The Laidlaw Scholars Leadership and Research Program promotes ethical leadership and international research around the world—starting with the passionate leaders and learners found on campuses like Cornell. Open to first- and second-year students, the two-year Laidlaw program provides generous support to carry out internationally focused research, develop leadership skills, engage with community projects overseas, and become part of a global network of like-minded scholars from twenty universities worldwide.

At this session, we'll share more information about the program, including independent international projects with the Einaudi Center’s trusted partners around the world for the summer 2026 leadership-in-action portion of the program, and tips for writing a successful application. Applications are due January 12, 2026.

Register here. Can’t attend? Contact programs@einaudi.cornell.edu.

IES Luigi Einaudi Distinguished Lecture

With the second Trump administration challenging the basic tenets of transatlantic relations, Europeans must find a way to contain the damage and chart a new path forward. Doing so successfully will require an understanding of the post-Cold War history of Europe, NATO, and Ukraine. In this lecture, Professor Mary Elise Sarotte, Director of Yale’s Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy, will highlight how this history illuminates the tensions between Europe and the United States today. Drawing on her award-winning book Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate, Sarotte will both illuminate how we got to where we are—and what might happen as American foreign policy enters an era of “magical realism.”

About the Speaker

Mary Elise Sarotte is the Brady-Johnson Professor of Grand Strategy with a tenured joint appointment at the Yale School of Management. An expert in the history of international relations, she directs the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy.

Professor Sarotte has held tenured faculty appointments at the University of Cambridge, the University of Southern California, and, most recently, the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies or SAIS, where she was the inaugural holder of the Marie-Josée and Henry R. Kravis Distinguished Professorship of Historical Studies.

Host and Sponsors

This event is hosted by the Institute for European Studies (IES), part of the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies. The IES Luigi Einaudi Distinguished Lecture is an annual event.

Presented by Alex V. Barnard, Assistant Professor of Sociology at New York University (NYU)

Is there an underlying order to how societies classify, treat, and control madness? Both popular and scholarly portrayals of contemporary mental health systems emphasize service fragmentation and inter-professional competition. In this talk, I draw on a year of in-depth fieldwork in France, including observations in a public mental health clinic, social service office, and courts, supplemented with nearly two-hundred interviews with administrators and clinicians, to show the underlying logic to the trajectories of people with serious mental illness through the welfare state. As I show, decision-making across these sites is linked by a shared conception, both embedded in formal policy and informal practices, of what makes someone a malade—a real mentally-ill person. This strong medical and bureaucratic identity ties this population to a paternalist, protective psychiatric system, in sharp contrast to the U.S., where the absence of a clear administrative category for this population leads to a chaotic mix of coercion and care from jails, shelters, and hospitals. While these results reveal the power of the French state to construct a particular definition of what it means to have a serious mental illness, I show how defining the population in this way constrains attempts to reform the system. This talk suggests how the dynamic interplay between categories adopted in official policy, used in professional practice, and adopted by populations themselves can reproduce national differences, even in an era where psychiatric knowledge and medical treatment are converging across national borders.

Speaker

Alex V. Barnard is an assistant professor of sociology at New York University and holds a PhD in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley. His work examines medical and bureaucratic decision-making, welfare policy, and social control comparatively. His previous book, Conservatorship: Inside California's System of Coercion and Care for Mental Illness (Columbia University Press), examines California's involuntary treatment system, showing how a failure of government oversight and inter-agency coordination leads to the extensive use of coercive interventions that provide neither care nor control. Ongoing projects include examining trends in national legislation around involuntary psychiatric treatment, analyzing variation in the policing of protests and university responses to the 2024 student protest encampments, and the governance of emerging addictions to online gambling and AI.

Host
Institute for European Studies, part of the Einaudi Center for International Studies

Co-host
The Department of Sociology Colloquium Series

Panelists:

Samira Rafaela, Former Member of European Parliament, Visiting Scholar, Cornell Law School

Chiara Cristofolini, Associate Professor of Labor Law, University of Trento, Visiting Scholar, Cornell School of Industrial and Labor Relations

Sarosh Kuruvilla, Andrew J. Nathanson Family Professor in Industrial and Labor Relations, Global Labor and Work, Academic Director, Global Labor Institute

Moderator:

Chantal Thomas, Radice Family Professor of Law and Director, Cornell Center for Global Economic Justice Cornell Law School