Undergraduate Global Scholars are student leaders in the campus community. This competitive fellowship program is open to students from all colleges and majors with a passion for big global questions and speaking across differences. The Global Scholars program provides a toolkit of resources for weighing challenging questions and builds your practical skills in public debates. For the 2024-2025 school year, Scholars will bring their skills as writers, scholars, activists and artists, poets, hands-on practitioners, and more to study and promote democracy building. By the end of the program, you'll be an active global citizen and champion for social impact.

Applications are due Friday, September 20.

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

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The Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies hosts info sessions for graduate and for undergraduate students to learn more about funding opportunities, international travel, research, and internships. View the full calendar of fall semester sessions.

Talk by Carole McGranahan (Anthropology, University of Colorado)

What does a day of ethnographic research look like? In this talk, I present one day, over the course of thirty years of research with the Tibetan community, sinking into what it feels like to be immersed, to notice, to ask, to listen. I move across field sites – Kathmandu, Toronto, New York – and among people, mostly Pala, Ama, and their families. This is about what it means to make home as a refugee, to learn ethnographically, and to commit to a community. It is an exercise in theoretical storytelling across place and over time about how research grounded in Kathmandu and stories of Tibet extends across continents and oceans to Himalayan North America.

Carole McGranahan is Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Colorado, USA, and a scholar of contemporary Tibet and the Himalayas. She is the author of Arrested Histories: Tibet, the CIA, and Memories of a Forgotten War (2010), co-editor of Imperial Formations (2007) and Ethnographies of U.S. Empire (2018), and editor of Writing Anthropology: Essays on Craft and Commitment (2020). She is currently co-editing The Tibet Reader, a volume on Ethics and Ethnography, and finishing a book about theoretical storytelling.

Talk by Townsend Middleton (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

What happens after colonial industries have run their course? When the factory closes and the fields go fallow, how do laboring communities continue to live and fight amid all that remains? In this talk, anthropologist (and Cornell SAP alum), Towns Middleton takes on these questions through a discussion of his new book Quinine’s Remains. Harvested from cinchona bark, quinine was malaria’s only remedy throughout the colonial period. As such, the alkaloid was vital to the British Empire. British botanists appropriated cinchona from indigenous South America, bringing the ‘fever tree’ to India in the 19th century and establishing massive plantations to produce the medicine the empire needed. Today, the cinchona plantations of the Darjeeling Hills remain—as do the roughly fifty thousand people who call them home. Their futures, however, are unclear. The Indian government has threatened to privatize or shut down this seemingly obsolete and crumbling industry, but the plantation community, led by strident trade unions, has successfully resisted. Overgrown cinchona fields and shuttered quinine factories may appear the stuff of postcolonial ruination, but quinine’s remains are not dead. Rather, they have become the site of urgent efforts to redefine land and life for the twenty-first century. To engage quinine’s remarkable history and its often-confounding aftermaths, then, is to explore what it means to forge life after empire.

Townsend Middleton is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He received his PhD in Anthropology from Cornell University in 2010. He is the author of The Demands of Recognition: State Anthropology and Ethnopolitics in Darjeeling (Stanford 2015) and co-editor of Darjeeling Reconsidered: Histories, Politics, Environments (OUP-India 2018). He publishes broadly on political culture and the conditions of postcoloniality in the Indian Himalayas. He is currently co-editor of the scholarly magazine Limn.

Quinine’s Remains is published by the University of California Press (2024) and is available in digital Open Access format for free globally.

State-Building Under Indian Occupation
In this talk, Dr. Hafsa Kanjwal discusses her book Colonizing Kashmir: State-Building Under Indian Occupation. The book interrogates how Kashmir was made “integral” to India through a study of the decade long rule (1953-1963) of Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad, the second Prime Minister of the State of Jammu and Kashmir. Drawing upon a wide array of bureaucratic documents, propaganda materials, memoirs, literary sources, and oral interviews in English, Urdu, and Kashmiri, Kanjwal examines the intentions, tensions, and unintended consequences of Bakshi’s state-building policies in the context of India’s colonial occupation.

She reveals how the Kashmir government tailored its policies to integrate Kashmir’s Muslims while also showing how these policies were marked by inter-religious tension, corruption, and political repression. Challenging the binaries of colonial and postcolonial, Kanjwal historicizes India’s occupation of Kashmir through processes of emotional integration, development, normalization, and empowerment to highlight the new hierarchies of power and domination that emerged in the aftermath of decolonization. In doing so, she urges us to question triumphalist narratives of India’s state-formation, as well as the sovereignty claims of the modern nation-state.

About the Speaker
Hafsa Kanjwal is an associate professor of South Asian History in the Department of History at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, where she teaches courses on the history of the modern world, South Asian history, and Islam in the Modern World. As a historian of modern Kashmir, she is the author of Colonizing Kashmir: State-building Under Indian Occupation (Stanford University Press, 2023), which examines how the Indian and Kashmir governments utilized state-building to entrench India’s colonial occupation of Kashmir in the aftermath of Partition. Hafsa has written and spoken on her research for a variety of news outlets including The Washington Post, Al Jazeera English, and the BBC.

Host
Judith Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies

Co-Host
South Asia Program

Talk by P. Sainath (Founding Editor, People’s Archive of Rural India)

The 2022 celebrations around the 75th year of India’s Independence seemed devoid of any recall of who and what it was the Indian people fought against to win Freedom and Independence. Official websites dedicated to the subject tell young readers nothing about it. Nor was there any debate on who won India its Independence. A bunch of returning Oxbridge elites? Or, as Gandhi observed, ‘the people themselves’? India’s official website commemorating 75 years of Independence (Azadi ki Amrut Mahotsav) has many thousands of entries on what the government considers vital around that period. It has no single story on, by, or about, nor even a single photo or video of a living freedom fighter – and there are still some, as my book The Last Heroes (Penguin November 2022) would show you. No less importantly, the official site has nothing on the British Raj and its impact on Indians. Two vital questions, then, remain unanswered: what did British colonialism actually do to Indians? And secondly – the question my recent book deals with – who, really, were our freedom fighters? The book records the life stories of 15 very ordinary Indians – representative of tens of millions of others – and how they took on the British Raj. Farmers, labourers, cooks, couriers, homemakers, artisans, students, and others played astonishingly courageous roles without personal gain. They came from a diverse social spectrum: Dalits, Adivasis, Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, OBCs, Brahmins, atheists… What motivated these freedom fighters? Why do they tell us that freedom and independence are two different things?

Magsaysay Prize -winner P. Sainath is an Indian journalist focusing on social and economic inequality, deprivation, and poverty, particularly in rural India. Despite receiving over 60 national and global awards for journalism, Sainath has also declined several – including the Padma Bhushan, as he believes “journalists should never accept prizes and rewards from the governments they cover and critique.” Sainath was McGraw Professor of Writing at Princeton University in the Fall of 2012 and has been conferred doctorates by three other Universities. In India, he has taught journalism for 37 years. His first book, Everybody Loves A Good Drought, was declared a Penguin Classic in 2013 and is in its 61st printing. His latest book, The Last Heroes: Foot Soldiers of Indian Freedom, is already in its 5th edition. A journalist since 1980, Sainath became a full-time rural reporter in 1993 and has since then spent, on average, around 270 days a year in India’s poorest regions, writing from there for India’s largest newspapers, including The Times of India and for The Hindu (of which he was Rural Editor for a decade). More recently, his path-breaking reporting placed India’s ongoing agrarian crisis and farmers’ suicides – over 400,000 in two decades since 1995 – on the national agenda. In 2014, Sainath launched the People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI), a unique online project on rural India, with its 833 million people speaking 780 living languages and a bewildering array of stories, occupations, arts, music, culture, and a lot more. In less than ten years, PARI has won 70 journalism awards, including every single major prize in that field in India.