Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Brad Simpson from the University of Connecticut, who will discuss Indonesian politics and policies surrounding the New International Economic Order.

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

Abstract

Historians writing about the 1970s movement for a New International Economic Order (NIEO) have focused most of their attention to its most radical proponents and bitter opponents. But Indonesia pursued a ‘middle path’ of moderate advocacy for an NIEO that attempted to accommodate the interests of both wealthy industrialized states like the US and Japan, and developing state members of the G-77 whose radical politics the anticommunist regime in Jakarta often opposed. While many Indonesian officials embraced some elements of the radical analysis of NIEO advocates, most believed that Indonesia’s needs were better served by a modest reform politics than by confrontation with the West.

About the Speaker

Brad Simpson is Professor of History and Asian Studies at the University of Connecticut. He is the author of Economists with Guns: Authoritarian Development and US-Indonesian Relations, 1960-1968 and The First Right: Self-Determination and the Transformation of International Order, 1941-2000 (Oxford, August 2025). He is now working on an international history of Indonesia's engagement with the politics of human rights and developmental during the Suharto era (1966-1998).

Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Chiara Formichi, H. Stanley Krusten Professor of World Religions in the Department of Asian Studies.

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

Abstract

Domestic Nationalism argues that Muslim women in Java and Sumatra, from the late 1910s to the 1950s, were central to Indonesia’s progress as guardians and promoters of health and piety through gendered activities of care work. While sidelined in the Dutch colonial project of hygienic modernity, women’s labor of social reproduction became increasingly visible during the Japanese Occupation and early years of independence. Women from all walks of life were called upon to fulfill domestic and motherly roles for the production and socialization of laborers, soldiers, and citizens.

The medicalization of cleanliness, intersecting with multiple patriarchal orders, marginalized women’s traditional influence and knowledge. However, leveraging the critical importance of infant care, cleanliness, and nutrition, women pushed against the boundaries imposed on them by the colonial and postcolonial state. Largely absent from government archives, their words and acts are evident in vernacular magazines and visual sources drawn from official outreach, news and lifestyle media, and advertisements. Women writers rearticulated scientific mothering, nationalist maternalism, and Islamic ideals of motherhood to create a public voice through gendered care work.

The framework of Domestic Nationalism proposes that as the modern Indonesian nation-state took shape capitalizing on the public function of mothering, so did homemaking become a crossroads of national and international approaches to development, blurring nonaligned self-reliance and global capitalist interests.

About the Speaker

Chiara Formichi is the H. Stanley Krusen Professor of World Religions’ Director of the Religious Studies Program, and Professor in Asian Studies, at Cornell University. She specializes on Islam in Southeast Asia. Her research and publications focus on the intersection of religion and politics in colonial and postcolonial Southeast Asia, and on the relationship between Islamic Studies and Asian Studies. She has published two single-authored books, edited five volumes or special issues, and over 20 journal articles and book chapters. Chiara’s third monograph, Domestic Nationalism: Muslim Women, Health, and Modernity in Indonesia is forthcoming in October with Stanford University Press.

Localizing Surrealism: A Cross-Cultural Study of Modern Taiwanese Poetry

超現實主義的在地化：台灣現代詩的跨文化研究

Speaker:

Cheng-Chung Liu, Professor and Chair, Department of Chinese Literature

National Taiwan University

This lecture will be delivered in Mandarin.

Description:

臺灣日常語言展現出混融的性格，台灣文學創作也充滿跨文化視域。以超現實主義在臺灣詩壇的流衍而言，便有三種路徑可說：一是殖民地時期以日本詩壇為中介 ，通過日文去吸收與創作。相對於歐洲的革命精神與日本的知性思維，殖民地的超現實顯現出一種病弱、壓抑的特殊樣態。二是戰後初期由中國大陸移居臺灣的詩人，主要受到超現實繪畫的啟發，再參考少量的中譯文獻，將視覺經驗轉譯為漢語的創作方法。三是嘗試融貫西方非理性思維與包含禪宗在內的中國傳統詩學，追求純粹經驗，以及化矛盾為和諧的技術。上述三種路徑相互交錯，使得超現實主義以混成的形象再現。

This lecture is sponsored by a grant from the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in New York and co-organized by the East Asia Program and the Department of Asian Studies.

What explains the fact that the humanitarian response in some crises is well funded, while other emergencies are largely neglected? How do recent funding cuts affect the work of humanitarian organizations and the lives of affected people?

This lecture will give an overview of the literature on funding allocations of humanitarian aid, focusing on three groups of factors: humanitarian needs, donor countries’ interests, and media coverage. A recent study will be presented of why donors fund some humanitarian emergencies but neglect others. The study uses a novel statistical approach, relying on an underused dataset and considering funding requirements per emergency. While humanitarian needs and donor interests play a role, the most consistent factor influencing how donors allocate their funding is media coverage.

The lecture will provide an overview of practical ways of overcoming imbalances in funding allocations and delivering aid in more effective ways. Pooled funds like the UN’s Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF) can provide funding more quickly and more strictly based on needs. CERF relies heavily on tools to make funding decisions in a systematic, evidence-based way, and is the biggest financier of anticipatory action globally.

As funding for humanitarian action is being cut, it is more important than ever to ensure the most urgent humanitarian needs of affected people are identified and addressed.

About the speaker

Nicolas Rost is head of programme for the UN’s global humanitarian fund, CERF. At the Central Emergency Response Fund, Nico works on providing humanitarian financing as quickly as possible for new emergencies, for anticipatory and early action, and for neglected and underfunded crises. Previously, he worked on evaluations of humanitarian programmes, on coordinating development programmes in Palestine, humanitarian funds in Somalia, the Central African Republic and Yemen, for the UN’s refugee agency in the Central African Republic and Geneva, and for a German NGO in Madagascar. Nico is also a visiting scientist at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative where his research focuses on early warning signs of humanitarian crises. He holds a Master’s degree in political science from the University of North Texas, and a Master’s and PhD in politics and public administration from the University of Konstanz. He has published a book and, together with his co-authors, articles on anticipating displacement, genocide and civil war, mediation and peacekeeping, in the International Journal of Forecasting, the Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of Peace Research, and other journals. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and their three sons.

Host

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

Co-hosts

Africana Studies and Research Center

Institute for African Development, part of the Einaudi Center for International Studies

The Critical Language Scholarship (CLS) Program provides fully funded immersive summer programs for U.S. undergraduate and graduate students to learn languages of strategic importance to the United States’ national security, economic prosperity, and engagement with the world. Each summer, over 500 American students enrolled at colleges and universities across the United States spend approximately eight weeks studying one of a dozen languages either overseas or virtually. Participants gain the equivalent of one year of language study, as the CLS Program maximizes language and cultural instruction in an intensive environment.

Can't attend? Email programs@einaudi.cornell.edu for more information.

National security discourses have profoundly permeated the film industry in the United States for decades. Through direct and indirect intervention in major film productions, US security institutions (including the Pentagon, DEA, CIA, and FBI) have pushed for what Matthew Alford and Tom Secker call “national security cinema,” with hundreds of films complacent with a transnational militarist agenda promoting state violence in the global south. For this presentation I will analyze the films Sicario (Denis Villeneuve, 2015) and Emilia Pérez (Jacques Audiard, 2024) as symptomatic not only of securitarian propaganda criminalizing racialized populations but also erasing the devasting effects of the US-backed militarized antidrug policy in Mexico. I will ultimately consider the normalization of the militarization and its technopolitical surveillance culture (following the work of scholars Camilla Fojas, Huub Dijstelbloem, and Iván Chaar López) through the “drug wars” narrative at the US-Mexico border region.

Oswaldo Zavala is Professor of contemporary Latin American literature and culture at the College of Staten Island and at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of La modernidad insufrible. Roberto Bolaño en los límites de la literatura latinoamericana contemporánea (2015), Volver a la modernidad. Genealogías de la literatura mexicana de fin de siglo (2017), Drug Cartels Do Not Exist. Narcotrafficking in US and Mexican Culture (2018), and La guerra en las palabras. Una historia intelectual del “narco” (1975-2020) (2022). He co-edited, with Viviane Mahieux, Tierras de nadie: el norte en la narrativa mexicana contemporánea (2012); with José Ramón Ruisánchez, Materias dispuestas: Juan Villoro ante la crítica (2011); and with Magdalena Perkowska, Tiranas ficciones. Poética y política de la escritura en la obra de Horacio Castellanos Moya (2018). He has published more than fifty articles on contemporary Latin American narrative, the U.S.-Mexico border, and the link between violence, culture and late capitalism.

Nuclear issues are forever. Whether dealing with the Cold War nuclear arms race, or the legacy of nuclear testing in the Pacific, nuclear challenges persist for decades. This presentation looks at two case studies in nuclear history. First, exploring the intense nuclear cooperation between the U.S. and Russia that began in the 1990s, only to founder on the rocks of new international realities. In all, 50,000 metric tons of highly enriched uranium, the equivalent of 20,000 nuclear weapons, were taken out of Russian stockpiles before the program ended.

The Cold War also ushered in an age of nuclear testing, including the “Bravo Test,” the most powerful hydrogen bomb tested by the United States. The presentation focuses on “Bravo” and the 66 other tests in the Republic of the Marshall Islands, and the consequences that continue to reverberate.

The presentation highlights some of the Pacific environmental champions who see climate change as existential a threat as the nuclear legacy. Reppy Fellows will recognize the cross currents in diplomacy, conflict, and environment that make today’s global environmental problems so vexing.

Tom Armbruster served as Nuclear Affairs Officer at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow and Ambassador to the Marshall Islands. Insights into these assignments will give anyone considering a career in diplomacy an inside look at the realities, complexities, and opportunities in a Foreign Service career.

About the speaker

As a Foreign Service Officer, Tom served in Helsinki, Finland; Havana, Cuba; Moscow, Russia; Nuevo Laredo, Mexico; Dushanbe, Tajikistan; Vladivostok, Russia; and Majuro, Republic of the Marshall Islands. After retiring as Ambassador to the Marshall Islands (2012-2016) Tom served in senior advisor roles at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations and U.S. Embassy Nuku`alofa, Tonga. He led Inspector General missions to Colombia, Denmark, Chad, Mauritania, Nepal and Bangladesh.

Foreign Service highlights include leading a counternarcotics delegation to Kabul, serving as lead negotiator for a treaty in force with Russia on emergency response, and attending “Cool School,” an arctic survival course while “Polar Affairs Officer.” He is the only American diplomat to travel to the Soviet Union by kayak, paddling with a group of Finns from Helsinki to Tallinn.

Mr. Armbruster holds Masters’ degrees from the Naval War College and St. Mary’s University. He speaks Russian and Spanish. Publications include articles in State Magazine, the Foreign Service Journal, Above and Beyond, Chesapeake Bay and the book How to Become an Ambassador. He lives in Ithaca with his wife Kathy, Marshallese dog “Skipjack” and Russian cat “Vika."

Host

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