Open up a whole new world by studying abroad!

Cornellians who have studied abroad are sharing their experiences at the Office of Global Learning's study abroad fair. You'll learn about where in the world you can study, what programs work for you and your major, and how study abroad can enhance your college experience.

Join us for international treats! No registration required.

Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by MK Long (PhD Candidate, Cornell University), which explores the rhetorical force of relationships in biographies of Buddhist nuns in Burma.

This Gatty Lecture will take place on Zoom only. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

Participate by Zoom here.

About the Talk

Understandings of Buddhist lay women and monastics in Burma and other Theravada Buddhist cultures are so far mostly informed by ethnographic projects. There is far less insight into the historical contexts and textual forms in and through which Buddhist monastic women, known in Burmese as thilashin, have worked to harness social and material capital to support their livelihoods, their pursuit of educational opportunities, and the establishment, expansion, and maintenance of their residential and educational institutions.

Long responds to these questions by analyzing a 1982 volume of (auto)biographies of the founder and three generations of successors of a Buddhist nunnery established in central Burma in 1905. The volume’s emphasis on its subjects’ gradual accumulation and upkeep of relationships over the life course, and its close attention to the grounds and effects of different forms of relatedness suggests that sociality, rather than autonomy, is vital to the rhetorical self-presentation of thilashin and their models of authority. Historically, this emphasis also indicates the meaningful persistence of highly intimate and localized networks of belonging amidst the state-driven reorganization of Buddhist institutions in Burma in the 1980s. Bringing together feminist and queer theories of kinship and temporality with studies of Buddhist narrative and scriptural interpretation, Long’s analysis shows how thilashin and their biographers participate in the work of Buddhist historiography to recollect and reproduce communities. Tracing the ways generations of thilashin have reimagined models of authority during socially and politically charged moments of transformation, Long's work positions thilashin as theorists of kinship, gratitude, debt, and property as forms of relatedness that engender new political orientations within and beyond the timescape of a Buddhist nation.

About the Speaker

MK Long is a PhD candidate in the Department of Asian Studies at Cornell University. Long's research interests include Buddhism and gender, contemporary Burmese and Pali literature, biography, kinship, and the micropolitics of Buddhist institutions.

Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Phi Hong Su, (Assistant Professor of Sociology, Williams College), who will speak about Vietnamese migrants in Berlin.

This Gatty Lecture will take place at the Kahin Center, but people are also welcome to join us on Zoom. Lunch will be served. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

Participate by Zoom here.

About the Talk

When the Berlin Wall fell, Germany united in a wave of euphoria and solidarity. Also caught in the current were Vietnamese border crossers who had left their homeland after its reunification in 1975. Unwilling to live under socialism, one group resettled in West Berlin as refugees. In the name of socialist solidarity, a second group arrived in East Berlin as contract workers. The Border Within paints a vivid portrait of these disparate Vietnamese migrants' encounters with each other in the post-socialist city of Berlin. Journalists, scholars, and Vietnamese border crossers themselves consider these groups that left their homes under vastly different conditions to be one people, linked by an unquestionable ethnic nationhood. Phi Hong Su's rigorous ethnography unpacks this intuition. In absorbing prose, Su reveals how these Cold War compatriots enact palpable social boundaries in everyday life. This book uncovers how 20th-century state formation and international migration—together, border crossings—generate enduring migrant classifications. In doing so, border crossings fracture shared ethnic, national, and religious identities in powerful ways.

About the Speaker

Phi Hong Su is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Williams College. Previously, she was a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Division of Social Science at New York University Abu Dhabi. She is interested in people on the move, the understandings and convictions they carry with them across borders, and how these transform as folks rebuild home. In her research and teaching, she draws on these threads to think about im/mobilities, intersectional identities, and inequality.

Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Lina Chhun, (Assistant Professor, Department of American Studies, University of Texas at Austin), who will discuss oral histories in Cambodian American communities.

This Gatty Lecture will take place at the Kahin Center, but people are also welcome to join us on Zoom. Lunch will be served. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

Participate by Zoom here.

About the Talk

In 2009, I began the oral history project that would lead to my book. At the time, I conceptualized my project as one of “uprooting the koh tree,” of dispelling silences within my family and those within the Cambodian American community at large. My master’s thesis, entitled “Uprooting the Koh Tree: Silence and Resilience in Cambodian Narratives of Survival,” was an autoethnography of my own memories and experiences growing up as the daughter of genocide survivors. This autoethnography drew from oral history interviews with members of my family to explore what I considered at the time “the cultures of silence among [Cambodian] immigrants and their children.” Through this narrative—what I have come to see as deeply problematic, a reproduction of well-trod progress narratives from silence to disclosure as the basis of liberal subjectivity—the project intended to serve as “a bridge between generations of survivors, largely disconnected” because of these various silences. In the years since the completion of my master’s thesis—a period of over ten years which saw the project through two graduate programs and multiple disciplinary and interdisciplinary spaces—I have come to understand the possible violence of that initial framing. This presentation is one iteration and one working through of the attachments and tensions I’ve encountered and continue to encounter in doing this work on violence at the intersection of the personal, familial, and historical.

About the Speaker

Lina Chhun was born in Khao-I-Dang, a refugee camp on the Thai-Cambodian border and spent most of her life growing up in California’s Central Valley. Professor Chhun studies historical violence, war, and militarism, with a focus on questions of racial disposability in the context of the U.S. Cold War in Southeast Asia. Her first book manuscript, Walking with the Ghost, queries the complex relationship between registers of memory regarding the U.S. Cold War in Southeast Asia and the Cambodian Holocaust of 1975-79, addressing questions of commemoration and mediation—how and why historical violence comes to be registered, understood, and written into the record via such mediums as archives, landscapes, and experiential narratives. The book challenges historical models of “tragedy” and liberal humanitarian discourses of trauma, approaches which disavow the complex humanity of Cambodian subjects and the continually intersubjective ways in which knowledge about violence is produced and reproduced, nationally and across the diaspora.

Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Risa J. Toha, (Assistant Professor of Political Science, Wake Forest University), who will speak about national identity in Singapore.

This Gatty Lecture will take place at the Kahin Center, but people are also welcome to join us on Zoom. Lunch will be served. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

Participate by Zoom here.

About the Talk

Prior works in ethnic politics and political economy have shown that in-group ethnic favoritism can lead to adverse political and social outcomes. Yet, in many of these available studies, ethnic identity could not be easily disentangled from other dimensions of identity, such as religion, class or nationality. Hence, the independent effect of ethnic differences on social cohesion remains unclear. In this paper, we leverage Singapore’s unique demographic composition to measure the extent to which individuals’ ethnicity, national identity, and class influence their altruism towards outgroup members. We conducted a field experiment wherein we mail misdirected envelopes to residents containing vouchers and letters cuing for intended recipients’ ethnicity, class, and nationality, and track their returns as a measure of altruism. We find little evidence of ethnic favoritism in our data. Instead, letter recipients are more likely to return misdirected letters when (i) they perceive that the intended recipients belong to a lower socioeconomic class and (ii) as their education and household income increases. Our results also show moderate effects of national solidarity cutting across ethnic boundaries, wherein Singaporean letter recipients tend to return the letters at a higher rate when the intended recipients are fellow Singaporeans, regardless of their ethnicity and class. We discuss the implications of these findings on ethnic politics, social harmony, and nation-building.

Talk by Juan Fernandez (PhD Candidate, Cornell University)

This talk examines three foundational ideas in the history and anthropology of sex and gender in Southeast Asia in the context of the colonial Philippines: the "high" status of women; the image of the man of prowess; and the concept and practice of gender pluralism.

Drawing from episodes of the ethnographic encounter between the earliest generation of American anthropological field-workers during the first decade of the 20th century and their Indigenous interlocutors, the talk aims to rethink the assumptions behind the axioms of the study of gender and sexuality in the region, as well as tracing their roots in the history of anthropology.

Speaker

Juan Fernandez is a historian of modern Southeast Asia. He received his M.A. from the University of Chicago and his B.A. from the University of the Philippines at Baguio. He has two forthcoming publications: one is a contribution to an edited volume on Indigenous Studies in the Philippines, and the other is an article in the journal Philippine Studies, entitled "'From Savages to Soldiers': The Igorot Body, Militarized Masculinity, and the Logic of Transformation in Dean C. Worcester's Philippine Photographs." He will be joining the faculty of the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin - Madison in Fall 2023 first as an Anna Julia Cooper Postdoctoral Fellow, and subsequently as assistant professor of history in fall 2024.

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This Gatty Lecture will take place in person at the Kahin Center, but people are also welcome to join us on Zoom. Lunch will be served.

Jeremy Ladd

Visiting Assistant Professor, Cornell University

Much research on democratization puts a premium on the importance of opposition political parties in bringing about democratic change, or at least being present at transitional elections to face incumbents. But the very existence of these parties is under-theorized. This article investigates the relationship between the support for opposition parties in hybrid regimes and the activity we would intuitively expect most hybrid regime incumbents to pursue in the face of a vibrant opposition: repression. Appealing to an original "big" dataset on the Cambodia National Rescue Party, this article finds that, surprisingly, the repression of opposition parties in hybrid regimes can actually lead to an increase in the attention they receive from citizens, which these parties can translate into more supporters. In other words, repressing an opposition party can actually increase its support base.

Jeremy researches opposition political parties and movements in electoral authoritarian regimes and emerging democracies. He is particularly interested in explaining why some parties and movements in these contexts are so successful while others are not. He is also interested in how both authoritarians and their opponents are adapting to the digital world. His comparative research is currently focused on Southeast Asia and Russia and the Post-Soviet region. Jeremy’s research on Southeast Asia was recently awarded a Southeast Asia Research Group Fellow award for 2022.

This Gatty lecture will take place at the Kahin Center, but people are also welcome to join us on Zoom.

Lunch will be served.

For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

Talk by David Ludden

The Rohingya survival crisis – in borderlands of Myanmar and Bangladesh -- has disappeared from the headlines, but Rohingyas remain one of the largest stateless populations in the world. Their suffering can be understood as an extreme example of the violence inflicted by national territory around the world. In South Asia, "partition" is the keyword in that violent history: it denotes the forced expulsion of people deemed foreign to the nation and the forced inclusion of people living on land claimed by nations during the demolition of British India. Rohingyas are among the latest and most brutalized victims of this imposition of national state boundaries on mobile imperial spaces during the ongoing global process of decolonization.