Join Einaudi Center experts for World in Focus Talks on global events in the news and on your mind. Our faculty's research and policy insights put the world in focus.

This year we’re hosting informal campus discussions on many Tuesday afternoons. This week’s topic:

The United States helped create the United Nations to protect the sovereignty of independent countries. Now the Trump administration is setting the tone for superpowers with imperial ambitions by waging economic war against democratic allies, violating long-standing treaties, and holding out the possibility of using military force.

What do these unprecedented actions mean for the rest of the world? How are states and peoples in different regions responding? And what may happen if tensions continue to escalate?

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Featured Faculty

Agnieszka Nimark (PACS) | Affiliated ScholarMagnus Fiskesjö (EAP, PACS, SEAP) | AnthropologyAlexandra Blackman (SWANA) | GovernmentSeema Golestaneh (SWANA) | Near Eastern StudiesIrina Troconis (LACS) | Romance StudiesKenneth Roberts (LACS) | GovernmentPeter Katzenstein (IES, PACS) | Government

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Conversations Matter at Einaudi

This conversation is hosted by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies and its regional and thematic programs. Find out what's in store for students at Einaudi!

East Asia Program Lecture Series presents "Convict Politics: Innocent Convicts and Unlawful Commoners in Early Chinese Empires (221 BCE-23 CE)"

Speaker: Liang Cai, Ruth and Paul Idzik Associate Professor in Digital Scholarship of History, University of Notre Dame

Description:

This talk, based on newly mined data from newly unearthed manuscripts and traditional sources, explores convict politics in the early Chinese empires. Whereas a substantial number of bureaucratic personnel were convict laborers, assisting local officials, the central court reemployed numerous previously convicted individuals as high officials. The book argues that convict politics emerged because the mutual responsibility system and high-performance-oriented law extensively criminalized people, including the innocent. Paradoxically, the Western Han dynasty’s stringent criminalization of individuals was juxtaposed with redemption policies and frequent amnesties that excessively exonerated offenders, even the most heinous. The intellectual roots underpinning the harsh laws and the universal amnesties fundamentally embraced the same utopian ideal of a crime-free society. Although this dual practice of extensive criminalization and widespread pardoning fostered the population’s tolerance towards the political system, these practices were fraught with injustice and led to form Confucian deep-seated skepticism towards the law in Chinese tradition.

Speaker's Bio:

Dr. Liang Cai received her Ph.D. from Cornell University and currently serves as an associate professor of history at the University of Notre Dame. She specializes in Chinese political and intellectual history, with a focus on the Qin-Han dynasties (221 BCE - 23 CE). Dr. Cai's publications cover topics such as Confucianism, bureaucracy, law, social networks, and archaeologically excavated manuscripts. She has also collaborated with computer scientists on a digital humanities project aimed at creating structured biographical data and conducting social network analysis of early Chinese empires, particularly those in the Qin-Han period, which is considered the fountainhead of Chinese civilization.
Dr. Cai’s first book Witchcraft and the Rise of the First Confucian Empire contests long-standing claims that Confucianism came to prominence with the promotion of Emperor Wu in the Han dynasty. She argues that it was a witchcraft scandal in 91–87 BCE that created a political vacuum and permitted Confucians to rise to power, ultimately transforming China into a Confucian regime. Her book won the 2014 Academic Award for Excellence presented by Chinese Historians in the United States and was a finalist for the 2015 Best First Book in the History of Religions presented by the American Academy of Religion.
Her other selected publications appear in The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, the Journal of Asian studies and Law and History Review.
Dr. Cai’s second book, Convict Politics: From Utopia to Serfdom in Early China (221 BCE–23 CE) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), is scheduled for release in December 2025. This book seeks to stimulate deeper reflection on utopian thought and its perilous application in political practice.

About East Asia Program

As Cornell’s hub for research, teaching, and engagement with East Asia, the East Asia Program (EAP) serves as a forum for the interdisciplinary study of historical and contemporary East Asia. The program draws its membership of over 45 core faculty and numerous affiliated faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students from eight of Cornell’s 12 schools and colleges.

Gatty Lecture Series

Anti-authoritarian Counter-Cartographies of Solidarity with Human Rights Defenders (HRDs) in the Philippines

Join us for a talk by Arnisson Ortega, Associate Professor from the Department of Geography and the Environment at Syracuse University.

This Gatty Lecture will take place at Rockefeller 374, Asian Studies Lounge. Lunch will be served. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

Abstract
Human Rights Defenders (HRDs) in the Philippines have long endured systemic violence, making the country one of the most dangerous places for HRDs. In solidarity with HRDs in Negros Island—a key hotspot targeted by the state —me and my colleagues in the Philippines initiated a participatory mapping project grounded in HRD geonarratives: spatially anchored accounts of resistance, trauma, and survival. Working with activists, artists, and grassroots organizations, we launched a series of storytelling and sketchmapping activities, and co-created artmaps to visualize sites of struggle, care, and state repression. These maps served as tools for social media advocacy, political mobilization, and cultivating care practices. What have emerged from these initiatives are counter-cartographies of resistance and solidarity that expose the spatial logics of authoritarian violence. Through geonarrative storytelling and sketchmapping, we expose the spatial configurations of authoritarian violence that HRDs face. We traced the necropolitical spaces where HRDs confront psychological and physical violence—from surveillance and red-tagging to arbitrary arrests and extrajudicial killings—within everyday spaces such as homes, workplaces, hospitals, commercial centers, and rural farmlands. These geonarratives reveal how state and non-state actors systematically constrict safe spaces for HRDs, embedding violence into the micro-geographies of everyday life. Despite these conditions, HRDs and their communities have cultivated practices of care, resilience, and collective survival to sustain their advocacy work. The maps we generated amplified the plight of HRDs, supported public-facing campaigns, and fostered broader awareness of HRD vulnerability and resistance. By centering their geonarratives, we advance a justice-oriented geographic praxis that foregrounds solidarity and creative collaboration.

About the Speaker
Arnisson Ortega is a human geographer committed to community-engaged work that advances social justice. Arnisson’s research spans the spatial politics of urbanization, transnational migration, and uneven geographies of accumulation and dispossession. Much of Arnisson’s work focuses on the Philippines, Arnisson’s homeland, where Arnisson uses decolonial, community-engaged, and mixed-method approaches—particularly mapping and storytelling—as tools for resistance and world-making. Arnisson’s current projects examine decolonial cartographies, migrant-driven urban change in post-industrial cities, and the spatial politics of urban development in former U.S. military estates in the Philippines.

The Jewish Studies Program invites you to come join our colleagues at the School of Industrial and Labor Relations (ILR) Global Labor and Work Workshop in welcoming a new book from Cornell University Press at a book launch with Elissa Sampson and Robert Zecker. The Global Labor and Work series has a longstanding tradition of hosting panels and individual presentations that foster rich and stimulating discussions at the cutting edge of the study of work, labor, and employment—all within a collegial setting.

The room capacity of Doherty Lounge is limited to 36.

Co-editors Elissa Sampson and Robert Zecker will discuss their new book, "From Popular Front to Cold War," which tells the story of the International Workers Order (IWO). Originally a left-wing Yiddish-speaking fraternal organization founded in 1930 as a mutual benefit insurance society, the IWO uniquely became interracial and multiethnic, championing early civil-rights campaigns, battling for labor unions and needed social reforms during the Great Depression and World War II, while pushing the boundaries of multiracial social democracy. Although the postwar Red Scare sentenced the IWO to liquidation in 1954, this organization remains a vital reminder in our current distressing times that another world was possible.

At its height, the pro-Soviet IWO had almost 200,000 members drawn from a broad ethnic and racial spectrum of the working class--Jews, Blacks, Poles, Slovaks, Italians, Hispanics, and others. It operated summer camps, published foreign-language newspapers, and supported a wide range of cultural activities; its multilingual archives are housed at Cornell's Kheel Center. An early advocate for the US's entry into World War II, the IWO was ahead of its time in championing the nascent Civil Rights movement and Black leadership. Its leaders and activists included Clara Lemlich Shavelson, Paul Robeson, Langston Hughes, Louise Thompson Patterson, and Vito Marcantonio. The IWO was declared a subversive organization during the Cold War although its membership was not connected to the Communist Party. Its legacy as a model for working-class cooperation across racial and ethnic differences endures to this day.

Dr. Elissa Sampson is an urban geographer who studies how the past is actively used to create new spaces of migration, memory, heritage and activism. Her life-long interest in migration, diaspora, re-diasporization and immigrant culture has been pursued in the Lower East Side, Brooklyn, Jerusalem, Paris and elsewhere and points to the dynamic interactions among diasporas in shared spaces/places. She has worked extensively with Cornell University’s, Kheel Center archives on the International Workers Order (IWO) and is responsible for its partial digitization. She co-organized a public, online academic conference, “Di Linke,” (the Left) based largely on its Jewish Section holdings: a weeklong series of webcasts in December 2020 attracted more than six hundred attendees. She is a Research Associate in Cornell’s Jewish Studies Program where she has taught labor and gender history, including the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, its memorialization, and its relationship to current activism. She has published in the fields of urban geography and memory studies as well as on the IWO and is the co-editor of "From Popular Front to Cold War: The Interracial Left and the International Workers Order, 1930–1954" from Cornell University Press.

Robert M. Zecker is a professor of history at Saint Francis Xavier University, Nova Scotia, Canada, where he teaches courses in race, immigration, social movements, and US history. His research includes immigration, radicalism, and the popular culture of immigrants on the left. He is the author of many articles in journals such as the Journal of American Ethnic History, American Communist History, the Journal of Popular Culture, and the Journal of Transnational American Studies. He is the author of four books, most recently “A Road to Peace and Freedom”: The International Workers Order and the Struggle for Economic Justice and Civil Rights, 1930–1954 (Temple University Press, 2018). He is currently writing a history of the workers’ schools of the CPUSA.

Sponsors: Jewish Studies Program, ILR School Global Labor and Work

Co-sponsors: Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies, Department of Government, Institute for Comparative Modernities, Department of Anthropology, Feminist, Gender, & Sexuality Studies Program, American Studies Program, Department of History, Africana Studies & Research Center

In an age of surveillance, censorship, and closed borders, this symposium will consider ways of doing research in and on the SWANA region. Points of discussion will include conceptual and methodological innovations in the face of restrictions, engaging with non-academic discourses, and possible lessons from post-colonialism in an increasingly inchoate world. Please register at https://forms.gle/p9vYMnyEZWkpGT1D9

10:00 Introduction and Welcome

Seema Golestaneh (Southwest Asia and North Africa Program & Near Eastern Studies)

10:15 - 12:00 Doing Research in the Region: Challenges, Tactics, Possibilities roundtable

Opening comments by Farzin Lotfi-Jam (Architecture), with remarks by Ziad Fahmy (Near Eastern Studies), Pamela Karimi (Architecture), Mostafa Minawi (History), Zinab Attai (Goverenment), and Amr Lehta (Near Eastern Studies)

1:30 - 2:45: SWANA and Critique Workshop

Parisa Vaziri (Near Eastern Studies & Comparative Literature) will lead a workshop, discussing a pre-circulated reading

3:00 - 4:15: Beyond Academic Prose: Art, Activism, Expressions

Visual artist Tracy Chawan will lead a hand-on workshop on political posters from the region.

Lunch and coffee will be served.

Speaker: Rania Huntington, Professor of Chinese Literature, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Title: The Grieving Father and the Baleful Spirits: Qian Xiyan’s Ting lan zhi (Record of Listening to Falsehood)

Abstract: Qian Xiyan composed the Ting lan zhi in response to the death of his young son, the most recent of a series of similar losses. Attempting to explain the boy’s death, Qian chronicles ordinary and extraordinary incidents in his short life. A collector of contemporary strange tales who was also very well read in the earlier tradition, Qian interrogates many of his culture’s common explanations of infant and child mortality, finally concluding with a bitter indictment of heterodox religious practice. The resulting text is part memoir and part treatise.

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.

Speaker: Tingting Xu, Assistant Professor of Art History, University of Rochester

Title: Prince Chun, Photography, and Poetry: Visual and Textual Accounts of the Naval Drill of 1886

Abstract: The poem Singing while Sailing (Hanghai fangge) was written by Prince Chun Yihuan (1840~1891) on the 15th days of the Fourth lunar month in 1886, during his inspection of the naval drill of the Beiyang Fleet in the Bohai Sea. It was composed just after the Haiyan Steamer he was aboard left Dagu and entered the open Bohai Sea. The poem was included in Yihuan’s Verses of Navigation (Hanghai yincao) and was inscribed onto the monumental painting Riding the Wind by two court painters. The painting further incorporated facial details drawn from a group photograph of Yihuan and two accompanying inspectors, Li Hongzhang (1823~1901) and Shanqing (1833~1888), thereby integrating poetry, painting, and photography into a single commemorative ensemble. We will conduct a close reading of the poem, examining how image and text intertwine, how ideals and realities coexist, and how personal expression is woven into courtly narratives.

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.