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

I am a historian of Central and Eastern Europe, interested in the interactions between German and Russian power (their competition for territory and influence) across this space, as well as the consequences these interactions have had for the people living in between. In my work, I explore questions such as the relationship between nationalism and empire, the importance of imperial legacies in modern European history, and the centrality of imperial competition to East European politics and societies. While I approach my field from a global and transnational perspective, I do not forsake the local but aim to show how small places can shed light on the relationship between great power politics and large global processes, and local politics and society.

Hosted by the Institute for European Studies, part of the Einaudi Center for International Studies

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.

Greenland: The Last Colony in Europe: The history, status and future of Greenland as seen from its closest European neighbour

President Guðni Th. Jóhannesson, former President of Iceland (2016–2024) and current Professor of History at the University of Iceland, explores Greenland’s complex path from colony to emerging nation. Drawing on Iceland’s own experience of gaining independence from Denmark, he examines the historical ties, political tensions, and geopolitical stakes that shape Greenland’s future amid growing great-power interest in the Arctic. The lecture offers a unique perspective from Iceland, Europe’s closest neighbour to Greenland, on questions of sovereignty, self-determination, and small-state resilience in an era of global change.