Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Juno Salazar Parreñas, Associate Professor of Science and Technology Studies and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Cornell 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

In 1978, the tropical city-state of Singapore received three polar bears, starting a dynasty of polar bears that ended in 2018. Within the lifespan of these tropical polar bears, the entire planet has undergone rapid and exponential growth in economies, human populations, agricultural intensification, deforestation, and the burning and consuming of carbon and chemicals--all indelibly changing the entire planet. Singapore has been a central hub for 20th and 21st century economic development, despite its dearth of natural resources. How might the story of Singapore’s famously cultivated landscape be told from the perspective of wild Canadian-born polar bears held captive in tropical Singapore? What forms of ferality erupted the controlled landscape of Singapore Zoo? This paper is based on ongoing archival and ethnographic research in Singapore, Canada, and the US.

About the Speaker

Juno Salazar Parreñas is an Associate Professor of Science and Technology Studies and Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Cornell University. Her book Decolonizing Extinction: The Work of Care in Orangutan Rehabilitation (Duke UP, 2018) received the Michelle Rosaldo Prize from the Association for Feminist Anthropology and honorable mentions for the Association of Asian Studies' Harry Benda Prize, Society for Medical Anthropology's New Millenia Award, and the American Anthropological Association's Diana Forsythe Prize. She is also the editor of Gender: Animals (Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks, 2017)

Talk by Vidyan Ravinthiran (English, Harvard University)

What overlap is there between political, psychological and philosophical ideas of identity, and what role might poetry play in helping their convergence? Discussing his fusion of life-writing and verse criticism, Asian/Other: Life, Poems, and the Problem of Memoir, and his Forward Prize-winning poetry collection, Avidya—both published last year—Vidyan Ravinthiran considers alternatives to the ego-noise that so thoroughly permeates our cultural discourse, including our rhetorics of empowerment and critique.

Vidyan Ravinthiran is a Professor of English at Harvard University, where his teaching ranges from the Romantic poet John Keats to video game storytelling. He is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Avidya, winner of the 2025 Forward Prize; and several books of literary scholarship, including Elizabeth Bishop’s Prosaic, winner of both the University English Prize and the Warren-Brooks Award for Outstanding Literary Criticism. He co-edited with Shash Trevett and Seni Seneviratne Out of Sri Lanka, the first anthology of both Sri Lankan and diasporic poetry, including works originally written in English, Sinhala and Tamil—named a Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year, as was Worlds Woven Together, a collection of the essays that won him Poetry magazine’s Editors’ Prize for Reviewing. Vidyan’s most recent book is Poetry and Opinion, published this year by Cambridge University Press.

Books will be available for sale and signing, courtesy of Odyssey Bookstore.

The Rabindranath Tagore Lecture Series in Modern Indian Literature is made possible by a gift from the late Cornell Professor Emeritus Narahari Umanath Prabhu and his wife, Sumi Prabhu. Inspired by Rabindranath Tagore’s expansive imagination, unbounded by geopolitical boundaries, the series has regularly featured prominent writers from across South Asia and its diasporas.

I am the Betty Freyhof Johnson ‘44 Professor of Political Science and Associate Provost for
Wellesley in the World. My research and teaching focuses on questions of great power competition
and international order. My latest book, When Right Makes Might: Rising Powers and World Order was
published by Cornell University Press in 2018. Here I examine how a rising power’s legitimation
strategy affects whether a great power confronts or accommodates a potential challenger. If a rising
power can portray its ambitions as legitimate, it can make the case that, far from being a
revolutionary power, its advances will only preserve, and perhaps even protect, the prevailing status
quo, then great power accommodation is likely. In contrast, if a rising power’s claims are
illegitimate—if they are inconsistent with prevailing rules and norms—then great powers will see its
actions as threatening, making containment and confrontation likely.

At Wellesley, I teach a number of courses rooted in this research, including a seminar on great power
competition, a course on “dangerous ideas” and international order, and a course on nuclear politics.
I also enjoy writing for public outlets, and my work has appeared in Foreign Affairs, the New York
Times and the Washington Post.

Outside of Wellesley, I’m an avid fan of hiking, choral singing, all things golden retriever, and
“adventuring” with my family.

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

In 1958, the Office of Naval Research unveiled the Perceptron, the first neural network for artificial intelligence, created by Cornell psychologist Frank Rosenblatt. The Navy expected it to read and write within a year. Nearly seventy years later, the Pentagon is again betting on AI to revolutionize war, while industry leaders promise that recursive self-improvement and superintelligence are just around the corner. Why does the military accept exceptional expectations about AI despite repeated disappointment? Part of the answer is rethinking technology hype. Because we cannot fact-check the future, hype is better understood as performative discourse than as exaggeration. This expectant, dramatic, and imminent discourse can be studied in real time, regardless of whether it proves true. Part of the answer is remembering forgetfulness. Learning supposedly tempers expectations, but forgetting can reset them. I trace AI hype from Dartmouth and DARPA through the Lighthill Report, Strategic Computing, and the Third Offset. I show that hype runs on both hope and fear, and that the exceptional expectations it evokes cycle as technical performance and forgetting interact.

About the speaker

Frank L. Smith III is the director of the Cyber and Innovation Policy Institute (CIPI), part of the Strategic and Operational Research Department in the Center for Naval Warfare Studies at the U.S. Naval War College. Smith was previously a senior lecturer in the Department of Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney. His interdisciplinary research examines the relationship between emerging technology and national security, particularly in cyberspace. He has a Ph.D. in political science and a B.S. in biological chemistry, both from the University of Chicago.

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

Dr. Veronica Anghel works at the intersection of comparative politics and international relations. As an assistant professor at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies she co-directs the European Governance and Politics Programme and leads the ‘Global Risks to the EU’ project. Her current research focuses on the European Union’s geopolitical role in the global order, and European integration and enlargement. She is also a Visiting Professor at the College of Europe and an Associate Editor for the Journal of European Public Policy. She has been awarded the Inaugural ‘Rising Star’ Award of the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) in 2021.

Previously, Anghel was a Lecturer at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, where she taught courses on Risk in International Relations and Economy, and European Politics. She held fellowships at Stanford University (Fulbright), the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the EUI (Max Weber), and the Institute for Human Sciences Vienna (Europe’s Futures Fellow). Her research has been published in, among others, West European Politics, Political Science Quarterly, the Journal of European Public Policy, Political Communication, Foreign Affairs, the European Journal of Political Research. Her book ‘From Club to Commons: Enlargement, Reform and Sustainability in European Integration’ (Cambridge University Press 2025, with Erik Jones) proposes a new theory of European integration. She is the co-editor of Developments in European Politics 3 (Bloomsbury Academic) and sits on the board of the Council for European Studies (CES).

Anghel has practical experience working in international relations and politics from the time she served as a foreign affairs advisor for the Romanian Presidency, covering the country’s relations to NATO and the United States at the time of Russia’s annexation of Crimea. She was selected by the US Department of State to joint its International Visitor Leadership Program and has trained U.S. diplomats on European politics through the Foreign Service Institute.

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

Winner of the 2026 Peter Katzenstein Book Prize, Cornell University

Fiona Cunningham is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. She is also a Faculty Fellow at Perry World House and affiliated with the Center for the Study of Contemporary China and the Christopher H. Browne Center for International Politics at the University of Pennsylvania.

Fiona’s research interests lie the intersection of technology and conflict, with an empirical focus on China. Fiona’s first book Under the Nuclear Shadow: China’s Information-Age Weapons in International Security (Princeton University Press, 2024) examines China’s distinctive approach to the dilemma of coercing an adversary under the shadow of nuclear war, which relies on substitutes for nuclear threats.

Her research has appeared in academic and policy-oriented outlets including International Security, Security Studies, and The Washington Quarterly. She has held fellowships at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University, the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University, and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She has conducted fieldwork at the Renmin University of China, supported by a China Confucius Studies Program research fellowship. Her research has also been supported by the Korea National Commission for UNESCO, Ploughshares Fund, Defense Threat Reduction Agency, Asia-Pacific Foundation of Canada, Stanton Foundation, and the Smith Richardson Foundation.

Fiona is a research affiliate with the MIT Security Studies Program and holds nonresident affiliations with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and National Security College at the Australian National University.

Fiona received her Ph.D. in Political Science from MIT in 2018. She holds a Bachelor of Arts from the University of New South Wales and a Bachelor of Laws from the University of Sydney, both with first class honors. Previously, she was an Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at the George Washington University.

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

The Predatory Sea: Human Trafficking and Captivity in the Seventeenth-Century Caribbean (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025)

Colonialism is often imagined as an imperial project organized by officials at the highest levels of the state. For the earliest English and French colonies in the Caribbean, nothing could be further from the truth. Between 1570 and 1670, a multinational assortment of privately funded ship captains, sailors, merchants, and adventurers engaged in widespread practices of captive-taking and human trafficking throughout the Caribbean. Raids against coastal communities and regional shipping in the region ensnared multitudes, including free and previously enslaved people of African and Indigenous descent, who found themselves trafficked into slavery away from their communities of belonging. Beginning in the 1570s, their captors established maritime bases on small, strategically located islands throughout the region. Those anchorages served as temporary settlements for northern European traffickers decades before their respective monarchs sanctioned official colonies. Colonization thus started with practices of captive-taking and human trafficking, which remained central to the development of the first English and French colonies in the Caribbean.

Through extensive research in Spanish, French, and English archives in Europe and the Caribbean, The Predatory Sea offers a fresh perspective on how captivity and maritime violence shaped early English, French, and Dutch settlement. Drawn from sources across imperial archives, the book reveals the experiences of those ensnared in this trade. Many captives escaped to Spanish population centers, where they testified to officials about what they witnessed in early English, French, and Dutch colonies. Those testimonies informed a series of Spanish attacks on foreign settlements in the Caribbean over the decades leading up to the 1650s. Captives were cause and consequence of inter-imperial competition and warfare during this violent century of Caribbean history. This captive economy, as explicated in The Predatory Sea, shaped English and French colonization, inter-imperial competition, and the lived experiences of captives and their captors.

About the speaker
Casey Schmitt is an Associate Professor of History at Cornell University where she researches and teaches on early modern colonization, mobility, empires, and slavery. Her work has appeared in the Hispanic American Historical Review, Early American Studies, and the William & Mary Quarterly and she has received support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Historical Association, and the Cornell Center for Social Sciences among others.

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

Author of Death Is Our Business: Russian Mercenaries and the New Era of Private Warfare (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2025).

In 2014, a well-trained, mysterious band of mercenaries arrived in Ukraine, part of Russia's first attempt to claim the country as its own. Upon ceasefire, the “Wagner Group” faded back into shadow, only to reemerge in the Middle East, where they'd go toe-to-toe with the U.S., and in Africa, where they'd earn praise for “tough measures” against insurgencies yet spark outrage for looting, torture, and civilian deaths. As Russia gained a foothold of influence abroad, Wagner founder Yevgeny Prigozhin, known as “Putin's Chef,” went from caterer to commander to single greatest threat Putin has faced in his over-twenty-year rule.

Dually armed with military and strategic prowess, the Wagner Group created a new market in a vast geopolitical landscape increasingly receptive to the promises of private actors. In this trailblazing account of the Group's origins and operations, John Lechner-the only journalist to report across its many warzones-brings us on the ground to witness Wagner partner with fragile nation states, score access to natural resources, oust peacekeeping missions, and cash in on conflicts reframed as Kremlin interests. After rebelling, Prigozhin faced an epic demise-but Wagner lives on, its political, business, and military ventures a pillar of Russian operations the world over.

Featuring exclusive interviews with over thirty Wagner Group members, Death Is Our Business is the terrifying true tale of the renegade militia that proved global instability is nothing if not an opportunity.

About the speaker

John graduated from the Master of Science in Foreign Service (MSFS) Program at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. At Georgetown, John focused on security issues in Central Africa and the Sahel; Turkey; Russia, and the former Soviet Union. He is an expert on Russia’s growing influence in Africa. He speaks fluent Russian; advanced French, Turkish, and Georgian; and conversational Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian (BCS), Chechen, German, and Sango (the lingua franca of the Central African Republic).

After working in finance for several years, John decided to leverage his language skills and significant experience living abroad—especially in Russia and Europe—for a career in international affairs. After arriving in Washington DC, he took an internship with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), analyzing and publishing articles on Turkish domestic politics, security, and foreign relations.

While attending Georgetown he has continued to work as a freelance journalist, covering issues related to language, history, culture, and politics in eastern Ukraine, Moldova, Turkey, the Sahel, and the Central African Republic. He is an expert on the history, languages, and politics of Central Africa, Turkey, and the former Soviet Union. You can find his articles published in Foreign Policy, War on the Rocks, Kyiv Post, The Diplomat, Africa is a Country, African Arguments, The National Interest, and Defense One, among others.

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