What do you do when the site where you planned to do your research has a major disruption making your research infeasible? What do you do when a loved one gets sick and you need to find more time for caregiving in the last semester of your program? What do you do when you get a job—a year earlier than you anticipated—and you need to finish quickly? Have a Plan B! Come hear from current and former PhD students who have had to make changes in plans, how they negotiated the process with their committee, and where they are today.

Moderator

Mildred Warner (City and Regional Planning, AAP)Panelists

Gloria Blaise (Natural Resources and the Environment, CALS)Michael Cary (Global Development, CALS)George Homsy (Binghamton University)Adam (Chuling) Huang (International and Comparative Labor, ILR)***

Grad Chats: Conversations on International Research and Practice is a series hosted by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies to support graduate students with interdisciplinary training and planning around conducting international research.

Spring 2023 Schedule

From Plan A to Plan B: Designing Research for a Changing World (Thursday, February 16, 4:30 pm – 6:00 pm, Uris Hall G02)Best Practices and Challenges in International Field Research (Tuesday, March 14, 4:30 pm – 6:00 pm, Uris Hall G08)Beyond the IRB: Ethics and International Research (Wednesday, March 29, 4:30 pm – 6:00 pm, Uris Hall G08)Finding a Research Focus through Creative Writing (Tuesday, April 18, 4:30 pm – 6:00 pm, Uris Hall G08)Travel Health and Safety Awareness for Conducting Research Abroad (Tuesday, May 9, 4:30 pm – 6:00 pm, Uris Hall G08)

Borderlands, migrations, and movement are prevalent themes in post-secondary education. They connect students to seemingly disparate experiences in an increasingly inter-connected world. How do we engage with these topics to teach effectively about diversity, equity, inclusion, and social justice? In this workshop, we combine the expertise of faculty across disciplines and area studies to share ideas and resources with one another.

This online workshop is sponsored by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, with funding support from the U.S. Department of Education Title VI NRC Program.

Speakers:

Nicole Childrose (History, Columbia-Green Community College)

Debra Castillo (Latina/o Studies, Cornell)

Tristan Ivory (sub-Saharan Africa/Sociology, Cornell)

Natasha Raheja (South Asia/Anthropology, Cornell)

Please join Cornell's Society for Buddhist Studies for a virtual talk by Prof. Maria Heim, the George Lyman Crosby 1896 & Stanley Warfield Crosby Professor in Religion at Amherst College.

Prof. Heim will argue that Buddhaghosa in the Sumaṅgalavilāsinī, and in particular, his commentarial elaboration of the Mahāparinibbāna Sutta, appreciates the literary beauty of the sutta and further embellishes it. His literary expansions of the weeks, days, and hours of the Buddha's final nirvana employ rich imagery, shifts of perspective, foreshadowing, and other literary devices to heighten the acute emotional power and beauty of the narrative.

The talk is sponsored by the GPSA-FC and the Department of Asian Studies, and is open to all interested.

Please join Cornell's Society for Buddhist Studies for a virtual talk by Prof. Anne M. Blackburn, the Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities here at Cornell.

In her research, Prof. Blackburn works at the intersection of Buddhist institutional history, political economy, intellectual history, and literature. She focuses on intellectual-political centers in what is now Sri Lanka (formerly Lanka) during the 2nd millennium A.D., locations in what are now Burma, Thailand, and India, and the circulatory processes that shaped these connections. Prof. Blackburn’s latest book, Buddhist-inflected Sovereignties Across the Indian Ocean: A Pali Arena, 1200-1550 (supported by an ACLS fellowship), will be published by the University of Hawai’i Press in Fall 2023.

The talk is sponsored by the GPSA-FC and the Department of Asian Studies, and is open to all interested.

Open up a whole new world by studying abroad!

Cornellians who have studied abroad are sharing their experiences at the Office of Global Learning's study abroad fair. You'll learn about where in the world you can study, what programs work for you and your major, and how study abroad can enhance your college experience.

Join us for international treats! No registration required.

Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by MK Long (PhD Candidate, Cornell University), which explores the rhetorical force of relationships in biographies of Buddhist nuns in Burma.

This Gatty Lecture will take place on Zoom only. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

Participate by Zoom here.

About the Talk

Understandings of Buddhist lay women and monastics in Burma and other Theravada Buddhist cultures are so far mostly informed by ethnographic projects. There is far less insight into the historical contexts and textual forms in and through which Buddhist monastic women, known in Burmese as thilashin, have worked to harness social and material capital to support their livelihoods, their pursuit of educational opportunities, and the establishment, expansion, and maintenance of their residential and educational institutions.

Long responds to these questions by analyzing a 1982 volume of (auto)biographies of the founder and three generations of successors of a Buddhist nunnery established in central Burma in 1905. The volume’s emphasis on its subjects’ gradual accumulation and upkeep of relationships over the life course, and its close attention to the grounds and effects of different forms of relatedness suggests that sociality, rather than autonomy, is vital to the rhetorical self-presentation of thilashin and their models of authority. Historically, this emphasis also indicates the meaningful persistence of highly intimate and localized networks of belonging amidst the state-driven reorganization of Buddhist institutions in Burma in the 1980s. Bringing together feminist and queer theories of kinship and temporality with studies of Buddhist narrative and scriptural interpretation, Long’s analysis shows how thilashin and their biographers participate in the work of Buddhist historiography to recollect and reproduce communities. Tracing the ways generations of thilashin have reimagined models of authority during socially and politically charged moments of transformation, Long's work positions thilashin as theorists of kinship, gratitude, debt, and property as forms of relatedness that engender new political orientations within and beyond the timescape of a Buddhist nation.

About the Speaker

MK Long is a PhD candidate in the Department of Asian Studies at Cornell University. Long's research interests include Buddhism and gender, contemporary Burmese and Pali literature, biography, kinship, and the micropolitics of Buddhist institutions.

Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Phi Hong Su, (Assistant Professor of Sociology, Williams College), who will speak about Vietnamese migrants in Berlin.

This Gatty Lecture will take place at the Kahin Center, but people are also welcome to join us on Zoom. Lunch will be served. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

Participate by Zoom here.

About the Talk

When the Berlin Wall fell, Germany united in a wave of euphoria and solidarity. Also caught in the current were Vietnamese border crossers who had left their homeland after its reunification in 1975. Unwilling to live under socialism, one group resettled in West Berlin as refugees. In the name of socialist solidarity, a second group arrived in East Berlin as contract workers. The Border Within paints a vivid portrait of these disparate Vietnamese migrants' encounters with each other in the post-socialist city of Berlin. Journalists, scholars, and Vietnamese border crossers themselves consider these groups that left their homes under vastly different conditions to be one people, linked by an unquestionable ethnic nationhood. Phi Hong Su's rigorous ethnography unpacks this intuition. In absorbing prose, Su reveals how these Cold War compatriots enact palpable social boundaries in everyday life. This book uncovers how 20th-century state formation and international migration—together, border crossings—generate enduring migrant classifications. In doing so, border crossings fracture shared ethnic, national, and religious identities in powerful ways.

About the Speaker

Phi Hong Su is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Williams College. Previously, she was a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Division of Social Science at New York University Abu Dhabi. She is interested in people on the move, the understandings and convictions they carry with them across borders, and how these transform as folks rebuild home. In her research and teaching, she draws on these threads to think about im/mobilities, intersectional identities, and inequality.

Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Lina Chhun, (Assistant Professor, Department of American Studies, University of Texas at Austin), who will discuss oral histories in Cambodian American communities.

This Gatty Lecture will take place at the Kahin Center, but people are also welcome to join us on Zoom. Lunch will be served. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

Participate by Zoom here.

About the Talk

In 2009, I began the oral history project that would lead to my book. At the time, I conceptualized my project as one of “uprooting the koh tree,” of dispelling silences within my family and those within the Cambodian American community at large. My master’s thesis, entitled “Uprooting the Koh Tree: Silence and Resilience in Cambodian Narratives of Survival,” was an autoethnography of my own memories and experiences growing up as the daughter of genocide survivors. This autoethnography drew from oral history interviews with members of my family to explore what I considered at the time “the cultures of silence among [Cambodian] immigrants and their children.” Through this narrative—what I have come to see as deeply problematic, a reproduction of well-trod progress narratives from silence to disclosure as the basis of liberal subjectivity—the project intended to serve as “a bridge between generations of survivors, largely disconnected” because of these various silences. In the years since the completion of my master’s thesis—a period of over ten years which saw the project through two graduate programs and multiple disciplinary and interdisciplinary spaces—I have come to understand the possible violence of that initial framing. This presentation is one iteration and one working through of the attachments and tensions I’ve encountered and continue to encounter in doing this work on violence at the intersection of the personal, familial, and historical.

About the Speaker

Lina Chhun was born in Khao-I-Dang, a refugee camp on the Thai-Cambodian border and spent most of her life growing up in California’s Central Valley. Professor Chhun studies historical violence, war, and militarism, with a focus on questions of racial disposability in the context of the U.S. Cold War in Southeast Asia. Her first book manuscript, Walking with the Ghost, queries the complex relationship between registers of memory regarding the U.S. Cold War in Southeast Asia and the Cambodian Holocaust of 1975-79, addressing questions of commemoration and mediation—how and why historical violence comes to be registered, understood, and written into the record via such mediums as archives, landscapes, and experiential narratives. The book challenges historical models of “tragedy” and liberal humanitarian discourses of trauma, approaches which disavow the complex humanity of Cambodian subjects and the continually intersubjective ways in which knowledge about violence is produced and reproduced, nationally and across the diaspora.