Recent U.S. military actions in Venezuela—including strikes on civilian boats, the seizure of oil tankers, and the abduction of President Nicolas Maduro—have raised questions about U.S. ambitions in Latin America and their implications for peace and international order. This panel brings together five prominent experts on Venezuelan history and politics, with the aim of deepening understanding of Venezuelan perspectives on recent events and their broader implications.

How are Venezuela’s political parties responding to shifting U.S. foreign policies? What are the likely effects of recent military actions on prospects for peace and stability in Venezuela and Latin America? Can the U.S. play a meaningful and legitimate role in helping Venezuelans restore democratic governance, and if so what policies might contribute to that goal?

Panelists

Irina Troconis, Professor, Cornell University (moderator)David Smilde, Professor, Tulane UniversityVeronica Zubillaga, Professor, Universidad Simón Bolívar, Caracas; Visiting Scholar, University of Illinois, ChicagoMargarita López Maya, Professor, Universidad Central de Venezuela
Register

Register here to join the virtual conversation.

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Event Hosts

This virtual event is hosted by the Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies and cosponsored by the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program. Both are part of the Einaudi Center for International Studies.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine, political radicalization, the crisis of the US, the rise of China - these are global shocks that define our current moment. But in Europe, it is commonly said, they have a particular meaning. Not only are they close at hand. They signify a particular type of shock, a "pivot in time" as Germany's Chancellor Scholz put it. They signify an awakening. They signify "the return of history". Looking back to the 20th century, I want to explore the recurring theme in European public debate of the "end" and the "return" of history.

About the speaker

Professor Adam Tooze teaches and researches widely in the fields of twentieth-century and contemporary history. From a start in modern German history with a special focus on the history of economics and economic history his interests have widened to take in a range of themes in political, intellectual and military history, across a canvass stretching from Europe across the Atlantic. His most recent book was Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World (2018).

Host and Sponsors

This event is hosted by the Institute for European Studies (IES), part of the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies. The IES Luigi Einaudi Distinguished Lecture is an annual event.

2026 International Interdisciplinary Conference on Myanmar's Borderlands (2026 IICMB)

A virtual conference hosted by the Inya Institute (Yangon), Cornell University's Southeast Asia Program (SEAP), and their Southeast Asia-based partners.

Myanmar’s multilayered crisis is profoundly reshaping the socio-economic and geo-political dynamics of the country’s borderlands—regions that have evolved into spaces of exchange, negotiation, and collaboration across geographical, cultural, and linguistic boundaries. The emergence of these spaces has been uneven, unfolding under stringent administrative control and persistent insecurity and marked by fluctuating intensity and periodic pushback from central authorities. Yet, the potential of borderlands to provide local and trans-local communities and networks with opportunities to shape the country’s future remains tremendous.

The conference’s focus on interconnectedness will highlight how inclusive learning and dialogue, local and trans-local community engagement, and recognition of our interdependence with the natural environment can further strengthen borderland dynamics across all markers. It will broaden the conversation on borderland issues that may only be addressed through the prism of ethnicity or framed as issues specific to group identities. It will also encourage dialogue across communities, inviting them to discuss the challenges they face and the aspirations they hold.

invite scholars and students to submit original research papers and/or panels covering any area of Myanmar borders with China, Laos, Thailand, Bangladesh, and India and addressing any of the following topics:

• borderland dynamics and their local and trans-local communities

• networks and partnerships emerging across ethnic, religious, cultural and linguistic boundaries

• communities, networks, and trade across borders

• natural resources and challenges to environmental protection in borderlands

• legal and illegal border migration

• humanitarian relief to refugees and public health in borderlands

• border regimes and governance

• infrastructure(s) and illicit economies and activities

• non-human mobility in borderlands

• formal and non-formal education in borderlands

• other themes related to Myanmar’s borderlands.

In order to preserve the confidentiality of presenters, the conference program will not be available for circulation beyond the group of conference presenters. Conference presenters will also be expected to follow the Chatham House Rule.

The conference will be held entirely online. Due to the time difference between Myanmar and the U.S., panels will be held in the evening for presenters based in Myanmar, Thailand, and elsewhere in Southeast Asia, and the morning for those located in the U.S.

The Fulbright U.S. Student Program supports U.S. citizens to study, conduct research in any field, or teach English in more than 150 countries. The program is open to graduate students, recent graduates, and young professionals. Undergraduate students who wish to begin the program immediately after graduation are encouraged to start the process in their junior year. Recent graduates are welcome to apply through Cornell.

The Fulbright program at Cornell is administered by the Mario Einaudi Center for International studies. Applicants are supported through all stages of the application and are encouraged to start early by contacting fulbright@einaudi.cornell.edu.

Register for the virtual session.

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

Speaker: Wu Hung, Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor of Art History and the College Chinese Art, University of Chicago

Title: How to Read Chinese Handscroll Paintings

About Cornell Classical Chinese Colloquium
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 also 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.
o 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.
o No preparation is required; all texts will be distributed at the meeting.
o Refreshments will be served.

Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Thuy Linh Nguyen, Associate Professor of History from Mount Saint Mary College.

This Gatty Lecture will take place at The Kahin Center, 640 Stewart Ave. Lunch will be served. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

Abstract
My presentation explores the environmental history of the French introduction and mass planting of exotic timber species, such as Casuarina equisetifolia—commonly known as filao—and eucalyptus, to reforest and stabilize the vast moving sand dunes covering the majority of Vietnam’s 2000-mile coast, highlighting their effects on the coastal environment and indigenous communities. This research questions the colonial stereotype that portrayed coastal sand dunes as empty and barren landscapes devoid of vegetation. In contrast, as my presentation demonstrates, the ecological multiplicity of the dunes offers a new lens for examining various topics, including traditional knowledge, local economies, resources, property, land reclamation, and colonial state power.

About the Speaker
Thuy Linh Nguyen is an Associate Professor of History at Mount Saint Mary College in Newburgh, NY. Dr. Nguyen is a historian of modern Vietnam. A native of Vietnam, she received her PhD in History from the University of Pennsylvania. She is currently working as Associate professor of History at Mount Saint Mary College. Newburgh, NY. Her first book, Childbirth, Maternity and Medical Pluralism in French Colonial Vietnam, 1880–1945 (University of Rochester Press, 2016), examines the interactions between French colonial medicine and Vietnamese childbirth practices and their impact on maternal and infant health care. Her second book, Vietnam’s Coal Frontier: Mining, Environment and Empire (Cambridge University Press, November 2025), explores the environmental, economic, and social history of large-scale coal mining in French colonial Vietnam. She has also published peer-reviewed articles on other topics of modern Vietnamese history.

Why do isolated latent proliferators insist on retaining some of their nuclear capabilities in nonproliferation settlements? Prominent scholarship on nuclear proliferation shows that weak states have used latent nuclear capabilities like uranium enrichment and plutonium reprocessing to draw Western states into negotiations and extract concessions. But when theories of nuclear latency are applied to isolated states like North Korea and Iran, scholars undertheorize those regimes’ political aspirations and black box their demands as generic “rewards” for nuclear restraint. This leads scholars to overlook the credibility deficits of the political commitments that superpowers make in nonproliferation agreements, and to misinterpret the nuclear-latency strategies of isolated regimes seeking to address those credibility challenges. This article analyzes the technopolitical strategies that North Korea and Iran used as they sought to keep Western states engaged and hold them to their commitments. Through a mixture of technical and political analysis, I identify a repertoire of nuclear latency strategies by which both states have sought to simultaneously signal nuclear capability and restraint while retaining nuclear latency in reserve to incentivize future engagement from the West.

About the speaker

Christopher Lawrence is Assistant Professor of Science, Technology and International Affairs in Georgetown University's Walsh School of Foreign Service. He studies the histories of U.S. nonproliferation engagement with North Korea and Iran, as well as the epistemic communities in the West that create knowledge about those countries’ nuclear programs. His academic writing has been published in International Security, Social Studies of Science, Journal of Applied Physics, and IEEE Transactions on Nuclear Science. He has also written policy analysis for various online publications, including Bulletin of Atomic Scientists and War on the Rocks.

Host

Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies, part of the Einaudi Center for International Studies

Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Aurore Candier, Associate Professor of History and Director of the Center for Burma Studies at Northern Illinois University.

This Gatty Lecture will take place at The Kahin Center, 640 Stewart Ave. Lunch will be served. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

Abstract
While living and working in Burma for over twenty years, Aurore Candier conducted research on the evolution of knowledge and concepts among Burmese elites, especially as evolved in their encounters with other cultures in the early and modern periods. Through conceptual history and discourse analysis, Candier has investigated the semantic shifts in Burmese words and concepts through a diachronic corpus made up of texts from different literary genres and traced the progressive changes in the imaginary and thought of the Burmese Buddhist universe. She has explored semantic changes in Burmese concepts and categories of knowledge such as “reform,” “time,” categorizations of “people,” “secular knowledge,” and “astrology.” She has forged an intervention which challenges some of the most basic assumptions of Burmese historiography, especially as conceived of in the classical sense.

About the Speaker
Aurore Candier has been Director of the Center for Burma Studies and Associate Professor of History at Northern Illinois University (USA) since 2024. She is a historian of Burma, where she has conducted research for over two decades, building strong ties with local scholars, students, and artists thanks to her fluency in Burmese. Her work spans pre-colonial Mainland Southeast Asian politics, early 20th-century colonial history, and Burmese intellectual and cultural history. She focuses on the longue durée of ideas and knowledge in Burma and contributes to interdisciplinary projects on astrology and divination in Burmese society.

In this talk, Kira Thurman investigates the rise of Black Europeans in popular music since WWII. After the collapse of European empires, European popular music industries turned to the musical labor of former colonial subjects to reinvent themselves in an increasingly global and English-speaking marketplace. Interpreting many Black European pop stars such as Boney M or Milli Vanilli as Black Americans, however, transatlantic listeners often failed to recognize the musicians performing in front of them as belonging to European history. How, then, do we account for both the overwhelming presence—and discursive absence—of Black Europeans in modern history? This talk seeks to illuminate how musical producers, performers, and their audiences sought to make sense of—and occasionally reject—the category of ‘Black Europe’ in the wake of a newly emerging post-imperial Western Europe.

About the speaker

Kira Thurman is a highly-sought-after and award-winning historian and musicologist. A classically-trained pianist who grew up in Vienna, Austria, Thurman earned her PhD in history from the University of Rochester with a minor field in musicology from the Eastman School of Music. Her research, which has appeared in German Studies Review, the American Historical Review, Journal of the American Musicological Society (JAMS), Opera Quarterly, and Journal of World History, focuses on two topics that occasionally converge: the relationship between music and national identity, and Central Europe's historical and contemporary relationship with the Black diaspora.

Host

The Institute for European Studies, part of the Einaudi Center for International Studies

The Fulbright U.S. Student Program supports U.S. citizens to study, conduct research in any field, or teach English in more than 150 countries. The program is open to graduate students, recent graduates, and young professionals. Undergraduate students who wish to begin the program immediately after graduation are encouraged to start the process in their junior year. Recent graduates are welcome to apply through Cornell.

The Fulbright program at Cornell is administered by the Mario Einaudi Center for International studies. Applicants are supported through all stages of the application and are encouraged to start early by contacting fulbright@einaudi.cornell.edu.

Register for the virtual session.

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