New Year is a major cultural event celebrated across South Asia, and this campus-wide celebration highlights the rich languages and traditions associated with this festival. The event will serve as an opportunity for students of all backgrounds to engage through music, dance, food, and language-focused activities featuring the diverse ways New Year is celebrated across South Asia. It will promote awareness and appreciation of South Asian cultures and the less commonly taught languages within the Cornell community, foster cultural exchange and inclusivity, and strengthen the sense of community among South Asian students and beyond.

The event will feature:

Language Workshops: Interactive language sessions featuring greetings, common phrases, images of rituals and traditions, calligraphy, regional calendars, etc.Food Fair: A showcase of authentic cuisines from South Asian regions, small plates featuring traditional New Year's foodArts & Crafts Corner: Hands-on activities, including alpana (folk art), mask-making, mandala drawing and coloring activity, etc.Cultural Performances (starting at 5:00 pm in Klarman Auditorium): Poetry recitations, traditional music, and dance performances by student groups and artists from the Cornell Community

Join us for a conversation discussing the historical and contemporary relationship between the United States, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, beginning with their acquisition in 1898 following the Spanish-American War. As sites of U.S. territorial expansion, both were governed through military rule and colonial policies justified by racial and economic ideologies.

While Puerto Ricans were granted U.S. citizenship in 1917, the Philippines moved toward independence by 1946, creating divergent but interconnected paths shaped by migration, labor extraction, and strategic military interests. The discussion moves from this shared colonial foundation to contemporary issues—including large-scale migration, economic dependency, grassroots resistance, and debates over political status. It highlights how diasporic communities engage with questions of identity and belonging and how movements for self-determination continue to challenge the legacy of the U.S. empire today.

Panelists

Christine Bacareza Balance is an associate professor of performing and media arts and Asian American studies at Cornell University. Her work as a scholar and cultural worker bridges performance, popular culture, and Asian American studies, with a particular focus on Filipino and Filipino-American experiences. Her research and teaching explore how music, media, and performance shape diasporic identity, memory, and political life. She is also engaged in community-based and public humanities work that connects academia to broader conversations around race, empire, and cultural expression.

Rebeca L. Hey-Colón is an associate professor with a joint appointment in the Department of Literatures in English and the Latina/o Studies Program at Cornell University. She is a scholar of Afro-Latinx and Caribbean cultures whose work explores how race, migration, and religion shape identity and resistance across the Americas. Her research and teaching center on Afro-diasporic spiritual practices, visual and literary cultures, and the everyday experiences of Latinx communities. She engages questions of colonialism, borders, and belonging through a focus on cultural expression and community knowledge.

Host

This event is organized by the Migrations Program's undergraduate Migrations scholars and co-sponsored by Latina/o Studies Program and Asian American Studies

Don't miss our first event hosted by the Migrations scholars on April 21: Margins and Mobilization: Migrant Worker Precarity and Power in the Trump-era Economy.

Join us for a conversation on the role of migrant workers in the U.S. economy. Bringing together scholars and activists, the panel will examine how immigration laws and border enforcement function as tools of labor control, shape markets, and produce systemic vulnerability. The discussion will trace how these dynamics have intensified under the Trump administration amid the rise of ethnonationalism and increasingly punitive immigration policy, as well as how migrant workers have been pushing back and what forms of resistance have emerged.

This event is of interest to all those studying labor, immigration, human rights, and social justice to better understand the intersection of migration policy, politics, and the everyday lives of migrant workers.

Panelists

Aly Wane is a human rights organizer based in Syracuse, New York. Originally from Senegal, he has worked on anti-war, economic, racial, and immigrant justice. He has been involved with the American Friends Service Committee, the Workers' Center of Central NY, and has been on the Board of the Alliance of Communities Transforming Syracuse, a politically progressive interfaith organization. He is a member of the Syracuse Peace Council and the Black Immigration Network, the Black Alliance for Just Immigration, and the UndocuBlack Network. He is currently on the advisory boards of the Immigrant Justice Network and Freedom University out of Georgia.

Shannon Gleeson is professor of labor relations, law, and history in the School of Industrial and Labor Relations. Her research focuses on the labor rights of migrant workers and the enforcement of those rights, the vulnerabilities migrant workers face, migrant organizing and anti-capitalist currents within the immigrant rights movement, and the policing of migrant workers.

M. Cornejo is an assistant professor in communication. Trained as an interpersonal communication researcher, Cornejo examines how legally stigmatized migrants’ communication strategies to obtain humanization and access to essential resources (e.g., education, health care access) alter their self-view, psychosocial health, general well-being, and social mobility in the U.S.

Host

This event is organized by the Migrations Program's undergraduate Migrations scholars.

Don't miss our second event hosted by the Migrations scholars on April 22: From Colony to Diaspora: Enduring Legacies of U.S. Territorial Rule in Puerto Rico & the Philippines.

Paper Presentations (each paper followed by discussion):

Aiduosi Amantai, Binghamton University. History.
"Negotiating Power: White Bones and Black Bones in the Kazakh Khanate, 17th–18th Centuries".

Katrina Nousek, Cornell University Department of German Studies
“(Mis)recognition: Ethnicity, Society, and Postsocialist Poetics”

Yulia Antonian, Yerevan State University, Faculty of History, Dept. of Cultural Studies
“Assembling the socialist industrial city: urban environment, social structure and belonging in Charentsavan (Armenia).”

Jeffrey Gettleman, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and foreign correspondent for The New York Times, has covered major global conflicts and issues throughout his career. A 1994 graduate of Cornell University with a major in philosophy, Jeffrey took a wide range of classes at Cornell, including sculpture, economics, and creative writing. He has reported from some of the world's most challenging locations, including Ukraine, where he recently covered the ongoing war, and from remote areas like Papua New Guinea and the Amazon. With years of experience in conflict zones, including living in Kenya, Jeffrey has also written extensively for outlets such as GQ, National Geographic, and The New York Review of Books. In addition to his work as a journalist, he authored the memoir Love, Africa and frequently appears on national networks like CNN and NPR. Jeffrey also holds a master's degree in anthropology from Oxford University as a Marshall Scholar. He will discuss his recent experiences reporting on the war in Ukraine, Eastern Europe's challenges with Russia, and the geopolitical competition for dominance in the Arctic. Having recently returned from Greenland, he is open to questions on topics related to Europe, journalism, and any other matters of interest.

The historical trajectories of ethnic cleansing in the 19th and early 20th centuries will be explored in this year’s Annual Armenian Genocide Commemoration lecture, given by Dr. Khatchig Mouradian. The lecture, “Ethnic Cleansing in the Long 19th Century: The Native American, Circassian, and Armenian Cases,” will be held on Thursday, April 24, at 4:30 p.m. in White Hall room 106.

“Cases of ethnic cleansing and genocide are often studied in historical isolation, yet Dr. Mouradian’s talk promises to illuminate how instances of forced displacement across world regions took shape out of related conditions of imperial decline and nation-state formation,” said Lori Khatchadourian, associate professor of Near Eastern studies and anthropology in the College of Arts and Sciences. “In comparing the ethnic cleansing of the Ottoman Armenians with the displacement of indigenous Americans and the Circassians of the Russian Empire, this talk by a leading historian of the Armenian genocide will reveal patterns and connections in the systematic removal of ethnic, racial or religious groups, and amplify the traumatic experience of displacement during the long 19th century.

“We are fortunate that Dr. Mouradian is giving this year’s Annual Armenian Genocide Commemoration Lecture at Cornell. It should be of great interest to students and faculty in Near Eastern studies and across the humanities and social sciences.”

Mouradian is a lecturer in Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African studies at Columbia University, and the Armenian and Georgian specialist at the Library of Congress. He is also a lecturer at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee.

Mouradian is the author of the award-winning book “The Resistance Network: The Armenian Genocide and Humanitarianism in Ottoman Syria, 1915-1918” (2021). He is a co-editor of “After the Ottomans: Genocide’s Long Shadow and Armenian Resilience,” (2023) and “The I.B. Tauris Handbook of the Late Ottoman Empire: History and Legacy,” (forthcoming in 2025).

Sponsored by the Department of Near Eastern Studies with support from Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies and its Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA) initiative, Department of History