Find out more about our summer public policy program in Turin. Nestled between the Alps and the Mediterranean in the magnificent Piedmont region of northern Italy, the city of Turin provides an inspiring background to explore the causes and consequences of population change, the debates unfolding in Europe around these issues, and the policies intended to address them. Population problems are central to societal change in numerous areas- inequality, immigration and diversity, race relations, family life, health and aging, and social welfare systems. This program explores the causes and consequences of population change, paying particular attention to how population processes interact with the social, economic, and political context in which they play out.

"Bukovina: The Life and Death of an East European Borderland" (Princeton University Press, December 2025)

The making and remaking of Bukovina, a disputed Eastern European borderland, from the eighteenth century to the present day

Bukovina, when it has existed on official maps, has always fit uneasily among its neighbors. The region is now divided between Romania and Ukraine but has long been a testing ground for successive regimes, including the Habsburg Empire, independent and later Nazi-allied Romania, and the Soviet Union, as each sought to reshape the region in its own image. In this beautifully written and wide-ranging book, Cristina Florea traces the history of Bukovina, showing how this borderland, the onetime buffer between Christendom and Islam, found itself at the forefront of modern state-building and governance projects that eventually extended throughout the rest of Europe. Encounters that play out in borderlands have proved crucial to the development of modern state ambitions and governance practices.

Drawing on a wide range of archives and published sources in Russian, Ukrainian, German, Romanian, French, and Yiddish, Florea integrates stories of ethnic and linguistic groups—rural Ukrainians, Romanians, and Germans, and urban German-speaking Jews and Poles—who lived side by side in Bukovina, all of them navigating constant reconfiguration and reinvention. Challenging traditional chronologies in European history, she shows that different transformations in the region occurred at different tempos, creating a historical palimpsest and a sense among locals that they had lived many lives.

A two-hundred-year history of a region shaped by the conflicting pulls of imperial legacies and national ambitions, Bukovina reveals the paradoxes of modern history found in a microcosm of Eastern Europe.

About the speaker

Atina Grossmann is Distinguished Professor of History at the Cooper Union in New York City where she teaches courses on modern Europe, Fascism and National Socialism, the Holocaust, refugees and migration in global context as well as gender and sexuality studies. Relevant publications include: The Surviving Remnant: Documents on Jewish Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany 1945-1950 (with A.Kramen, A Patt, T. Lewinsky, 2024); chapter on “Aftermath” (with K. Bohus) in Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Holocaust (2015); Our Courage/Unser Mut: Jews in Europe after 1945 (with K. Bohus 2020), Shelter from the Holocaust: Rethinking Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union (with M.Edele and S. Fitzpatrick 2017), Wege in der Fremde: Deutsch-jüdische Begegnungsgeschichte zwischen New York, Berlin, und Teheran (2012), and Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany (Princeton 2007/09, German edition Wallstein 2012). as well as “Trauma, Privilege, and Adventure: Jewish Refugees in Iran and India” (in Jews and Colonialism, ed. Stefan Vogt, 2023). In 2022-23 she was the Ina Levine Invitational Senior Scholar in Residence at the Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, USHMM. Her current research focuses on” Jewish Refugees from National Socialism in Iran and India: Between ‘Orient’ and European Catastrophe” as well as the entanglements of family memoir and historical scholarship.

Join us to learn about opportunities for graduate students with the Einaudi Center for International Studies. This session will discuss how to discover or strengthen global interests, including research and travel grants, guest lectures, fellowships, and more!

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

In light of the war with Iran, Arang Keshavarzian's book talk will now be a roundtable discussion on recent events. This conversation will examine the war with Iran beyond the headlines, situating this latest outbreak of violence within broader historical, social, and regional contexts and debates.

The event is hosted by the Southwest Asia and North Africa Program (SWANA), part of the Einaudi Center for International Studies, and cosponsored by the Department of Near Eastern Studies.

Panel

Arang Keshavarzian (Middle East Studies, New York University)Golnar Nikpour (History, Dartmouth College)Seema Golestaneh (SWANA director and Near Eastern Studies, Cornell University)Moderator: Mostafa Minawi (History, Cornell University).

***

About Arang Keshavarzian

Arang Keshavarzian is Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University. His research and teaching centers on questions of political economy of Iran and the wider Middle East. He has had a particular interest in the relationship between spatialization, capitalism, and political power. He is the author of Bazaar and State in Iran: The Politics of the Tehran Marketplace (Cambridge UP, 2007) and co-editor, with Ali Mirsepassi, of Global 1979: Geographies and Histories of the Iranian Revolution (Cambridge UP, 2021). His most recent book is Making Space for the Gulf: Histories of Regionalism and the Middle East (Stanford UP, 2024). It is the recipient of the 2025 Roger Owen Prize from MESA for best book in economic history, economics, and political economy, as well as an honorary mention for the 2025 biannual book award from the Association for Gulf and Arabian Peninsula Studies. His articles on various topics have appeared in several edited volumes as well as Politics & Society; International Journal of Middle East Studies, Geopolitics; Economy & Society; International Journal of Urban and Region Research, and Middle East Report.