Talk by Courtney Murdock (Entomology, Cornell University)

Mosquito-borne diseases remain one of the world’s most pressing public health challenges yet predicting where and when outbreaks will occur is becoming increasingly difficult as our climate and cities change. In India, rapid urban growth, rising temperatures, shifting rainfall patterns, and more frequent heat waves are transforming the environments where mosquitoes and the diseases they carry thrive. While malaria has declined dramatically in many Indian cities thanks to sustained public health efforts, dengue has continued to increase, raising important questions about how climate, urbanization, and mosquito control interact to shape disease risk. Our research brings together ecologists, epidemiologists, climate scientists, mathematicians, economists, and public health practitioners from the United States and India to better understand these changing risks. We are investigating how local climate conditions, human movement, and the built environment, particularly construction sites where migrant workers often live, and mosquitoes can persist year-round, contribute to the spread of malaria in rapidly growing cities. By combining field observations with climate data and mathematical models, we aim to identify where mosquitoes are most likely to survive and where disease transmission is most likely to occur before outbreaks begin. Working closely with municipal health departments and national partners, we are developing practical tools that can help guide mosquito surveillance and control of the places and times where they will have the greatest impact. Ultimately, this work will support India’s malaria elimination goals while providing a framework for protecting rapidly urbanizing communities around the world from mosquito-borne diseases in a changing climate.

Courtney C. Murdock is currently an associate professor in the Department of Entomology at Cornell University (2020-present). She received a B.S. in Biology and a minor in Spanish literature at the University of Michigan (1997-2001). She then went on to pursue a PhD in disease ecology at the School of Natural Resources and Program in the Environment at the University of Michigan (2002-2009). Murdock was a post-doc in the Departments of Biology and Entomology at Pennsylvania State University (2009-2014), after which she joined the University of Georgia as an assistant professor in the Department of Infectious Diseases and the Odum School of Ecology (2015-2020). A consistent theme of Murdock’s research program has been the application of ecological and evolutionary theory to inform our understanding of mosquito-borne disease transmission, as well as our disease management strategies. Research conducted in Murdock’s group spans multiple scales of ecological organization (from within host processes up to population and community-level dynamics) involving a combination of experiments in the lab and under semi-field conditions, as well as descriptive field studies and mathematical modeling to provide insight into relative mechanisms driving mosquito-borne disease transmission and control in the field.

Do you need to travel internationally for your graduate research or fieldwork?

The Einaudi Center sponsors international travel for individual Cornell graduate students. If you’re traveling between the United States and a host country for activities directly related to your dissertation or thesis research, Einaudi can help you get there. See full details here.

Register here. Can’t attend? Contact travelgrants@einaudi.cornell.edu to learn 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.

Talk by Anaar Desai-Stephens (Music, CUNY)

In this talk, I explore how Bollywood songs have become a powerful medium for dreaming, striving, and self-making in twenty-first-century India. Once dismissed as escapist fantasy, Bollywood’s emotionally charged songs now serve as tools for self-transformation in what has been dubbed “Aspirational India.” Drawing on more than two years of fieldwork in Mumbai, I trace how upcoming singers, amateur students, teachers, and Bollywood producers use Bollywood songs to perform what I call “dreamwork”: the musical and discursive work of promoting, imagining, and striving for desired selves and futures. Across playback singing schools, reality television shows, and the broader music industry, filmi singing is a site of both imaginative potential and precarity, promising social mobility while reinscribing inequalities of caste, class, and gender. Rather than dismissing my interlocutors’ aspirational dreams, however, I argue that we must take their musical dream work seriously in order to understand the cultural dynamics of emerging neoliberal economies. Through the lens of dreamwork, I theorize the efficacy of musical practice as a tool for shaping subjectivity while outlining a political economy of the imagination in relation to musical practice.

Anaar Desai-Stephens is Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology at the CUNY Graduate Center, having previously served as a faculty member at the Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester. Her research focuses on popular, media economies, and aspirational subjectivity in India and her first monograph, Voicing Aspiration: Bollywood Songs and Dreamwork in Contemporary India, will be published with Wesleyan University Press (Fall 2026). Her work has appeared in Twentieth Century Music; Culture, Theory, Critique; and The Routledge Handbook of South Asian Cinema, amongst others. Current research projects focus on the intersection of whiteness, gender and sexuality in the Bollywood culture industry, and how doulas and midwives listen in New York state. Anaar is trained as a violinist and vocalist across a range of genres.