Learn more about the Laidlaw Leadership and Research Program for undergraduates, tips for connecting with faculty research mentors, and advice for writing a successful application.

Laidlaw promotes ethical leadership and international research around the world—starting with the passionate leaders and learners found on campuses like Cornell.

Open to first- and second-year students, the two-year program provides generous support to carry out internationally focused research, develop leadership skills, engage with community projects overseas, and become part of a global network of like-minded scholars from more than a dozen universities.

Register for the information session here.

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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.

Learn more about the migration studies minor and international relations minor—offered by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies. Both minors are open to all Cornell undergraduates and include courses from across the university.

With a focus on global migration experiences, the migration studies minor prepares students to understand the historical and contemporary contexts and factors that drive international migration.

The international relations minor offers students the chance to study the politics, economics, history, languages, and cultures of the world.

Register here.

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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.

Artistic freedom is a fundamental democratic right.

Creative expression, from poetry to street art, theater, and literature, is often at the vanguard of political resistance and change, and so artists are some of the first to be silenced. In this panel, speakers discuss their own experiences as artists in authoritarian contexts where their ability to produce art was violently suppressed.

These artists have all found haven at Cornell. Their art speaks to the trauma of authoritarianism and the hope for change.

Speakers:

Sharifa “Elja” Sharifi, Afghan visiting scholar and 2022–23 Artist Protection Fund Fellow at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art

Pedro X. Molina, Nicaraguan political cartoonist and visiting critic with the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies

Khadija Monis '24, Afghan student, poet and artist

Rachel Beatty Riedl (moderator), director of the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies and John S. Knight Professor of International Studies

The event is sponsored by the Johnson Museum and Global Cornell as part of the university’s theme this year on The Indispensable Condition: Freedom of Expression at Cornell. The event will be held in person and livestreamed.

Presentation and workshop with Jon Solomon (Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3), moderated by Gavin Walker (Cornell University), around Prof. Solomon’s new book The Taiwan Consensus and the Ethos of Area Studies in Pax Americana: Spectral Transitions (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), prefaced by Naoki Sakai (Cornell University).

This book constitutes a timely intervention into debates over the status of Taiwan, at a moment when discussions of democracy and autocracy, imperialism and agency, unipolarity and multipolarity, dominate the intellectual agenda of the day. Pursuing a parallel trajectory that is both epistemic and historical, and that is traced out in relation both to Taiwan’s recent history and to the disparate forms of knowledge production about that history, this work engages in scholarly debates about some of the burning issues of our time, including transitional justice, hegemony and conspiracy in the digital age, debt regimes, cultural difference, national language, and the traumatic legacies of war, colonialism, anticommunism, antiblackness, and neoliberalism. Providing trenchant analyses of the fundamental bipolarity that persists amidst both unipolar and multipolar conceptions of the world schema inherited from the colonial-imperial modernity, this book will be of interest to scholars in many fields, including translation studies, postcolonial studies, Marxism studies, trauma studies, media studies, poststructural theory, gender studies, cold war studies, area studies, and American studies, black studies, among others.

Recommended and pre-circulated readings are Naoki Sakai’s preface & Chapters 4, 5, 6, and 8 of the book.

Sponsored by the Department of Comparative Literature. A mini-reception will follow the talk. The event is free and open to the public, no registration is required.

Jon Solomon is a professor in the Department of Chinese Literature at Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3 and a researcher attached to the Centre de Recherches Plurilingues et Multidisciplinaires, Université Paris Nanterre. His publications have focused on the biopolitics of translation, developing a critique of the disciplinary divisions of the Humanities in their relation to the economic and political divisions of the postcolonial world. His recent works include a book in Chinese about the 2019 Hong Kong anti-ELAB movement, A Genealogy of Defeat of the Left: Translation, Transition, and Bordering in the anti-ELAB Movement in Hong Kong (Tonsan, 2022), Knowledge Production and Epistemic Decolonization at the End of Pax Americana (Routledge, 2024), which he co-edited with Naoki Sakai and Peter Button; and many articles in English, such as “Logistical Species and Translational Process: A Critique of the Colonial-Imperial Modernity” in the Montreal-based journal Intermédialités; “Wynter is Coming: Black Communism, Translation, and Technics” in the Haus der Kulturen der Welt Catalogue.

Gavin Walker is Professor of Comparative Literature at Cornell University. Prior to coming to Cornell, he taught for 11 years at McGill University in Montréal, Québec. His research and teaching focuses on contemporary theory in its intersections with global intellectual history, continental philosophy and world literature, politics and aesthetics. He is the author of The Sublime Perversion of Capital (Duke, 2016) and Marx et la politique du dehors (Lux Éditeur, 2022), the editor of The End of Area: Biopolitics, Geopolitics, History (Duke, 2019, with Naoki Sakai), The Red Years: Theory, Politics, and Aesthetics in the Japanese ’68 (Verso, 2020), Foucault’s Late Politics, a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly (Duke, Fall 2022), and ‘Ronsō’ no buntai (Hōsei University Press, 2023, with Yutaka Nagahara) as well as editor and translator of Kojin Karatani’s Marx: Towards the Centre of Possibility (Verso, 2020). His new book, The Rarity of Politics: Passages from Structure to Subject is forthcoming from Verso next year.

Yanjie Huang , Chinese Studies, National University of Singapore

Cornell Contemporary Lecture Series

This talk discusses the rise of the Communist wartime monetary regime in post-1945 Manchuria (Dongbei). From the Sino-Japanese to the Korean War, the Chinese Communists were under constant pressure to balance wartime spending and inflations. Through a series of institutional innovations, Communist financiers such as Xue Muqiao and Chen Yun established a new monetary system suited to permanent military mobilization by backing the official currency with a basket of essential commodities and adapting the monetary-trade system to geopolitical situations. The Dongbei experience was especially critical since it marked the transition of the Communist monetary system from a wartime currency system of military mobilization to a peacetime system under a planned economy. Based on archival collections, surveys, and memoirs, this study examines how the Communist regime successfully exploited the institutional legacies of Japanese imperialism and the geopolitics of the early Cold War to secure a sound monetary basis in the decisive struggle against the KMT in post-1945 Manchuria.

China: The Central State and All Under Heaven is the theme of this semester's CCCI lecture series directed by Professor Yue (Mara) Du, History, Cornell. At the core of the “China Dream” and China’s rise in power on the global stage is the Chinese Communist Party’s proclaimed role in the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese Nation”—a restoration of China’s historical glory and its rightful place as a “Central State” of “All under Heaven.” To achieve this goal, China’s current leader Xi Jinping requires the party “not to forget the original intention,” which could be interpreted as either a return to Marxist-Leninist fundamentalism, to Mao’s integration of “Marx” and Legalism of China's first imperial dynasty, to Republican ethnonationalism, or to state Confucianism combined with territorial expansion in imperial China. As China’s past looms large in its present, understanding the historical relationship between the "Central State" and "All under Heaven" is critical for our analysis of China’s economy, society, politics, and international engagement at the present and in the future.

The Cornell Contemporary China Initiative lecture series is co-sponsored by The Levinson China and Asia-Pacific Studies Program, Cornell Society for the Humanities, and the Department of History.

Anna Bugaeva, Institute of Arts and Sciences, Tokyo University of Science

This talk will be introduced by John Whitman, Linguistics.

In historical times, Ainu, the only non-Japonic language of Japan and a lone witness of earlier cultures in Japan, was spoken by the people inhabiting the northernmost Japanese island of Hokkaido, the southern part of Sakhalin Island, and the Kuril Islands. Traditionally, the Ainu were hunter-gatherers who eventually faced the modern colonial expansion of Japan and Russia. This expansion ultimately led to the loss of their language in the early 21st century. In 2008, the Japanese government finally recognized the Ainu people as an indigenous ethnic group. Subsequently, in 2019, the Act on Promoting Measures to Realize a Society in Which the Pride of the Ainu People is Respected was enacted to ban discrimination against the Ainu and to provide grants for culture and language-related projects. Japan has taken longer than many other countries to acknowledge the contributions of its indigenous minorities to the nation and to recognize their linguistic and cultural aspirations. This talk will discuss the significance, within a Japanese context, of the legal recognition of Ainu as an indigenous language.

We are pleased to host Haun Saussy, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago to present the text-reading, "Kang Youwei's Roman Diaries (1904)" for this Classical Chinese Colloquium.

Professor Saussy's primary teaching and research interests include classical Chinese poetry and commentary, literary theory, comparative study of oral traditions, problems of translation, pre-twentieth-century media history, and ethnography and ethics of medical care.

To view Professor Saussy's CV, click here.

To view Professor Saussy's personal website, click here.

To see Professor Saussy's Google Scholar page, click here.

The Cornell Classical Chinese Colloquium (CCCC) 古文品讀 is a reading group for scholars interested in premodern Sinographic text (古文). The group meets monthly during the semester to explore a variety of classical Chinese texts and styles. Other premodern texts linked to classical Chinese in Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese have been explored. Presentations include works from the earliest times to the 20th century. Workshop sessions are led by local, national, and international scholars.

Participants with any level of classical Chinese experience are welcome to attend.

At each session, a presenter guides the group in a reading of a classical Chinese text. Attendees discuss historical, literary, linguistic, and other aspects of the text, working together to resolve difficulties in comprehension and translation.

No preparation is required; all texts will be distributed at the meeting.Contact eap-guwen@cornell.edu for more information and subscribe to CCCC news for updates about events. Please make sure to send your subscription request from the email address at which you wish to receive CCCC updates.

Cornell faculty hosts are TJ Hinrichs, History, and Suyoung Son, Asian Studies.

The East Asia Program is honored to have Haun Saussy, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago give this year's Hu Shih Distinguished Lecture: "Exile As Formative Experience in Classical Chinese Poetry."

The “myth of loyalty and dissent” (as Laurence Schneider put it) surrounding the figure of Qu Yuan has structured a great many self-representations by cast-off officials. But when poets banished to the margins of the empire adopt Qu Yuan as a source of style and allusion, the result is, often enough, a gain in descriptive and evocative power. By calling the experience of exile “formative” in the cases of Xie Lingyun 謝靈運, Shen Quanqi 沈全期, Song Zhiwen 宋之問, and Su Shi 蘇軾, I aim to put biography in second place. What occupies the foreground is rather the fashioning of transpersonal roles and attitudes that could be adopted by later poets— replicating the author-function that had made Qu Yuan such a powerful reference.

The East Asia Program's 2023-2024 Annual Hu Shih Distinguished Lecture is co-sponsored by the Departments of Asian Studies, History, and the Cornell Society for the Humanities.

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Professor Saussy's primary teaching and research interests include classical Chinese poetry and commentary, literary theory, comparative study of oral traditions, problems of translation, pre-twentieth-century media history, and ethnography and ethics of medical care.

To view Professor Saussy's CV, click here.

To view Professor Saussy's personal website, click here.

To see Professor Saussy's Google Scholar page, click here.

In 2014 on the 100th anniversary of Hu Shih's graduation from Cornell, EAP initiated an annual distinguished lecture in honor of the philosopher and statesman, Hu Shih. Leading scholars of Chinese and East Asian studies are invited to speak on critical issues in their field of research. These lectures are archived as a resource for the Cornell community and beyond. Hu Shih Distinguished Lecture videos and programs are permanently archived in the Cornell eCommons archive.

Learn about Hu Shih here.

Hundreds of thousands of ethnic minority children have been seized by the Chinese government, detained, and beaten if they speak their native language, according to numerous human rights groups.

These reported violations of children’s rights will be explored in a symposium entitled “Uyghur Children in China’s Genocide” on Fri., Oct. 27, from 1-5 p.m. in Goldwin Smith Hall, room 76. The symposium will be hybrid; register in advance for the livestream.

As organizer Magnus Fiskesjö explains, the children’s parents and grandparents are Uyghur and Kazakh ethnic minority people who are detained separately, in “re-education” camps, forced labor, or prisons. Their children are put into a children's Gulag of "boarding schools" and "orphanages," currently estimated to hold up to 1 million children. Family separations and boarding schools are soon to expand to all ethnic children, he says.

“By way of brutal punishments and even sibling separation, children are forced to permanently forget their language and culture -- thus, the plan is clearly an intentional component of genocide as per the U.N. Convention -- in ways similar to the horrific 'Indian schools’ of the US and Canada’s past,” said Fiskesjö, associate professor of anthropology in the College of Arts and Sciences. “Meanwhile, the rest of society is held in terror; international media is barred, and a campaign to intimidate and silence witnesses around the world, is also ongoing.”

The symposium will explore:

what is happening to children victimized by family separation, who are forcibly cut off from family, siblings, language, and culturewhy is the Chinese government doing thiswhat is the nature of the deep traumas the children endurehow can these wounds be remedied, if the genocide is halted tomorrowExperts, activists, and witnesses, including Uyghurs, will give presentations on these issues, including the experiences of “Indian schools” in the US and Canada. The panelists include:

Rukiye Turdush, independent scholar from East TurkistanZumret Dawut, camp survivor from East Turkistan, with her familyAdrian Zenz, Victims of Communism Museum and Memorial FoundationMagnus Fiskesjö, associate professor of anthropology (A&S)Jeffrey Palmer (Kiowa), associate professor of performing and media arts (A&S)Amy Bombay (Anishinaabe from Rainy River First Nations), Department of Psychiatry, Dalhousie University, CanadaSymposium Schedule:

1:00-1:15 p.m. Opening Remarks: Uyghur Children in China’s Genocide–context and Urgency by Magnus Fiskesjö, Anthropology, Cornell

1:15-1:30 p.m. State of Our Knowledge on the Chinese Family Separation and Child Indoctrination Policies by Adrian Zenz, Victims of Communism Museum and Memorial Foundation (12-minute pre-recording)

1:30-1:45 p.m. Indoctrination of Uyghur Children as part of the Genocide by Rukiye Turdush, an independent scholar from East Turkistan

1:45-2:45 p.m. Uyghur Experiences of Chinese Schooling by Zumret Dawut and family

2:45-3:00 p.m. Q&A moderated by Ruslan Yusupov, Fellow, Society for the Humanities at Cornell

3:00 p.m. Coffee/tea break

3:30-4:00 p.m. The Experience of Indian Schools in the USA by Jeffrey Palmer, Kiowa First Nations, Performing and Media Arts, Cornell

4:00-4:30 p.m. Trauma and Resilience: The Intergenerational Effects of Government Policies of Forced Assimilation and Child Removal by Amy Bombay, Anishinaabe from Rainy River First Nations, Department of Psychiatry, Dalhousie University, Canada

4:30-5:00 p.m. Q&A moderated by Allen Carlson, Government, Cornell

The symposium is sponsored by the East Asia Program, part of the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies. Cosponsors include the Reppy Program in Peace and Conflict Studies; Comparative Muslim Societies Program; American Indian and Indigenous Studies (CALS); Institute of Politics and Global Affairs (Brooks School); as well as the Institute for Comparative Modernities; Society for the Humanities; the Departments of Anthropology, Asian Studies, Sociology and Government; and the Program in Feminist, Gender & Sexuality Studies, in the College of Arts and Sciences.

The Cornell Classical Chinese Colloquium welcomes Xin Wen, Department of East Asian Studies, Princeton to lead this month's text-reading.

For much of China’s early and medieval imperial history, including the Zhou, the Qin, the Han, the Sui, and the Tang dynasties, Chang’an and the surrounding area served as the capital of the Chinese empire. The study of Chang’an is often siloed along these dynastic lines, with scholars on medieval China focusing on the Sui-Tang city, while early China specialists worked on the Han city and pre-Han sites. But historically, these two clusters of constructions were not unrelated, but were physically adjacent to each other: The northern wall of the Sui-Tang city was only about 700 meters south of the southern wall of the Han city. As a result, many Han dynasty and pre-Han sites were close to, or even within, the walled city of Chang’an in the Tang. In this meeting of the Cornell Classical Chinese Colloquium, I share two stories where Tang people examined and interacted with old tombs in Chang’an. These encounters betray an attitude toward the past that was primarily not antiquarian, but exorcistic. The ways Tang people argued about, verified, and refuted the identities of the ghosts believed to haunt ancient tombs also reveal a unique epistemology where archaeological excavation and textual analysis—tools available to modern historians—were combined with necromantic knowledge produced by sorcerers or gained through nocturnal and dream encounters in order to acquire an accurate understanding of the past. This past was neither dead nor past, but often lethally alive in Tang Chang’an.

The Cornell Classical Chinese Colloquium (CCCC) 古文品讀 is a reading group for scholars interested in premodern Sinographic text (古文). The group meets monthly during the semester to explore a variety of classical Chinese texts and styles. Other premodern texts linked to classical Chinese in Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese have been explored. Presentations include works from the earliest times to the 20th century. Workshop sessions are led by local, national, and international scholars.

Participants with any level of classical Chinese experience are welcome to attend.

At each session, a presenter guides the group in a reading of a classical Chinese text. Attendees discuss historical, literary, linguistic, and other aspects of the text, working together to resolve difficulties in comprehension and translation.

No preparation is required; all texts will be distributed at the meeting.Contact eap-guwen@cornell.edu for more information and subscribe to CCCC news for updates about events. Please make sure to send your subscription request from the email address at which you wish to receive CCCC updates.

Cornell faculty hosts are TJ Hinrichs, History, and Suyoung Son, Asian Studies.