As the war in Ukraine rages on, how is the ground shifting across Eurasia and beyond? Leading journalists and scholars covering Russia, Europe, China and the global political landscape will discuss how international relations, security, trade and economics are shifting in ways not seen since World War II.

This Arts Unplugged event will feature:

Ann Simmons, the Wall Street Journal's Moscow Bureau Chief

Mark Landler, the New York Times' London Bureau Chief

Peter Katzenstein, the Walter S. Carpenter, Jr. Professor of International Studies

Jessica Chen Weiss, associate professor of government in the College of Arts & Sciences

Ray Jayawardhana, the Harold Tanner Dean in the College of Arts and Sciences, will moderate the discussion.

For the Islamist-nationalist circles in Turkey, the conquest of Istanbul on May 29, 1453 is a significant triumph inherited from the magnificent times of the Ottoman Empire, and believed to denote the founding moment of the Turkish nation. In this research, the Islamist-nationalist rhetoric of the Ottoman conquest of Istanbul is seen as a manipulated melancholy project of the Islamist-nationalist imagination, which fixes the conquest in (spatial) images of its own “mourning” and produces “lost objects” to use as a tool of political propaganda (although nothing has actually been lost). Architecture as the bearer of clues to the search for lost objects and spatial-political instruments of the conquest rhetoric thus becomes the subject of the research. Hagia Sophia, whose status as a prayer space (mosque) and secular space (museum) has always been the main issue of controversies, is instrumental in thinking of “the lost mosque”. Thus, in this research, the building is brought forward as “the lost object” of the politically manipulated melancholy project of the Islamist-nationalist imagination, and its political misuse as “the lost mosque” becomes the main focus.

Berin F. Gür is professor of Architecture at TED University (TEDU), Ankara, Turkey and a visiting research fellow at the Institute for Comparative Modernities. She has taught architectural design since 1992 and teaches classes on the spatial and formal analysis of buildings and its theory, reading architectural precedents, and topics in contemporary architecture. She has various publications in the international and national journals and books on the processes of architectural design and urban design; architectural design education; architectural criticism; ideologies and architecture, and the production of urban space. She was the head of TEDU Department of Architecture between 2013-2019; and worked as the Vice Dean between 2019-2021.

Her time at Cornell and the ICM will be spent working on her current book project, Conquest and Melancholy: The Islamist-nationalist Rhetoric of the Conquest of Istanbul and the Manipulation of Architecture. The book brings together two seemingly irrelevant terms: “conquest” associated with glory and victory, and “melancholy” associated with mourning and grief. Togetherness of conquest and melancholy in this book advocates re-conceptualization of melancholy as a manipulated project. And the following questions are formulated: How is the Istanbul’s conquest represented in the Islamist-nationalist imagination? What are the melancholy objects or, in other words, “the lost objects” of the Islamist-nationalist rhetoric of conquest? What are the spatial political instruments of the conquest rhetoric?

Livestream available with this link. No registration required for online viewing:

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The Cornell Contemporary China Initiative (CCCI) of the East Asia Program welcomes Simona Segre-Reinach (Fashion Studies, University of Bologna, Italy) as part of our semester-long theme of Fashion and Politics in Twentieth-Century China with faculty host, Peidong Sun (History, Cornell)

Some of the questions that guest speakers will investigate include: How do we define politics from the dimension of fashion? What was a politicized fashion? How did fashion reflect the power structure? How did fashion become a way of obedience and resistance? And how do we define and interpret the human condition in China under Mao's rule (1949-1976)? What was human resilience in the face of absolute power?

Simona Segre-Reinach's talk is titled, "Sino-Italian Encounters in Global Fashion: 20 Years of Sino-Italian Collaborations."

The talk focuses on the evolution of fashion relations between Italy and China in a unique period - from the late nineties of the 20th century to the second decade of the 21st century – which signals a change in the concept and the practices of Italian fashion on the one hand and the emerging of Chinese fashion withing a global setting on the other.

The CCCI lecture series aims to expose the broad campus community to issues and scholarship of contemporary China.

We thank our co-sponsors:

Asian American Pacific Studies Program | Asian Studies | College of Human Ecology | Cornell Society for the Humanities | Feminist, Gender & Sexuality StudiesDepartment of History | Department of International & Comparative Labor Relations | Department of History | The Levinson China & Asia-Pacific Studies Program

Dr. Maria Snegovaya examines the drivers of Russian revanchism. Russia’s behavior has thrown into doubt the purported strength of international norms regarding territorial integrity, not least because Putin himself has spoken of seeking to ‘re-gather’ adjacent territory deemed ‘lost’—as they had been once under possession by Imperial Russia or the Soviet Union—through military means.

While recognizing that decisions to go to war and to reclaim lost territory are complex and multifaceted, the speaker argues that many analyses overlook—ironically—the nature of the political regime that rules Russia. If domestic political variables do matter for observers of Russia, the emphasis is on how Russia is institutionally autocratic such that it will pursue a foreign policy more aggressive than what would have been the case if it were democratic.

Maria Snegovaya and her co-author define a political regime in both institutional and behavioral terms to acknowledge the structural organization of power as well as the qualities of the elites that exercise influence. They show a strictly institutional definition of political regimes neglects the elite continuity that ties together the Soviet and the Russian leadership. This elite continuity across the two systems matter because the political regime still privileged particular beliefs about the use of force to settle international disputes, the intentions of the United States, and the relationship that certain nations should have vis-à-vis Russia. These beliefs, which they show to hold sway, had their Soviet antecedents.

Please join us for this virtual conversation. Register here.

About Speaker

Maria Snegovaya is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Political Science at Georgetown University's Walsh School of Foreign Service, a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies at George Washington University, and Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Center for New American Security. She is a comparative politics, international relations, and statistical methods specialist. The key focus of her research is democratic backsliding in Central and Eastern Europe, as well as Russia’s domestic and foreign policy.

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Presented by the Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies. Co-sponsored by the Institute for European Studies and the Gender and Security Sector Lab.

Since the early 2000s, Poland has experienced a remarkable Jewish revival, largely driven by non-Jewish Poles with a passionate new interest in all things Jewish. Klezmer music, Jewish-style restaurants, kosher vodka, and festivals of Jewish culture have become popular, while new museums, memorials, Jewish studies programs, and Holocaust research centers reflect soul-searching about Polish-Jewish relations before, during, and after the Holocaust. In Resurrecting the Jew, Geneviève Zubrzycki examines this revival and asks what it means to try to bring Jewish culture back to life in a country where 3 million Jews were murdered and where only about 10,000 Jews now live.

Drawing on a decade of participant-observation in Jewish and Jewish-related organizations in Poland, a Birthright trip to Israel with young Polish Jews, and more than a hundred interviews with Jewish and non-Jewish Poles engaged in the Jewish revival, Resurrecting the Jew presents an in-depth look at Jewish life in Poland today. The book shows how the revival has been spurred by progressive Poles who want to break the association between Polishness and Catholicism, promote the idea of a multicultural Poland, and resist the Far Right government. The book also raises urgent questions, relevant far beyond Poland, about the limits of performative solidarity and empathetic forms of cultural appropriation.

Speaker
Geneviève Zubrzycki, Professor of Sociology at the University of Michigan

Register for the session here.

There is a strong tendency in social and political sciences to simplify the academic use of the concept of populism. This is what populists do when they dichotomise reality into friends and enemies. The goal of this talk is to highlight and discuss why scholars have to develop an adaptive and multifaceted perspective, and how changing realities across Europe and the United States, including the experience of Covid-19 pandemic, might contribute to strengthen this perspective.

Speaker
Oscar Mazzoleni, Professor of Political Science and Political Sociology, University of Lausanne

Register for the session here.

Presented by the Institute for European Studies