Professor of Human Rights, Sheffield Hallam University

Laura Murphy will discuss the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, the landmark forced labor legislation that prohibits goods made in the Uyghur Region of China from import into the United States, including the effects of the law after two years of implementation. She will discuss the methods researchers use to uncover forced labor in China and the critical importance of that work to government efforts to prevent forced labor-made goods from entering the US. She will also discuss the government’s collaborations with industry and civil society to effect meaningful change for workers and protect the rights of people globally.

Bio: Laura T. Murphy, Ph.D. is Policy Advisor to Under Secretary Robert Silvers in the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Policy. Her role in the Office of Policy is to advise on forced labor, in particular on the implementation and enforcement of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act. She is Professor of Human Rights and Contemporary Slavery at Sheffield Hallam University in the U.K. Her recent academic work focused on researching forced labor in the Uyghur Region of China and identifying risk of forced-labor-made goods in international supply chains. She has worked internationally on forms of forced labor and human trafficking, including in West Africa, India, the United States, and Canada. She is author of numerous academic books and articles on the issue of forced labor globally.

Introduced by faculty host, Magnus Fiskesjö (Anthropology).

Cosponsored by the Department of Asian Studies, Contemporary Muslim Societies Program, Critical Ottoman and Post-Ottoman Studies Program, the Department of Global Labor and Work (ILR), and the Global Labor Institute, Government, as well as the Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies.

International Fair showcases Cornell's global opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students. Explore the fair and find out about international majors and minors, language study, study abroad, funding opportunities, global internships, Cornell Global Hubs, and more.

The International Fair is sponsored by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies and Office of Global Learning (both part of Global Cornell) in partnership with the Language Resource Center.

Register on CampusGroups to receive a reminder. Registration is not required.

Talk by Kathryn Babayan (History, University of Michigan)

This talk spotlights a rant ascribed to a woman from the Bakhtiari tribal group of Lurs living in the vicinity of Isfahan in southwestern Iran. The letter is undated. It finds its way to Isfahan as a collector’s item recorded in several late seventeenth-century anthologies. The vernacular language deployed in the letter ascribed to a Bakhtiari woman uses sexual insults to publicize the infidelity of her husband. I will read this rant to project the female voice otherwise excluded from epistolary collections of seventeenth century anthologies.

Kathryn Babayan (History, University of Michigan) is a social and cultural historian of the early-modern Persianate world with a particular focus on gender studies, and the history of sexuality. Babayan is the author of two award-winning books: The City as Anthology: Urbanity and Eroticism in Early Modern Isfahan (SUP, 2021) and Mystics, Monarchs and Messiahs: Cultural Landscapes of Early Modern Iran (Harvard University Press, 2003). She has also co-authored Slaves of the Shah: New Elites of Safavi Iran, with Sussan Babaie, Ina Baghdiantz-McCabe, and Massumeh Farhad (I.B. Tauris, 2004), and co-edited two books Islamicate Sexualities: Translations Across Temporal Geographies of Desire with Afsaneh Najmabadi (Harvard University Press, 2008), and An Armenian Mediterranean: Words and Worlds in Motion with Michael Pifer (Palgarve Macmillan, 2018).

Lunch provided, please RSVP

Cosponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography at Rare Book School, the Department of History, the Department of Near Eastern Studies, the South Asia Program, and the Comparative Muslim Societies Program.

Governments engage in transnational repression when they reach across borders to silence dissidents living abroad. Tactics for transnational repression include assassinations, abductions, threats, and direct action against dissidents’ families and friends living within the repressive government’s territory.

This panel will focus on this global phenomenon and its local consequences for students and faculty members at Cornell, U.S. campuses more broadly, and other communities around the world. It will include the voices of dissidents affected by transnational repression as well as scholars and experts working in the field.

This is a panel discussion following the April 24 documentary In Search of My Sister screening. The film chronicles Rushan Abbas's relentless pursuit of truth and justice.

About the Panelists
Rachel Denber, Deputy Director of the Europe and Central Asia Division, specializes in countries of the former Soviet Union. Previously, Denber directed Human Rights Watch's Moscow office and did field research and advocacy in Russia, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Estonia, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. She has authored reports on various human rights issues throughout the region. Denber earned a bachelor's degree in international relations from Rutgers University and a master's in political science from Columbia University, where she studied at the Harriman Institute. She speaks Russian and French.

Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet, Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History, Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet is a prominent scholar of Iranian and Middle Eastern history. Her research addresses issues of national and cultural formation and gender concerns in Iran, as well as historical relations between the U.S., Iran, and the Islamic world. She is the author of highly influential works, including Frontier Fictions: Shaping the Iranian Nation, 1804-1946, which analyzed land and border disputes between Iran and its neighboring countries. These debates were pivotal to national development and cultural production and have significantly informed the territorial disputes in the region today. Conceiving Citizens: Women and the Politics of Motherhood in Iran, a wide-ranging study of the politics of health, reproduction and maternalism in Iran from the mid-19th century to the modern-day Islamic Republic.

Rushan Abbas, founder and executive director of Campaign for Uyghurs. Rushan Abbas’s activism started in the mid-1980s as a student at Xinjiang University, co-organizing pro-democracy demonstrations in Urumchi in 1985 and 1988. Since she arrived in the United States in 1989, Ms. Abbas has been an ardent campaigner for the human rights of the Uyghur people. Ms. Abbas is the founder and executive director of Campaign for Uyghurs (CFU) and became one of the most prominent Uyghur voices in international activism for Uyghurs following her sister’s detainment by the Chinese government in 2018. Ms. Abbas has spearheaded numerous campaigns, including the “One Voice One Step” movement, which culminated in a simultaneous demonstration in 14 countries and 18 cities on March 15, 2018, to protest China’s detention of millions of Uyghurs in concentration camps.

Sean Roberts is an Associate Professor in the Practice of International Affairs and Director of the International Development Studies (IDS) MA program at The George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs. He received his MA in Visual Anthropology (2001) and his PhD in Cultural Anthropology (2003) from the University of Southern California. While completing his Ph.D. and following graduation, he worked for 7 years for the United States Agency for International Development in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, managing democracy, governance, and human rights programs in the five Central Asian Republics. He also taught for two years as a Post-Doctoral Fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Europe, Eurasian, and Russian Studies before coming to the Elliott School in 2008. Academically, he has written extensively on the Uyghur people of China and Central Asia, about whom he wrote his dissertation, and his 2020 book The War on the Uyghurs (Princeton University Press).

About the Moderator
Rebecca Slayton, Director of the Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies, is an associate professor of science and technology studies in the College of Arts and Sciences. Her research and teaching examine the relationships among risk, governance, and expertise, focusing on international security and cooperation since World War II. Her first book, Arguments that Count: Physics, Computing, and Missile Defense, 1949-2012 (MIT Press, 2013), shows how the rise of a new field of expertise in computing reshaped public policies and perceptions about the risks of missile defense in the United States. Her second book project, Shadowing Cybersecurity, examines the emergence of cybersecurity expertise through the interplay of innovation and repair. Slayton is also working on a third project that examines tensions intrinsic to creating a “smart” electrical power grid—i.e., a more sustainable, reliable, and secure grid.

Host
Judith Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies