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Featured Speakers:

Iván Duque Former President of Colombia (2018-2022) Colombia
Heather Henyon Founding Partner Mindshift Capital, UAE
Andrew Karolyi Charles Field Knight Dean and Harold Bierman Jr Distinguished Professor of Management Cornell SC Johnson College of Business, USA
Mark Mobius Founding Partner Mobius Capital Partners, UAE
Juan Pablo Ortega Co-founder and CEO Yuno, Puerto Rico
Shaanti Shamdasani CEO & Founder S. ASEAN International Advocacy & Consultancy - SAIAC, Indonesia
Vera Songwe Chair and Founder Liquidity and Sustainability Facility, Africa
Marcos Troyjo Transformational Leadership Fellow University of Oxford
Edward Tse Founder and Chairman Gao Feng Advisory Company, China

The Cornell Emerging Market Institute Conference is the United States’ leading annual forum for discussing the ongoing trends and phenomena in our world’s rapidly growing emerging markets. Bringing together heads of the world’s largest multilateral institutions and preeminent business, the conference fosters engaging discussions on economic development and this year, specifically, through the lens of global supply chains.

The Conference is hosted at Cornell’s landmark Cornell Tech campus on Roosevelt Island in New York City and will feature a variety of key-note speakers, thought-provoking panel discussions, networking sessions, and two sponsored competitions: the Cornell EMI Mark Mobius Pitch Competition and the Cornell EMI Corning Case Competition. The Conference also marks the launch of the Institute’s Annual Report, a collection of research and articles from the past year developed by researchers within Cornell as well as the Emerging Multinationals Research Network in collaboration with OECD Development Center, UNCTAD, IFC, and Inter-American Development Bank.

This year’s conference is centered around the compelling theme Risks and Realignments:

Emerging markets are in flux—no longer the future, already central to the present. And yet Capital is flowing as if there is doubt, with new partnerships dawning, old questions lingering. The EMI Conference straddles the crossroads, here to capture a seminal moment, when crises — even the specters of financial contagion — may not have to threaten us, so much as invite us to think anew. This Conference reaffirms our commitment to building bridges, as risks spill over, as potential realignments draw closer. The conference will hold 4 panels, the Cañizares Award ceremony, and the competition finals:

Central Bank Digital Currencies: Looking Back and Looking ForwardReorganizing investments in Emerging MarketsRealignments: Multilaterals and Sovereign Wealth FundsLaunch of the EMI Report 2023Cornell EMI Corning Case CompetitionCornell EMI Mark Mobius Pitch CompetitionJoin us.

Cornell University’s Emerging Market Institute is holding its annual conference on November 3rd at Cornell Tech on Roosevelt Island, NYC.

The Emerging Markets Institute holds an Annual Conference every first Friday of November, in which Emerging Markets are brought to the forefront of discussion. Within the conference, EMI also holds the finals of the and the . Stay connected to the EMI Conference website to find more about the speakers and agenda, and follow our newsletter.

Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Talitha Espiritu, (Associate Professor of Film and New Media, Wheaton College), who will discuss the myth-making of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos’ conjugal dictatorship in the Philippines.

This Gatty Lecture will take place at the Rockefeller Hall 374. Lunch will be served, and this event is co-sponsored by the Department of Performing and Media Arts. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

About the Talk

My talk will explore the sartorial in the myth-making of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos’ conjugal dictatorship in the Philippines (1965-1986). I will focus on fashion designer Christian Espiritu, Imelda Marcos’ chief couturier, who created her iconic image dressed in the Philippine terno, the traditional women’s formal wear, which she wore in all her state visits and state events. I will reconstruct and unpack the elevation of the terno into a state sign and the creative input of fashion designers in the public culture and cultural policy of the dictatorship.

About the Speaker

Talitha Espiritu teaches in the Film and New Media department at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts, where she also co-chairs the college’s Diversity, Equity and Access Leadership Team. Her book, Passionate Revolutions: the Media and the Rise and Fall of the Marcos Regime is available from Ohio University Press. Recent publications include a round table article on the 2022 Philippine elections for Contemporary Southeast Asia and she was recently interviewed about the Marcos regime on NPR’s Throughline podcast series.

Nonproliferation and Disarmament Today, A Nuclear Reckoning

Building on renewed awareness of nuclear dangers arising from Christopher Nolan's epic film, the presentation assesses the status of the international nonproliferation regime and the increased risk of the use of nuclear weapons arising from Russia's war of aggression in Ukraine. The nonproliferation regime has been relatively successful in preventing the cascade of nuclear weapons development that some feared early in the atomic age, although significant proliferation dangers remain. Russian threats of nuclear weapons use and the risk of catastrophe at the Zaporizhzhia atomic station recently prompted the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists to move the hands of its iconic clock closer to midnight than at any time since Oppenheimer and his colleagues created these weapons 78 years ago. The talk explores strategies for containing proliferation dangers and renewing the impetus for nuclear arms reduction and disarmament.

About the Speaker

David Cortright is professor emeritus of the practice at the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. Previously, Cortright was the director of policy studies at the Keough School’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and director of the institute’s Peace Accords Matrix project, the largest existing collection of implementation data on intrastate peace agreements.

Cortright has written widely about nonviolent social change, nuclear disarmament, and the use of multilateral sanctions and incentives as tools of international peacemaking. He has provided research services to the foreign ministries of Canada, Denmark, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Switzerland, and has served as a consultant or advisor to agencies of the United Nations, the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict, the International Peace Academy, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Host

Judith Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies

Pu Wang, Professor of Chinese, Russian and Asian Languages and Literature, at Brandeis University, traces the outburst of the writing of long poems by mainland Chinese poets since the turn of the century. These longer experimental texts, together with the debates revolving around them, have formed a key yet controversial intervention into contemporary cultural-political changes in China and beyond.

Pu Wang is an Associate Professor of Chinese and Chair of the Comparative Literature Program at Brandeis University. He is the author of The Translatability of Revolution: Guo Moruo and Twentieth-Century Chinese Culture (2018). He is also an acclaimed poet writing in Chinese, having published two books of verse. He translated Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life into Chinese.

Introduced by Kevin Dong, PhD Asian Studies graduate student; co-hosted by the EAP Graduate Student Steering Committee

Please note: this event will not be recorded and is solely in-person unless special access is required due to accessibility needs.

The Lingua Mater competition invites students and alumni to translate Cornell's Alma Mater into a different language and submit a video of the performed translation. The inaugural Lingua Mater alumni competition took place in 2018 as part of Cornell's Global Grand Challenges Symposium. The top videos received cash prizes.

2023 competition details

Can you translate Cornell’s Alma Mater into your mother tongue (or a language you are learning/have learned at Cornell) and sing it? We invite you to translate “Far Above Cayuga’s Waters” and submit a video of you (and your friends!) performing it, wherever you may be!

Translations do not need to be exact or perfectly in meter but should capture the feel and tune of our university’s Alma Mater. As is customary, include the first verse, refrain, second verse, and refrain in your video submission (for guidance, listen to a performance and read the lyrics).

Video submissions need to be MP4 files at 1920 x 1080 (1080p), in landscape mode with an aspect ratio of 16:9. Please ensure that you have copyright permission for any images/videos you use.

Entries will be reviewed by a panel of judges. Submissions will be judged equally on the translation, the musical quality, and the creativity in visual presentation.

The top three student entries will win cash prizes, the top alumni entry will receive financial support and Cornell swag for a local alumni event.

Winners will be announced during International Education Week (November 13-17, 2023), and the top video will be posted online that week. For alumni, be sure to subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay in the know of this competition and international alumni activities.

Student entries may be submitted by any registered Cornell student or group of students.
Alumni entries may be submitted by any Cornell alumni groups outside of the United States and Canada.

Submission deadline: Thursday, November 9, 2023

SUBMIT YOUR VIDEO AND LYRICS HERE

Please contact Angelika Kraemer, Director of the Language Resource Center, if you have any questions.

The Lingua Mater competition is co-sponsored by the Language Resource Center, the Office of the Vice Provost for International Affairs, and the Office of International Alumni Relations.

Three-day conference: Friday, October 27 to Sunday, October 29.

South Asia is an empirical microcosm of the ecological and epistemological upending caused by climate change. Forming a quarter of the world's population and inhabiting tremendous cultural and geographic diversity, South Asia provides a unique case study for examining the challenges of climate change on diverse cultural forms. Climate change has indelibly altered landscapes and people, from Bangladeshi river deltas to Nepali mountaintops to Pakistani deserts to Indian megalopolises to Maldivian islands.

This conference thus asks: How is climate change rendered in visual arts, cinema, literature, and architecture in South Asia? How do projects of cultural expression render visibility to place-based narratives in South Asia? A humanistic approach to climate change entails developing modes of attention to a world yet to come. Centering the human imagination in the scientized field of climate change engenders a view of environmental variation over time that highlights the flexibility, resilience, and persistence of human life and its relation to the nonhuman worlds. Such a perspective links meaning and materiality, ingenuity, imagination, literature and livelihoods, subsistence, and stories.

The full conference schedule is now available.

Supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Central New York Humanities Corridor. Cosponsored by the Johnson Museum of Art and its Stoikov Asian Art Lecture Fund.

Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Nina Baker Capistrano, (Consulting Curator and Special Projects Consultant, Ayala Museum, Philippines), who will discuss reinscribing P’u-tuan (Butuan) in the metanarrative of Early Southeast Asia.

This Gatty Lecture will take place at the Rockefeller Hall 374. Lunch will be served, and this event is co-sponsored by the Department of History of Art, and by the Cornell Institute for Archaeology and Material Science. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

About the Talk

Maps delineate the imagined contours of history and empire. Exclusion from cartographic representations thus marginalizes, blurs, and erases narratives and geographies. This paper attempts to recover and reinscribe the enigmatic polity of P’u-tuan (Butuan) on northeastern Mindanao, Philippines, in the metanarrative of Early Southeast Asia. The arrival of trade missions from P’u-tuan at the Chinese imperial court in the 11th century is documented in the Song Shih (Song History) compiled in 1345 from earlier sources. The early polity’s existence is confirmed as well by archaeological excavations conducted by the National Museum of the Philippines since the 1970s. Archaeologists suggest the existence of a port settlement actively engaged in maritime trade between the 10th-13th centuries at the mouth of the Agusan River near Butuan Bay. The archaeological record further suggests that commercial activities ceased and the settlement declined after the 13th century. The purported decline and ‘mysterious disappearance’ of Butuan is disputed in part by a glorious description of the king of Butuan in the 16th century written by Italian chronicler Antonio Pigafetta, who accompanied Ferdinand Magellan in the Spanish expedition that arrived in the Philippines in 1521. This paper re-examines early accounts, documents, and related concepts in light of material evidence from Butuan and neighboring cultures to gain insight into early interregional connectivities.

About the Speaker

Florina H. Capistrano-Baker received the PhD, MPhil, and MA from the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University. She was formerly museum director of the Ayala Museum (Philippines) where she is currently consulting curator and special projects consultant. Since 2000, her research has focused on Philippine specificities within a metanarrative of global exchange between the 10th-13th and 16th-19th centuries. Her book Philippine Ancestral Gold (Ayala Foundation and NUS Press, 2011) documents previously unpublished material suggesting early trade with neighbors in the Indian Ocean and South China Sea. In 2015 she co-curated the exhibition “Philippine Gold: Treasures of Forgotten Kingdoms” at the Asia Society Museum in New York and authored the exhibition catalogue of the same title (Ayala Foundation and Asia Society, 2015). She is co-editor of the volume Transpacific Engagements: Trade, Translation, and Visual Culture of Entangled Empires, 1565-1898 (Ayala Foundation with the Getty Research Institute and Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, 2021). Her scholarly work has been supported by grants from Columbia University, Ford Foundation, Asian Cultural Council, American Association of University Women, Japan Foundation, Locsin Foundation, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Getty Research Institute.

Mitchell A. Orenstein, Professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, will discuss how Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022 changed Europe. It shattered any remaining illusions that the EU could achieve peaceful coexistence with Russia through greater integration and united Europe instead around NATO. While Europe quickly reshaped its energy strategy and imposed unified sanctions on Russia, the invasion revealed Europe's continuing reliance on the United States for basic security and initiated a period of soul searching about Europe's lack of "strategic autonomy." Central and East European states that had long warned of Russia's violent intentions rose in importance, while France and Germany saw their influence diminished after decades of accommodating Russia. European leaders had to admit that they had been wrong to ignore the warnings of front-line states. In addition, the invasion reignited European Union and NATO enlargement, with Finland and Sweden joining NATO and Ukraine and Moldova offered EU candidate status. The result of these trends is a more geopolitical Europe with a sharper dividing line between an internal zone of integration and an external zone of power projection.

About the speaker

Dr. Mitchell Orenstein is Professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and Senior Fellow at Foreign Policy Research Institute. His sole-authored and co-authored works on the political economy and international affairs of Central and Eastern Europe have won numerous prizes. His most recent book, Taking Stock of Shock (Oxford University Press, 2021), co-authored with Prof. Kristen Ghodsee, evaluates the social consequences of the 1989 revolutions that ended communism in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Orenstein is also the author of The Lands in Between: Russia vs. The West and the New Politics of Hybrid War (Oxford University Press, 2019), a study of how intensifying geopolitical conflict has shaped politics in the lands in between Russia and the West.

Cohosts

Institute for European Studies
Judith Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies

Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Van Nguyen Marshall, (Associate Professor of History at Trent University), who will discuss associational life in South Vietnam, 1954-1975.

This Gatty Lecture will take place at the Rockefeller Hall 374. Lunch will be served. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

About the Talk

In Between War and the State, Van Nguyen-Marshall examines an array of voluntary activities, including mutual-help, professional, charitable, community development, student, women's, and rights organizations active in South Vietnam from 1954 to 1975. By bringing focus to the public lives of South Vietnamese people, Between War and the State challenges persistent stereotypes of South Vietnam as a place without society or agency. Such robust associational life underscores how an active civil society survived despite difficulties imposed by the war, government restrictions, economic hardship, and external political forces. These competing political forces, which included the United States, Western aid agencies, and Vietnamese communist agents, created a highly competitive arena wherein the South Vietnamese state did not have a monopoly on persuasive or coercive power. To maintain its influence, the state sometimes needed to accommodate groups and limit its use of violence. Civil society participants in South Vietnam leveraged their social connections, made alliances, appealed to the domestic and international public, and used street protests to voice their concerns, secure their interests, and carry out their activities.

About the Speaker

Van Nguyen-Marshall is Associate Professor in the Department of History at Trent University with particular research interests in Modern Vietnamese History, focusing on associational life, civil society, and the Vietnam War. She is the author of In Search of Moral Authority: The Discourse on Poverty, Poor Relief, and Charity in French Colonial Vietnam (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2008) and the recently published Between War and the State: Vietnamese Voluntary Association in South Vietnam (1954-1975) (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2023).

Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Van Nguyen Marshall, (Associate Professor of History, Trent University), who will discuss the public lives of South Vietnamese people, Between War and the State.

This Gatty Lecture will take place at the Rockefeller Hall 374. Lunch will be served. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

About the Talk

In Between War and the State, Van Nguyen-Marshall examines an array of voluntary activities, including mutual-help, professional, charitable, community development, student, women's, and rights organizations active in South Vietnam from 1954 to 1975. By bringing focus to the public lives of South Vietnamese people, Between War and the State challenges persistent stereotypes of South Vietnam as a place without society or agency. Such robust associational life underscores how an active civil society survived despite difficulties imposed by the war, government restrictions, economic hardship, and external political forces. These competing political forces, which included the United States, Western aid agencies, and Vietnamese communist agents, created a highly competitive arena wherein the South Vietnamese state did not have a monopoly on persuasive or coercive power. To maintain its influence, the state sometimes needed to accommodate groups and limit its use of violence. Civil society participants in South Vietnam leveraged their social connections, made alliances, appealed to the domestic and international public, and used street protests to voice their concerns, secure their interests, and carry out their activities.

About the Speaker

Van Nguyen-Marshall is Associate Professor in the Department of History at Trent University with particular research interests in Modern Vietnamese History, focusing on associational life, civil society, and the Vietnam War. She is the author of In Search of Moral Authority: The Discourse on Poverty, Poor Relief, and Charity in French Colonial Vietnam (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2008) and the recently published Between War and the State: Vietnamese Voluntary Association in South Vietnam (1954-1975) (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2023).