Bartels World Affairs Lecture

In this year’s Bartels lecture, Ambassador Samantha Power examines the causes and consequences of dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). While reductions in United States foreign assistance have inflicted harm on millions of people, the principal beneficiaries of the cuts, Power contends, are the People’s Republic of China and other governments that prefer to operate without scrutiny or accountability.

Join us as Power outlines a strategy for revitalizing a broad bipartisan coalition to support foreign assistance. To succeed in building resilient aid structures, politicians and stakeholders will need to demonstrate the effectiveness of aid programs to the public. U.S. resources should be used as leverage to secure new commitments from partner countries and mobilize additional investments from allied governments, the private sector, philanthropy, and members of the diaspora.

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Speaker

Ambassador Samantha Power served in the Biden-Harris administration as the administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the world’s premier international development agency. She was the 28th U.S. ambassador to the United Nations during the Obama-Biden administration. Her first book, "A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide, won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.

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About the Bartels World Affairs Lecture

The Bartels World Affairs Lecture is a signature event of the Einaudi Center for International Studies. This flagship event brings distinguished international figures to campus each academic year to speak on global topics and meet with Cornell faculty and students, particularly undergraduates. The lecture and related events are made possible by the generosity of Henry E. Bartels ’48 and Nancy Horton Bartels ’48.

Robespierre’s Lists: Power and Connection in the French Revolutionary Terror

Colin Jones is Emeritus Professor of History at Queen Mary University of London. He has written many books on French history, most recently The Fall of Robespierre (2021), French Revolutionary Lives (2024) and The Shortest History of France (2025). For 2025-26 he is John and Constance Birkelund Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.

In the last months of his life, Maximilien Robespierre (1758-94), then a major figure on the Committee of Public Safety that was running the Terror, drew up a number of lists of what he called ‘patriots with more or less talent’. Identifying the nearly 200 individuals on these lists and calculating their connections to Robespierre allows us to explore how he built a political network and how this affected the operations of the Terror. It also offers a perspective on why Robespierre was overthrown in July 1794.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine, political radicalization, the crisis of the U.S., the rise of China—these are global shocks that define our current moment.

But in Europe, it is commonly said, they have a particular meaning. Not only are they close at hand. They signify a particular type of shock, a "pivot in time" as Germany's Chancellor Scholz put it. They signify an awakening. They signify the "return of history."

Looking back to the 20th century, Adam Tooze will explore the recurring theme in European public debate of the "end" and "return" of history.

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About the Speaker

Professor Adam Tooze (Columbia University) teaches and researches widely in the fields of 20th-century and contemporary history, and is interested in a range of themes in political, intellectual, and military history, across a canvas stretching from Europe across the Atlantic. He is the author of prize-winning books such as The Wages of Destruction (2006), The Deluge (2014), Crashed (2018), and Shutdown (2021). His latest book, Carbon: Climate Crisis and the Decline of the West, is forthcoming in February 2027.

About the Event

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.

The Fulbright U.S. Student Program supports U.S. citizens to study, conduct research in any field, or teach English in more than 150 countries. The program is open to graduate students, recent graduates, and young professionals. Undergraduate students who wish to begin the program immediately after graduation are encouraged to start the process in their junior year. Recent graduates are welcome to apply through Cornell.

The Fulbright program at Cornell is administered by the Mario Einaudi Center for International studies. Applicants are supported through all stages of the application and are encouraged to start early by contacting fulbright@einaudi.cornell.edu.

Register for the virtual session.

Can’t attend? Contact fulbright@einaudi.cornell.edu.

In this talk, Kira Thurman investigates the rise of Black Europeans in popular music since WWII. After the collapse of European empires, European popular music industries turned to the musical labor of former colonial subjects to reinvent themselves in an increasingly global and English-speaking marketplace. Interpreting many Black European pop stars such as Boney M or Milli Vanilli as Black Americans, however, transatlantic listeners often failed to recognize the musicians performing in front of them as belonging to European history. How, then, do we account for both the overwhelming presence—and discursive absence—of Black Europeans in modern history? This talk seeks to illuminate how musical producers, performers, and their audiences sought to make sense of—and occasionally reject—the category of ‘Black Europe’ in the wake of a newly emerging post-imperial Western Europe.

About the speaker

Kira Thurman is a highly-sought-after and award-winning historian and musicologist. A classically-trained pianist who grew up in Vienna, Austria, Thurman earned her PhD in history from the University of Rochester with a minor field in musicology from the Eastman School of Music. Her research, which has appeared in German Studies Review, the American Historical Review, Journal of the American Musicological Society (JAMS), Opera Quarterly, and Journal of World History, focuses on two topics that occasionally converge: the relationship between music and national identity, and Central Europe's historical and contemporary relationship with the Black diaspora.

Host

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

The Fulbright U.S. Student Program supports U.S. citizens to study, conduct research in any field, or teach English in more than 150 countries. The program is open to graduate students, recent graduates, and young professionals. Undergraduate students who wish to begin the program immediately after graduation are encouraged to start the process in their junior year. Recent graduates are welcome to apply through Cornell.

The Fulbright program at Cornell is administered by the Mario Einaudi Center for International studies. Applicants are supported through all stages of the application and are encouraged to start early by contacting fulbright@einaudi.cornell.edu.

Register for the virtual session.

Can’t attend? Contact fulbright@einaudi.cornell.edu.