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Southeast Asia Program

Information Session: Careers for International Relations Minors

April 29, 2026

11:00 am

Join the International Relations Minor for a virtual career information session featuring Cornell alumni working in diplomacy, education, and law. Panelists will reflect on their career paths, share advice on internships, graduate school, and professional transitions, and answer student questions about careers connected to international relations.

Register here.

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Speakers

Eric Andersen is the Political-Economic Counselor at the U.S. Embassy in Maputo, Mozambique. Having joined the U.S. State Department in 2009, he previously served as Political Counselor (Acting) in Islamabad, Pakistan. His other assignments have included Cairo, Kyiv, and Khartoum, as well as in Washington, D.C. as Special Assistant to the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs. Prior to entering the Foreign Service, he spent four years on Capitol Hill as a Professional Staff Member for the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. In his first stint with the U.S. Government, he flew the SH-60B “Seahawk” helicopter as an aviator in the U.S. Navy. He holds an M.A. in Security Policy from the George Washington University, and a A.B. in English Literature from Cornell University (Class of 1996).

Angie Yucht Swenson, M.S.Ed., Ed.M., is the founder and principal tutor of AYS Tutoring and Consulting, a practice she launched after more than a decade working in both private and public schools across New York City. She specializes in supporting elementary through high school students with learning challenges and has worked with families from diverse international backgrounds, including Russia, Israel, and France. Angie graduated from Cornell University in 2010, majoring in Human Development and minoring in International Relations, followed by a master’s in General and Special Education from Hunter College, and a master’s in School Leadership from Bank Street College of Education. She resides in NYC with her husband, two daughters, and a goldendoodle.

Emma Marshak is a commercial litigator in Washington, DC who specializes in judgment enforcement. She has enforced domestic and international judgments, including awards from investor-state arbitration, in federal and state courts across the United States.

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This session is presented by the Einaudi Center for International Studies. The International Relations minor is open to all Cornell undergraduate students interested in learning about the politics, economics, history, languages, and cultures of the world.

Additional Information

Program

Einaudi Center for International Studies

Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies

East Asia Program

Southeast Asia Program

Latin American and Caribbean Studies

Institute for African Development

Institute for European Studies

South Asia Program

Migrations Program

Southwest Asia and North Africa Program

Society for the Humanities Spring Fellows' Conference on "Scale"

April 24, 2026

9:30 am

A. D. White House, Guerlac Room

Join this year's cohort of Fellows at the Society for the Humanities for presentations on work-in-progress on the 2025-26 focal theme of Scale. Each presentation will be followed by a Q&A. Open to the public.

Scale Fellows’ Conference Friday, April 24, 2026

9:00-9:30am Coffee & Light Refreshments

9:30-10:30am Panel 1

9:30am Addicted to Formlessness: Thomas Mann's Medieval Sculpture
Luke Fidler, Society Fellow
Assistant Professor, Art History, University of Southern California

10:00am Building the North American Anarchist Movement Through Continental Convergences (1986-1989)
Spencer Beswick, HSP Postdoctoral Associate
Cornell University

15-minute break

10:45am-11:45am Panel 2

10:45am The Long 1780s from Provincial, Viceregal, and Imperial Perspectives
Ernesto Bassi, Faculty Fellow
Associate Professor, History, Cornell University

11:15am Integrated Rural Circuits: A Scalar History of Southeast Asia’s Computational Environments
Shaoling Ma, Faculty Fellow
Associate Professor, Asian Studies, Cornell University

11:45-1:15pm Lunch

1:15pm-2:45pm Panel 3

1:15pm A Love Supreme: Toward an Afro-Native Study of Land Acknowledgments
Tiffany Hale, Society Fellow
Assistant Professor, Religion, Barnard College

1:45pm Group Work: How to Practice Queer and Trans Kinship
Teagan Bradway, Society Fellow
Professor, English, SUNY Cortland

2:15pm Poussin’s Blind Orion
Benjamin Anderson, Faculty Fellow
Associate Professor, History of Art and Classics, Cornell University

15-minute break

3-4pm Keynote Speaker
Scale's Remainders; or, Television's Impossible Floor Plans
Nick Salvato
Frederic J. Whiton Professor of Liberal Studies in the Department of Performing and Media Arts, Cornell University

4:30pm: Reception

Additional Information

Program

Southeast Asia Program

PMAPS: A Screening of NEW WAVE

April 30, 2026

6:00 pm

Schwartz Center for Performing Arts, Film Forum

The Performing and Media Arts Presentation Series (PMAPS) presents a film screening of New Wave on the 51st anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War.

Get your free ticket at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/new-wave-at-cornell-university-tickets-198…

Filmmaker Elizabeth Ai embarks on a project to tell a story of joy and youthful defiance as she explores a musical phenomenon in the 1980s known to Vietnamese American teens as new wave. As she delves into the lives of family members and icons of the new wave scene, she uncovers much more than just music and fashion. In the heart of Orange County, California, this counterculture movement takes the youth by storm, becoming a sanctuary for rebellious teens. The fun Euro-synth dance beats and punk/goth aesthetics mask deep traumas--broken dreams and unfulfilled expectations that have shaped her community. The joyful memories of her uncles and aunts sneaking out to this underground scene clash with her own painful childhood, haunted by her mother's abandonment. As the filmmaker digs deeper, the excavation becomes an emotional journey, unraveling mysteries that touch on cultural identity, generational trauma, and the Vietnam War's lasting impact. The exploration transforms from a love letter to her community into a cathartic process for the filmmaker. By confronting these buried emotions, the film takes us on a soulful journey that binds wounds, celebrates resilience, and offers new beginnings.

Co-sponsored by the Southeast Asian Program (SEAP).

Additional Information

Program

Southeast Asia Program

GETSEA Community Book Read with Faizah Zakaria

April 15, 2026

7:00 pm

Join us for a virtual discussion with Faizah Zakaria, author of The Camphor Tree and the Elephant and winner of the 2025 Benda Prize. This virtual conversation is open to the broader public, and is hosted by GETSEA.

All participants should read the Introduction and Chapter 1.

The Camphor Tree and the Elephant offers a striking rethinking of the Anthropocene in Southeast Asia, tracing how religious transformation, from animism to Islam and Christianity, reshaped human relationships to the environment in the nineteenth-century Sumatran highlands and Malay world. Drawing on ethnography, oral traditions, and colonial archives, Zakaria shows how cosmological change, colonial governance, and plantation economies together produced new ways of imagining and exploiting nature.

The Community Book Read is structured as a live, discussion-based conversation with the author, with Juno Salazar Parreñas as discussant, bringing together faculty and graduate students from across institutions. Coming in with at least some familiarity with the text makes a real difference. Even reading the introduction and first chapter will give you enough to engage meaningfully.

Register here: https://get-sea.org/events/

Additional Information

Program

Einaudi Center for International Studies

Southeast Asia Program

14Strings! Sage Chapel Concert

April 26, 2026

4:00 pm

Sage Chapel

14Strings! will be performing at Sage Chapel on Sunday, April 26th from 4pm to 6pm!

14Strings! is a Filipino style Rondalla based in Ithaca, New York. The main instruments are 14 stringed plucked instruments like the banduria, the laud (Lute), and the octavina.

14Strings! was originally a student organization at Cornell University, but there is also a community group consisting of non-students and local residents. The two groups regularly practice and perform together. Members include Cornell undergraduate students, graduate students, faculty, and staff as well as Ithaca residents with no Cornell affiliation. Current members come from China, Malaysia, Japan, the USA and (of course) the Philippines.

Additional Information

Program

Southeast Asia Program

Einaudi Center for International Studies

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