Join us for a screening of the documentary Bombshell (2026) on Wednesday, September 16, at 6:00 p.m.

In the acclaimed 1964 film Dr. Strangelove, an American president calls a drunken Soviet Premier with bad news: “…Dimitri, you know how we've always talked about the possibility of something going wrong with the Bomb...” The “something” is a deranged commander who has launched a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, which leads to nuclear apocalypse. While a global apocalypse has yet to materialize, the history of nuclear weapons is full of other things going wrong. Indigenous lands have been destroyed, hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of people have died of cancer, and trillions of dollars have been spent on weapons that one U.S. Defense Secretary ultimately concluded were “useless.”

Today the majority of the world’s nations have joined the Treaty for the Prohibition on Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), and surveys suggest strong public support for the TPNW, even in nations that possess nuclear weapons. However, the nine nations in the world that have nuclear weapons are continuing a costly and dangerous nuclear arms race which endangers all life on earth. In this full-day symposium, distinguished experts from diverse disciplines—including physics, political science, history, feminist studies, and peace and conflict studies—will discuss contemporary dangers of nuclear weapons, how we got here, and how we can work for a more secure and peaceful future.

This symposium is cosponsored by the Judith Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies and the Department of Government at Cornell University, on the occasion of Professor Matthew Evangelista’s retirement from Cornell. Professor Evangelista’s scholarship makes groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of the nuclear arms race and means of ending it, and we are pleased to honor his distinguished career in peace and conflict studies.

Panels:

10:00 AM to 11:30 AM: Nuclear Arms Races and How to Stop Them
Ray Acheson (Princeton), David Cortright (Cornell), Lisbeth Gronlund (MIT)

11:30 AM to 12:00 PM: Lunch Break

12:00 PM to 1:15 PM: Keynote: Benoît Pelopidas, Sciences Po, Paris

1:15 PM to 1:30 PM: Coffee Break

1:30 PM to 2:45 PM: New Perspectives on Nuclear Disarmament and Arms Control
"Banning or Facilitating the Test? Reconsidering the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty"
Ruoyu Li (Colgate)

“Atmospheric Absorption: Nuclear Weapons and the Science of Climate Doomsday in the 1970s”
Benjamin Wilson (Harvard)

2:45 PM to 3:45 PM: Coffee Break
Guest appearance by Frank von Hippel and David Holloway via Zoom

3:45 PM to 5:15 PM: Panel: Nuclear War and Climate Catastrophe
Neta Crawford (St. Andrews), Zia Mian (Princeton), and Benoît Pelopidas (Sciences Po)

Host
Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies, part of the Einaudi Center for International Studies

Co-sponsor
Department of Government

My talk on "Translation and Language Justice in and Beyond Europe” will focus on “language justice,” (a term that does not as-yet refer to a clear field or critical problematic), as a rubric for a vision of language politics straddling law, official global language policy, and language rights under conditions of imperialism and cultural conquest. Drawing on Benjamin Constant’s anti-Napoleonic broadside The Spirit of Conquest and Usurpation in Their Relation to European Civilization,” (1814), which diagnosed the psychic violence of linguistic occupation, I will adapt and extend his association of cultural usurpation to contemporary cultural contexts in and beyond Europe. Constant associated usurpation with an existentially grave condition in which each act of articulation becomes a form of self-harming; attacking the site where individual consciousness, auto-identification and affective social ties constitute a fusional core of self and collective identity. The talk will consider the impact of an abrogated “right to language” on political life, from the targeting of languages spoken by immigrants, minorities and noncitizens to the hastening of language extinction as a global phenomenon particularly threatening to the survival of Indigenous languages. I also take up the matter of how generative AI, bolstering the kind of nationalist monolinguism that leads to “English only” language policies as well as the practice of instrumentalized linguistic streamlining conducive machine translation, is emerging as a new political force of linguistic usurpation and conquest.

About the speaker

Emily Apter is Julius Silver Professor of French and Comparative Literature at New York University. She earned her BA from Harvard University and PhD from Princeton University. In 2012, she was appointed Remarque-Ecole Normale Supérieure Visiting Professor; she has also taught at the University of California, Los Angeles; UC Davis; Cornell University; and Williams College. Apter was president of the American Comparative Literature Association in 2017-18. She is editor of the book series Translation/Transnation from Princeton University Press, and serves on the editorial boards of Publications of the Modern Languages Association of America, Comparative Literature, October, Diacritics, Sites, and Signs. A 2003 Guggenheim Fellow, Apter was awarded a two-year Mellon Grant (with Jacques Lezra) in 2011-12, for a seminar on “The Problem of Translation.” In fall 2014, she was a Humanities Council Fellow at Princeton University.

Apter’s books include Unexceptional Politics: On Obstruction, Impasse, and the Impolitic (Verso, 2018), Against World Literature: On The Politics of Untranslatability (Verso, 2013), and The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (Princeton, 2006). She has also published extensively in Third Text, e-flux, October, boundary 2, New Literary History, Littérature, Artforum, Critical Inquiry, Translation Studies, Cabinet, The Global South, Grey Room, Boston Review, differences, and Public Culture, among others.