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.

Talk by Nomaan Hasan (Anthropology, Cornell University)

What role can a religion have for those outside its fold? Against a political landscape that frames Islam as an insular and adversarial presence, this talk follows a Muslim civic organization in India as it seeks to establish Islam as an ethical resource across religious boundaries. By tracking the group’s shift away from attempts at sermonic reform toward ordinary practices of volunteering and charity, the talk examines how organizers negotiate majoritarian governance to carve a social space for Islam that extends beyond Muslim identity. Although prevailing scholarship generally considers efforts to render religious traditions publicly accessible as unwittingly complicit with secular dominance, I argue that this critique misses their potential to extend an ethos beyond its usual territory.

Nomaan Hasan is a Klarman Postdoctoral Fellow in the College of Arts & Sciences at Cornell University. His current book project seeks to develop conceptual resources for living with difference at a moment when cultural particularity is mobilized by exclusionary political projects. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in India, it explores the ideological and aesthetic strategies through which ordinary citizens confront the rise of post-liberal populism. This research has been supported by grants from the Charlotte W. Newcombe Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, the Center for Islam in the Contemporary World, and the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. His writing has appeared in Anthropology and Humanism, Political and Legal Anthropology Review, and South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies.

Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Christina Firpo, Professor of History at California Polytechnic State University.

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

Abstract

Forthcoming

About the Speaker

Christina Firpo is professor of Southeast Asian history at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo. She is the author of The Uprooted: Race, Imperialism, and Childhood in Indochina 1890-1980 (University of Hawaii Press, 2016); Black Market Business: Selling Sex in Northern Vietnam 1920-1940 (Cornell University Press, 2020); and Beauty and the Nation: Women, Culture, and the National Image in Interwar Vietnam (Columbia University Press, 2026).

Gatty Lecture Series

*Please note this Gatty Lecture takes place on Friday, not Thursday*

Join us for a talk by Micah R. Fisher, Assistant Professor, Matsunaga Institute for Peace and Conflict Resolution, School of Communication & Information at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa

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

Abstract

This presentation draws together critical agrarian studies and the geopolitics of knowledge production to examine how inheritance remains unsettled, both for those who inherit land in Southeast Asia and for those who inherit the work of studying it. The talk unfolds in three parts. The first establishes a conceptual foundation grounded in village-level land politics, bringing foundational theories of property, access, and exclusion into conversation with one another. The second draws on a decade of editorial experience with the journal Forest and Society, reflecting on efforts to decenter academic publishing and elevate a new generation of scholarship from the region. The third looks toward a future for area studies built on regional networks, using joint field schools as a model. This model has functioned as a mechanism for institutional parity with Southeast Asian universities, while also working to build equitable partnerships with local communities. I conclude with a framework for rethinking resource governance and collaborative pedagogy together in the study of contemporary Southeast Asia.

About the Speaker

Micah R. Fisher, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor at the Matsunaga Institute for Peace & Conflict Resolution at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, and Senior Researcher with the Forest and Society Research Group at Hasanuddin University in Makassar, Indonesia. He studies how land, forests, and livelihoods are transformed across Indonesia and Southeast Asia through commodity booms, conservation policy, and shifting resource claims. This research is grounded in over two decades of long-term fieldwork in South Sulawesi, East Kalimantan, and Jakarta. He is co-Editor-in-Chief of Forest and Society, a leading journal in Southeast Asian forest governance, and serves as Conference Chair of the 2027 Biennial of the International Association for the Study of the Commons, to be hosted in Sulawesi, Indonesia. He also leads the Henry Luce Foundation–funded LuceSEA Transitions Field Schools, a partnership with Southeast Asian universities. He holds a Ph.D. in Geography and the Environment from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. His current book project, Inheritance, traces the aftermath of the first formal return of state forest lands to an Indigenous community in Indonesia.

Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Doreen Lee, Professor of Anthropology, Director of Global Asian Studies, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Northeastern University.

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

Abstract

Forthcoming

About the Speaker

Doreen Lee is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Northeastern University. She studies cities, politics, and popular culture in Indonesia. Her publications include "Activist Archives: Youth Culture and the Political Past in Indonesia" (Duke 2016), and the forthcoming book "The Urban Grotesque: Life and Debt in Jakarta" (Duke 2026). Currently she is researching land use and forms of vacancy in Jakarta.

Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Mary-Collier Wilks, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.

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

Abstract

Forthcoming

About the Speaker

Mary-Collier Wilks is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Her research examines gender, foreign aid, international development, and global health in Cambodia.