Through this event, IES fellows collectively reflected on the diversity of methodologies and archives across disciplines. This focus captured their common interest and curiosity for disciplinary practices other than one’s own, and a willingness to make their processes and assumptions clear to others. Participants covered diverse fields: History, Government, Communications, Music, Comparative Literature, German Studies, Romance Studies, Medieval Studies, and represented a wide variety of cutting edge work being done by PhD students across the universityThe first panel tackled the topic of community and exchange across Europe, stretching from Ancient Rome to the present. Angela Kothe (Government) opened with a presentation on mapping LGBTQ spaces and public houses across the UK over time. Duncan Eaton (History) explored the changes in sugar beet trade in Slovakia and its impact on economic and political exchange in the interwar period. Julia Sebastien (Communications) rounded out the panel with her research on a virtual reality re-creation of a site in ancient Pompei, Casa della Regina Carolina, combining archeology, communications, and pedagogy to bring this history to the present.

Next, a panel featuring graduate students from the history and government departments explored means of government and control in twentieth and twenty-first century states. Kaitlin Findlay (History) presented on the use of official photography as a reflection of evolving international humanitarian norms in the context of the internment of Japanese Americans and Canadians in the Second World War. Madeleine Lemos (History) followed with an exploration of the tourism campaigns from the fascist Spanish state in the 1960s. Georgy Tarasenko (Government) presented the results of an experimental study on secular versus religious messaging within Russia related to the war with Ukraine, while Frances Cayton (Government) rounded out the panel with her work on civil society organizations and their relationship to democratic backsliding in Poland.

The symposium closed with a third panel exploring artistic expressions and their complex resonances in the context of European history and construction of identities. Xinyu Zhang (Comparative Literature) opened the panel with a theoretical contribution on “poignancy” interrogating fundamental structures of meaning of history relevant to the conceptualization of “Europe” through J. M. Coetzee’s and Fredric Jameson’s writing. Spencer Hadley (German Studies) offered a microhistorical account of musician and activist Amiri Baraka’s 1977 performance at the Berliner Jazztage within shifting contexts of militancy in both Germany and the US. With Nora Siena (Romance Studies), the focus moved to Italy, as she analyzed the use of the cut-up literary technique by Italian writer and activist Nanni Balestrini in relation to the mobilizations of “Autunno Caldo” (“Hot Autumn”) in 1969. The panel concluded with Chiara Visentin (Medieval Studies) presenting on countess Marie of Champagne as an illustration of a noblewoman’s empowerment in the European Middle Ages through patronage of pioneering biblical adaptations in French.

With its wide-ranging chronological and geographical scope, this Symposium offered a unique occasion to appreciate the fruitfulness and importance of bringing together European Studies scholars from across disciplines. The conversations sparked in Q&As engaged fellows and other attendees, both graduate students and faculty alike, in mutually enriching dialogues. The event contributed to inspire European Studies young scholars at Cornell to embrace a larger repertoire of case studies, and crucially, of theoretical lenses and methodological and archival practices.

By Chiara Visentin and Madeleine Lemos, IES Director's Fellows

The Minors have taken classes, at Cornell and abroad, in European politics, history, art, and ideas, and have studied various European languages: French was the clear winner this year, with more than half of graduating European Studies Minors studying it, followed by Spanish, Italian, Russian, and Turkish. Keeping with IES’s interdisciplinary tradition, the Minors come from several colleges and majors, including, beyond Government and History, Industrial and Labor Relations, Psychology, Philosophy, Economics, Comparative Literature, Information Science, and Environment and Sustainability. Some favorite Minor classes at Cornell have been: HIST 2860: The French Revolution, ROMS 3300: The Culture of Violence: Europe 1914-1945, COML 3012: Remembering Socialism: Literature and Film after the End of History, and ITAL 3010: Screening la Cosa Nostra.

Several students have taken advantage of opportunities offered by IES and by the broader Global Cornell, such as the IES/PACS-funded Global Internships in Spain and Bosnia Herzegovina, and the IES undergraduate Harum, Conger Wood, and Susan Tarrow research fellowships. European Studies minors have attended our Institute’s lectures and workshops and have travelled to study abroad in places like Oxford, Paris, Turin, Athens, and Berlin.

After graduation, our ES Minors have a variety of career plans, including work in finance, strategy consulting, teaching, book publishing, think tanks, and policy and foreign affairs, as well as further study in law or graduate school.

Three out of the four Cornellians who won Europe Fulbright student awards for 2026-27 are European Studies Minors, including two graduating Minors, Nina Davis ’26, who won an English Teaching Assistant Fulbright in Portugal, and Madeleine Kapsalis ’26, English Teaching Assistant Fulbright in Greece.

The Minor in European Studies is at the core of IES’s engagement with undergraduate students. We are delighted that our students have confidently sought and embraced knowledge about European cultures, histories, and societies. These studies offer a perspective for understanding ourselves, here in America, as well as for understanding the whole world better. This perspective will be useful to our students as they venture into the great, wide world beyond college.

 By Patricia Young, Senior Program Manager for the Institute for European Studies

The event was guided by a set of questions including, how does political science research viably inform policymakers and practitioners? And how can partnerships between those in the policy and academic communities deepen research contributions? The symposium was organized by IES’s Eastern Europe faculty research pod, and led by Prof. Bryn Rosenfeld (Government).

The morning opened with a research panel featuring four scholars working across economics, political science, and public opinion. Charles Whitehead (Cornell, Law School) spoke about Ukraine's privatization landscape and the structural conditions needed to attract foreign capital into a postwar economy. Aaron Erlich (McGill, Political Science) traced a decade of survey research in Ukraine, from pen-and-paper surveys in 2015 to AI-assisted interviewing today, offering evidence from a series of publications that underscore the shifting landscape for survey research in a country reshaped by displacement and war. Jordan Gans-Morse (Northwestern, Political Science) presented findings from an experimental mega-study on what anti-war messages can be the most persuasive for the Russian population. Bryn Rosenfeld (Cornell, Government) closed the panel with research on Russian public opinion, explaining how the government can lead people to express acceptance of a war that many had seemed unlikely to support before it began.

The afternoon roundtable shifted the focus from research findings to the harder question of how those insights reach decision-makers. Regina Faranda, former Deputy Assistant Secretary at the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, spoke from experience about what lands in policy circles — and what doesn't. Kimberly O'Haver of the Open Society Foundation brought a concrete case study in drug policy reform in Ukraine, tracing the path from research to law on issues like medical cannabis and trauma-focused therapies for veterans.

In addition to panelists, participants included Cornell faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates, including several students from the region itself. Recognizing varied incentives, tools, and challenges that both sectors face, the group concluded that academic research must foster long-range relationships with policy makers that extend beyond moments of crisis or when a research area is in the news. Through this sustained interaction, researchers are better able to inform practitioners during major events and to foster joint collaborations via new studies or other partnerships. 

Story by Frances Cayton and Georgy Tarasenko, IES Graduate Fellows 2025-26.

Thurman was invited to speak at Cornell by the Institute for European Studies graduate fellows. She lectured to a packed A.D. White House on April 14, 2026. 

For Thurman, it began with a nagging question: Who, exactly, were the performers of the well-known Belgian band, Technotronic, best known for their 1989 hit “Pump Up the Jam"? The group’s vocalist, Ya Kid K, a Congolese Belgian rapper, is absent from the music videos. Instead, the videos feature Congolese Belgian model Felly Killingi. This case of musical “mimicry” thus sparked Thurman’s search into the layered influence of postimperial subjects in Europe’s high era of disco. 

Her first book, Singing Like Germans: Black Musicians in the Land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms (2021), received major awards from the American Historical Association, the Royal Musicological Society, and the German Studies Association. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Frieze Magazine, and The New York Review of Books, and she has contributed historical materials for numerous orchestras internationally. 

“How has empire transformed European music culture?” Thurman asks, challenging pervasive assumptions about race and belonging in European history. Using pop charts, recordings, published reviews, and music magazines, Thurman traces a surge of Black European presence in Western European music after World War II. At the same time, she reveals the complicated realities of who benefited from their labor and how these performers were visually linked to, and often conflated with, American Black culture. 

During Munich’s rise as Germany’s disco capital, producers frequently placed Black performers at the forefront as the public face of the industry, as seen with groups like Boney M., whose male frontman, Bobby Farrell, lip-synced to tracks recorded by producer Frank Farian, while serving as the visual embodiment of the music. Through a nuanced analysis informed by theories of masquerade and mimicry, Thurman untangles transnational histories of belonging and exclusion, as well as the construction and erasure of race.

In addition to her lecture, Professor Thurman engaged with the IES graduate fellows over a breakfast workshop, where she discussed strategies for young scholars to engage in public humanities by publishing articles and op-eds to reach a wider audience. If you would like to be a part of our European Studies community as a graduate fellow, please apply by May 11, 2026. 

Story by Kaitlin Findlay and the IES team.