Why did Denmark develop mass education for all in 1814, while Britain created a public-school system only in 1870 that primarily educated academic achievers? Cathie Jo Martin argues that fiction writers and their literary narratives inspired education campaigns throughout the nineteenth-century. Danish writers imagined mass schools as the foundation for a great society and economic growth. Their depictions fortified the mandate to educate all people and showed neglecting low-skill youth would waste societal resources and threaten the social fabric. Conversely, British authors pictured mass education as harming social stability, lower-class work, and national culture. Their stories of youths who overcame structural injustices with individual determination made it easier to blame students who failed to seize educational opportunities. Novel and compelling, Education for All? uses a multidisciplinary perspective to offer a unique gaze into historical policymaking.

Hosted by the Government Department and co-sponsored by the Institute for European Studies.

New Perspectives in European Studies: IES Graduate Fellows 2025 Spring Research Symposium

IES Graduate Fellows will be presenting their work in conference style presentations followed by time for discussions.

Lunch: 11:30am

Panel 1: Texts and Translation (11:45am - 12:30pm)

"Biblical Translation and Courtly Assimilation: the Socio-Political Imagination of 12th-Century Anglo-Norman Biblical Translations"
Chiara Visentin, Medieval Studies

"Iberia and the Partisan: Locating the Spanish Mind of Carl Schmitt"
Madeleine Lemos, History

5 minute break

Panel 2: Civic Engagement and Contemporary Challenges (12:35pm-1:20pm)

"Civic Engagement, Depolarization, and Crisis"
Frances Cayton, Government

"The International Political Economy of Contemporary Surveillance Technologies"
Amelia C. Arsenault, Government

10 minute break

Panel 3: Interpreting the Twentieth Century (1:30pm - 2:30pm)

"The Origins of Mussolini’s Decade of War"
Chris Mingo, History

"Straight Making as Organized Crime"
Angela Elissa Kothe, Government

"Diaspora and Displacement: Tracking the 1972 Ugandan Asian Expulsion in Empire's Aftermath"
Priyanka Sen, History of Architecture and Urban Development

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.

Join the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies’ undergraduate global scholars for a showcase of their capstone presentations providing public commentary and perspectives on global democracy.

Undergraduate global scholars advocate for building democracy on campus and around the world. They have partnered with the Einaudi Center's democratic threats and resilience faculty fellow Kenneth Roberts and Lund Practitioner in Residence Thomas Garrett—expert researchers and practitioners on building democracy—to design their projects.

Join Einaudi Center and Brooks School researchers for three-minute speed talks and community conversation on our contemporary moment.

Speakers will jump off from interdisciplinary and international research, experiences, and world events to provide a fresh perspective on current U.S. politics and public policy. Together we'll look at challenges faced and solutions found in a variety of academic fields and places around the world—to help us think through how to address emerging issues at home.

The event features clusters of speed talks on related topics—including free speech, U.S. elections, and international aid—with time for Q&A and conversation on each topic.

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Faculty Speakers

Lessons from Latin America

Kenneth Roberts, Democratic Threats Fellow (LACS) | GovernmentGustavo Flores-Macías (LACS) | Government and Public PolicySantiago Anria (LACS) | Global Labor and Work

International Implications

Magnus Fiskesjö (EAP/SEAP/PACS) | AnthropologyBryn Rosenfeld (IES) | GovernmentWilliam Lodge II (SAP) | Health Equity and Public Policy

Domestic Consequences

Mabel Berezin, IES Director | SociologyGautam Hans | LawMoon Duchin | MathematicsEllen Lust, Einaudi Center Director | Government and Public Policy

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Sponsors

This conversation is hosted by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, partnering with Cornell Brooks School of Public Policy's Governance and Local Development Institute and Data and Democracy Lab.

Find out how graduate and undergraduate students can get started at Einaudi.

Today's society faces challenges of great complexity. Some of these problems are the result of modern society's past successes (such as climate change, the aging of the population, the impact of robotization on the workforce, or disinformation), and that is why they have proven so difficult to solve. The policy approaches, concepts, and instruments have also exhausted their capacity to manage a rapidly evolving society that does not match the social context for which they were designed. Finally, our Enlightenment knowledge systems, driven by the forces of specialization, are also incapable of addressing these problems, since they were one of the main causes of the progress that has now become paradoxical.

To address current social challenges, it is necessary to integrate disciplines and experiment with new scientific approaches and methods, rather than rely on fragmented systems that created the problems in the first place.

This workshop will focus on a nascent attempt in Spain, linked to Cornell's Clinic Lab program, to use artificial intelligence for two purposes: for rigorous social research through interdisciplinary teams, and to address xenophobia, a social ill that has been growing rapidly in online settings.

Sergio García Magariño has a Ph.D. in Sociology with international recognition and is a specialist in education and social development. He is currently a lecturer (associate professor) at the Public University of Navarra and a researcher at its Institute for Advanced Social Research: I-Communitas. He is co-founder and director of the Institute for Global Knowledge, Governance and Development and associate researcher at the think tank Globernance, directed by Daniel Innerarity. He has been a Visiting Fellow at the University of Essex, at Cornell University, Visiting Professor at the University College of Dublin, and Consulting Professor at Nur University in Bolivia. His research interests include processes of violent radicalization, mechanisms of collaborative governance, collective security, social and economic development, and issues related to the sociology of science and religion. These are reflected in some 85 academic articles and books. He is a regular contributor to written and audiovisual media. He was included in the catalogue of Thinking Heads 2020-2021, a communications consultancy, as one of the 100 new talented speakers in Spain. A sample of his production can be seen at sergarcia.es or at his website at the Public University of Navarra.

Why do we see the country and the city as intrinsically different spaces and ways of being? Almost 50 years after Raymond Williams (1973) argued that this contrast is “one of the major forms in which we become conscious of a central part of our experience and of the crises of our society,” we continue to see agrarian economies and life as relics of an idyllic past, dissolving at the hands of the forward-marching cities. Against perspectives that saw the development of capitalism as an urban/industrial set of forces slowly gnawing away at rural/agrarian harmonious and simple living, Williams saw industrial capitalism as intrinsically connected to feudalism and agrarian capitalism, the urban to the rural. Rather than reflecting a historical reality, he argued that this spatial and ideological binary was constructed in direct response to the growth of capitalism and imperialism.

Today, more than half of the world’s population lives in urban areas—but agrarian livelihoods and lives are not merely withering away. The country-versus-city binary continues to govern our efforts to find solutions to the grave crises of our times. Contemporary solutions, such as agroecology as an antidote to industrial agriculture or green energy as a foil to fossil fuels, invoke the return to a pristine, sustainable past.

This conference will showcase graduate student papers that explore how the country and city constitute each other and investigate how capital, labor, imaginaries, and sentiments flow between the two.

10-11:30 am - Constructing Nature

Presentations by: Michael Cary, Jessie Mayall, Suraj Kushwaha and Finn Domingo

Discussant: Nataya Friedan

Constructions of nature, Williams reminds us, often contain veiled arguments about people, societies and social relations. This panel asks what kinds of social arguments are embedded in ideas of environmental instability and what kinds of politics emerge from them. We begin in England, where romanticized understandings of ‘the countryside’ underlie contemporary visions for landscape ‘optimization’ for food production and carbon sequestration. We then move to the remote Siachen glacier, where representations of the world’s highest battlefield by the Indian Army mediate public consent for militarization through appeals to martyrdom and national pride. From there we move to the aftermath of wildfires in Los Angeles, where the financial mechanisms and socio-economic effects of homeowners insurance are exacerbating an already unaffordable housing market. Finally, we turn to Paraguay, where the infrastructures of defense from destructive floods—and the politics of blame for when they happen—shape the relationship between an expanding city and neglected countryside.

12:30 -2pm - Morality of Improvement

Presentations by: Yui Sasajima, Maria Paula Espejo and Allen Huang

Discussant: Paul Kohlbry

These four papers examine the construction of rural spaces and urban fringes, paying attention to the flexible ideas of home that often lie behind the creation of certain spaces as desirable or ideal. At the heart of this question is the issue of improvement, which Raymond Williams points us to as a driver behind the subjection of tenants and the landless.Drawing on varying methodologies, these papers examine how rural and urban spaces are bridged—or thought to be bridged—through social reproduction, how home is made in new spaces, and who benefits from the drive to “improve.”

2:15-3:45pm - Structures of Feeling

Presentations by: Liam Greenwell, Georgia Koumantaros , Andrew Colpitts and Grace Myers

Discussant: Katharine Lindquist

Raymond Williams invites us to investigate the dialogic relationship between the rural and urban through the unspoken, shared, and historically contingent “structures of feeling” that emerge from cultural texts. This panel examines Williams’s contribution in relation to the moral, symbolic, representational, and material assemblages by which the rural is imagined. In doing so, we ask how the country and the city become sites of imagined dystopia and utopia alike by which people reimagine life in generative ways. These papers track imagined promises of the countryside—from a site for family values, national becoming, future imagination, and self-actualization—in contexts from rural evangelicalism in New York, queer reckonings with both limitation and thriving, folklore and placemaking in coal country, and the contradictions of village life in Greece. The unclear lines between utopia and dystopia trouble the position of the figures involved and promise—or threaten?—collective self-fashioning.