Talk by Curt Gambetta (Architecture, Cornell University)

Beginning in the late 1940s, scientists, building professionals, and technocrats embraced cement-stabilized mud (also known as “soil-cement”) as an easy-to-use, economical alternative to pukka concrete and fired brick house construction in India. But…

The millennial city of the global South is a charged setting for allegations of corruption, with skyscrapers, land grabs, and slum evictions invoking outrage at deepening economic polarization. This talk, based on a newly published book Corruption Plots: Stories, Ethics, and Publics of the Late Capitalist City,…

Talk by David Ludden

The Rohingya survival crisis – in borderlands of Myanmar and Bangladesh -- has disappeared from the headlines, but Rohingyas remain one of the largest stateless populations in the world. Their suffering can be understood as an extreme example of the violence inflicted by national…

“Priming the Canon: Ananda Coomaraswamy and Sri Lankan Art”

There has been much discussion about how to understand Ananda K. Coomaraswamy (1877-1947) as an influential voice in art history. This talks considers the place of Sri Lanka in his intellectual process, and therefore in the underlying energies of…

Lund Critical Debate

Democracies worldwide—even many wealthy democracies long considered safely consolidated—are at risk today. Governments, policymakers, and voters face new conflicts over democratic institutions, checks and balances, which citizens can compete for office or deserve representation, and what…

Talk by Anushay Malik (History, Simon Fraser University)

Before 1947, the working classes in the province of Punjab imagined themselves as part of a world much bigger than the one they would find themselves in after Punjab was partitioned to carve out the new states of India and Pakistan. This time (in the…

As in years prior, this conference provides an opportunity for graduate students to critically engage with the particularities of Sri Lanka and its diasporas; particularities often sacrificed to make our work speak clearly to non-specialist audiences. While we acknowledge the many benefits of such generalized…

Scholars, artists, and organizers who understand the violence of displacement deeply and intimately narrate and theorize how borders, militarized imperialisms, and their colonial genealogies shape people’s lives and foreclose right to both home and refuge. Featuring presentations, performances, films, installations…

Reading by V. V. Ganeshananthan (Novelist)

Jaffna, 1981. Sixteen-year-old Sashi wants to become a doctor. But over the next decade, a vicious civil war tears through her home, and her dream spins off course as she sees her four beloved brothers and their friend K swept up in the mounting violence. Desperate…

To the Academy is a multimedia performance work inspired by Kafka’s short story, A Report for an Academy, and the ancient Sanskrit treatise on performance, The Natyashastra. The piece weaves a tale about an ape couple rehearsing a music hall show for a group of scholars. As the apes grapple with how to entertain…

A Keynote Event for Displaced. Detained. Undeterred: A Critical/Creative Symposium

Thursday, April 20, 2023, Physical Sciences Building 401

4.30 Opening Remarks
Saida Hodžić (Cornell University)

4.45 KEYNOTE DIALOGUE

In this keynote, speakers Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi and Yến Lê…

The South Asian Imaginary: Exploring the region through image-making practices

A lecture by Rahaab Allana, curator and publisher at Alkazi Foundation for the Arts, New Delhi, to introduce the foundation's latest reader, Unframed: Discovering Image Practices in South Asia, co-published with…

Talk by Amina Yaqin (Associate Professor in World Literatures and Publishing, University of Exeter)

In this talk, I look back at the literary history of feminism in Urdu poetry through the voices of selected twentieth-century women poets. The aim is not to establish a canon of feminist poetry but to trace…

Talk by Kamila Shamsie (Novelist)

Kamila Shamsie will read from her new novel Best of Friends. The novel required Shamsie to return in her imagination to her 15-year-old self who lived through a pivotal moment in Pakistan’s history (the death of the dictator, Zia-ul-Haq, followed by the election of a 35-year…

Please join us for a virtual lecture by Petra Kieffer-Pülz (Academy of Sciences and Literature, Mainz).

Between 1803 and 1813 five ordination lineages were introduced from Burma to Sri Lanka that formed the Amarapuranikāya. In 1851 a dispute concerning the legal validity of the monastic boundary (sīmā) of…

States often fortify their borders against militant threats. How do these efforts shape civilian welfare and perceptions in borderland communities? Professor Christopher Blair conceptualizes border fortification as a legibility-building endeavor. By bolstering state reach in areas of weak historical penetration,…

As part of Mann Library’s Sustainable Fashion programming for the month of April, the Cornell and Ithaca area public are warmly invited to a screening of a documentary film co-directed by professor of communication and feminist, gender & sexuality studies Katherine Sender. Threads: Sustaining India’s Textile…

Talk by Nusrat S Chowdhury (Anthropology, Amherst College)

This paper contemplates the postcolonial trajectories of development and democracy by focusing on a river bridge in Bangladesh which is by far the country’s most high-profile infrastructural project. While the Padma Bridge was inaugurated only in…

Conducting international fieldwork provides significant value for dissertation research in various disciplines. Panelists will share information, guidance, and lessons learned related to planning, preparing, and conducting fieldwork overseas. Topics include factors shaping field site location(s) and/or partner(s),…

Over 500 Cornellians have crossed the globe with the Fulbright U.S. Student Program since the 1940s. You could be the next!

The program, administered by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, supports college graduates conducting research or teaching English in more than 150 countries. The…

Current calls to decolonize global research renew the institutional and personal scrutiny of our “best practices” in conducting field research. Beyond formal adherence to the Belmont principles of “respect, beneficence, and justice,” researchers must reexamine some of the hidden (and not so hidden) costs borne by…

Talk by Jomy Abraham

Wars, pogroms, environmental catastrophes, and resulting refugee crises turn certain geographies into killing fields. We are witnessing ‘unproductive’ geographies and population groups being abandoned to perish. The contemporary world is seeing new modes of narratives and texts emerging…

It is now widely accepted that the age of decolonization was also a turning point in the history of democracy, as the vast majority of the non-European world replaced imperial rule with democratic republics. Although this fact is taken for granted, scholarly attention so far has been focused on the nationalist…

Bartels World Affairs Lecture In this year's Bartels lecture from the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, former president of Costa Rica Carlos Alvarado Quesada shares how conservation and sustainability are crucial for preserving democracy around the world. Costa Rica is one of the most biodiverse…

A conversation about encounters, collaborations, and commitments that shape, motivate, and inspire anthropologists.

Co-sponsored by the Society for the Humanities; Science and Technology Studies; and the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies. Thank you.

Ashawari Chaudhuri is a visiting…

Faculty and staff are invited to join for an overview and open discussion of the Global Hubs initiative.

Vice Provost Wendy Wolford will explain the purpose of the Global Hubs, and faculty leads for several of the Hubs locations will discuss their experiences with institutional partners and ways for faculty…

Asian borders are often sites of division, surveillance, and militarization that usurp histories of indigenous sovereignty and fluid mobility, even as they are developed as zones of superficial connectivity. Against these spectacles, ordinary people escape and cross borders every day, often in illicit,…

Talk by Jyoti Balachandran (History, Pennsylvania State University)

This talk centers around the life and works of Qutb al-Din Muhammad al-Nahrawali (d. 1582), a Muslim intellectual from northern Gujarat who achieved tremendous professional success in Mecca. Over the course of his life, al-Nahrawali served…

Please join Cornell's Society for Buddhist Studies for a virtual talk by Prof. Richard F. Nance (Indiana University).

Attributed to the great Sarvāstivādin thinker Vasubandhu, the fifth-century Buddhist text The Logic of Explication (Vyākhyāyukti) is perhaps best known today for the elegant arguments it…

Given the intertwined history of industrial capitalism, extraction and colonialism, this symposium will explore the pending reparations to their victims from a multidisciplinary perspective. Acknowledging the accountability of the first industrializing countries of the Global North to the previously colonized…