Coordinated by Crisis and Conflict in Historical Perspective Initiative. Co-sponsored by East Asian Studies and International and Area Studies.
China’s continued rise to prominence in the international arena remains a popular talking point among scholars, policymakers, and pundits. But in assigning such a role, are we possibly assigning too much power and unfettered agency to Beijing’s policymaking elite? In this talk, I argue that China has been – and continues to be – beholden to its domestic institutional weaknesses in its exercise of foreign policy. This perspective is rarely discussed but remains an important lens through which to understand China’s actions in the global arena. I illustrate this dynamic through the historical case of China’s relations with the genocidal Khmer Rouge when they ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979.
Andrew Mertha is Professor of Government at Cornell University. He is the author of three books, The Politics of Piracy: Intellectual Property in Contemporary China (2005); China's Water Warriors: Citizen Action and Policy Change (2008); and Brothers in Arms: Chinese Foreign Assistance to the Khmer Rouge, 1975-1979 (2014), all with Cornell University Press. He has articles published in Comparative Politics, International Organization, and The China Quarterly. He is the former director of the China and Asia-Pacific Studies (CAPS) program at Cornell and is currently the president of the Center for Khmer Studies, the only American Overseas Research Center in mainland Southeast Asia. He speaks Mandarin Chinese, Hungarian, French, and Khmer and lived in China for seven years.
Cathy J. Schlund-Vials is professor of English and Asian/Asian American studies at the University of Connecticut; she is also the director of the Asian and Asian American Studies Institute at UConn. She is author of two monographs: Modeling Citizenship: Jewish and Asian American Writing (Temple University Press, 2011) and War, Genocide, and Justice: Cambodian American Memory Work (University of Minnesota Press, 2012). Her work on visual culture, popular culture, and graphic narrative has appeared in a number of collections and journals, including Modern Language Studies, Amerasia, Life Writing, and positions. She has also coedited a number of collections, which include Disability, Human Rights, and the Limits of Humanitarianism (Ashgate, 2014), Keywords for Asian American Studies (New York University Press, 2015), and Asian America: A Primary Source Reader (Yale University Press, 2017). She recently edited Flashpoints for Asian American Studies (Fordham University Press, 2017) and serves as a series editor--with Rick Bonus and Shelley Lee--for Temple University Press's Asian American History Culture initiative. Professor Schlund-Vials is the current president of the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS).
Co-sponsored by the English Department and the Center for the Humanities.
Frederick "Fritz" Mayer is Professor of Public Policy, Political Science, and Environment and Associate Dean for Strategy and Innovation at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy. Mayer teaches courses on the political economy of public policy, globalization and governance, political analysis, and leadership. In addition, Professor Mayer is the director of POLIS: The Center for Political Leadership, Innovation and Service.
For more information see his biography here: https://sanford.duke.edu/people/faculty/mayer-frederick-w
To register to participate in case competition, click here!
To RSVP to attend the conference events, click here!
A Washington University alumnus, John B. Brennan spent 30 years working in Consular Affairs at the US Department of State, primarily in the Foreign Service in embassies and consulates. He has significant experience in running large-scale programs with global reach gained through support and development of the systems that enable world-wide processing of U.S. visas and passports. As Deputy Assistant Secretary for Resources, he focused on modernizing and securing the IT systems of the Bureau of Consular Affairs. This included engagement in cybersecurity efforts at the Department of State and Interagency level and well as long-term project planning to improve disaster recovery, fail-over capacity, reliability and availability of consular systems. He has long-term experience in Asia with professional level spoken Mandarin and conversational Japanese. He has been engaged with all of the larger consular operations overseas, recently worked with both China and India, and served as the head of all consular operations in Mexico in my last overseas posting. He was involved in the formative program planning for the current information sharing, secure credential production, and biometric identity management that form the basis of current border security systems. He has an academic background in Chinese and Japanese and a deep understanding of the history, language and culture of both countries, including years of living and working in both nations.
Professor Kevin Young-- Assistant Professor of History at University of Massachusetts Amherst
Professor Young will be comparing the 1952 revolutionary period with the Morales era, paying special attention to popular movements, party politics, and the role of the US.
Migration and Mobility in the Modern Age: Refugees, Travelers, and Traffickers in Europe and Eurasia
(Indiana University Press, 2017)
Edited by current and former IAS faculty members Anika Walke, Jan Musekamp, and Nicole Svobodny
The edited volume is the result of the conference "On the Move: Migration and Mobility in Central and Eastern Europe and Eurasia”, which was organized by IAS faculty in 2013. Migration and Mobility provides an interdisciplinary perspective on how migrations and mobility altered identities and affected images of the “other” in Central and Eastern Europe and Russia. Chapters of the book combine methodological and theoretical approaches to migration and mobility studies with detailed analyses of historical, cultural, or social phenomena and thus offer a rich picture of the region as well as the potential of interdisciplinary work.
For more details on the book, please see http://www.iupress.indiana.edu/product_info.php?products_id=808334
Copies of the book will be available for purchase.
Dr. Chad Haddal-- Principal Systems Analyst at Sandia National Laboratory
Join us for a panel discussion about the Rohingya Crisis in Myanmar. Dinner will be provided.
Panelists include:
Prof. Abid Bahar | Dawson College
Prof. Kenton Clymer | Northern Illinois University
Prof. Emeritus Adullahi Ibrahim | University of Missouri - Columbia
Interested in pursing research by serving as an assistant to a professor, writing a thesis or going to graduate school? This event is for you and provides an opportunity to meet the IAS core faculty. Faculty members representing the social science disciplines will lead a discussion about their research topics, process and methods.
Paul B. Stares is the current director of the Center for Preventative Action at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).
Kirk Robertson has a distinguished record of leadership in finance, business, and public service, including executive appointments in the administrations of President Clinton and Bush, and senior management, foreign affairs and national security positions with US Senate committees and senators. He served as the Executive Vice President and transition CEO of OPIC, the US development bank and private equity corporation, where he guided expansion in Africa, Europe and Asia and new social impact products.
Mr. Robertson has also worked for an international law firm, advising clients on cross-border transactions and public policy, with a global private equity fund, and he founded and is now president of Terra Vista Capital, a boutique international finance and business advisory firm. He sits on corporate, industry association and nonprofit boards, is an angel investor, and has lectured at and worked with the entrepreneurship programs at Georgetown, George Washington and American Universities. He received a BA from Grinnell College and an MBA from the George Washington University.
Mr. Robertson started out in Washington working for a prominent US Senator from Missouri, the late Senator Tom Eagleton. His oldest son is a recent Washington University International Relations graduate who is now a Master of Finance candidate at the Olin School of Business.
Whether you've just declared IAS as your major or if you've been part of our program for a semester or more, we invite all IAS sophomores to join us for coffee and conversation.
Learn about the major, meet faculty and staff, find out about study abroad opportunities, discover SIR, and more!
We look forward to officially welcoming you to the International and Area Studies community.
Past research on group boundaries and boundary making has typically focused on the broader conditions that brighten or blur boundaries, allowing group members to contest or maintain social inequalities. Here, I ask how emergent ethnoracial boundaries – those still in formation but not yet adopted by mainstream institutions – are deployed and substantiated. Analyzing the Asian and Hispanic cases, I examine how pioneering social movement publications in the 1970s developed early claims about the boundaries of panethnicity. I investigate the different ways that panethnicity is expressed within Asian and Hispanic communities respectively, while also providing theoretical insight into the common discursive practices that reify new categorical identities. The end result is a new analytical framework for understanding how emergent ethnoracial boundaries are substantiated, which can be used beyond U.S. cases.
Dina Okamoto is Class of 1948 Herman B Wells Professor in the Department of Sociology and Director of the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society (CRRES) at Indiana University. She received her PhD in sociology from the University of Arizona in 2001. Her research examines how group boundaries and identities shift and change, which has broader implications for immigrant incorporation as well as intergroup conflict and cooperation. Her current projects investigate the social underpinnings of panethnicity, the civic and political incorporation of immigrants in the U.S., and the ways youth-serving community organizations deal with increasing ethnic, racial, and language diversity. She is author of Redefining Race: Asian American Panethnicity and Shifting Ethnic Boundaries (Russell Sage Foundation, 2014) and is currently completing a book on how increasing ethnoracial diversity in the U.S. shapes intergroup perceptions and attitudes in the 21st century.
Co-sponsored by the Sociology Department.
Victoria Mutheu is a small-scale farmer who grows crops for sale and home use. A resident of Kajiado County in Kenya, she started farming in 2010. Apart from farming, Ms. Mutheu is currently working on an oral history project looking into the lives of Kenyans who served in the colonial military during the Second World War. She is also researching the impact the war had on the soldiers' families. Ms. Mutheu is particularly interested in using film to record her oral history interviews (both colonial and post independent) to preserve them for future Kenyan generations.
Dr. Kirwin Shaffer is Professor of Latin American Studies at Berks College of Penn State University. For his biography and list of publications, click here.
This talk aims to underscore the long association between nakedness, race and slavery, as one element in a larger project which argues that nakedness was a key historical construct on which morality, aesthetics and scientific practice have drawn significantly. In the European empires, where the calibration of difference was paramount, nakedness acquired hierarchical significance and came to define savagery and subjecthood; even earlier it had signified absence and loss. As debates around Atlantic and other forms of slavery crystallised from the eighteenth century, a critical politics developed around the politics of depicting the slave body, whether visually or textually. Marcus Woods provocatively asked “what do we want to learn from the visual archive of slavery?” This is an attempt to answer that important question.
Professor Philippa Levine serves as the Walter Prescott Webb Chair in History and Ideas, as well as the Co-Director of the Program of British Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research specialties include the British Empire; intersections of race and gender; and science, medicine, and society.
John Fitzgerald is Professor Emeritus in the Centre for Social Impact at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne and Immediate Past President of the Australian Academy of the Humanities based in Canberra. He formerly served as Head of the School of Social Sciences at La Trobe University and as Director of the International Centre of Excellence in Asia-Pacific Studies at the Australian National University. From 2008 to 2013 he was China Representative of The Ford Foundation in Beijing where he directed the Foundation’s China operations. He has served as Chair of the Education Committee of the Australia-China Council of the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Co-Chair of the Committee for National and International Cooperation of the Australian Research Council, and President of the Chinese Studies Association of Australia. His research focus on the history of nationalism, philanthropy and public administration in China, and on Chinese communities in Australia. His books include Big White Lie: Chinese Australians in White Australia(UNSW 2007), awarded the Ernest Scott Prize of the Australian Historical Association in 2008, and Awakening China (Stanford 1997), awarded the Joseph Levenson Prize of the U.S. Association for Asian Studies. He has a Ph.D. from ANU and held a Fulbright postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is a graduate of the University of Sydney. He is currently researching China's influence operations in Australia.
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In recent years the Chinese Communist Party has embraced the idea that China’s national culture and value system need to be spread more widely abroad if the country is to secure its foreign policy objectives. It pursues this idea through routine public diplomacy but also through a series of less orthodox influence operations. Australia has been an early target of China’s public diplomacy and influence operations. It has also been at the forefront among liberal democracies in generating community, media and government responses.
This paper explores some of these operations and the impacts and the responses they have generated in Australia over the period from 2013 to 2017. It finds that many Communist party and government initiatives fall outside the spectrum of acceptable public diplomacy. It also finds that Australian institutions appear to invite influence operations bearing directly on their own field of work. In light of these findings, it questions whether new legislation can be effective without complementary behavioral change, among middle and senior managers, and without further legislation protecting freedom of speech in the national interest. It also explores the risks and costs of possible retaliatory action from China.
This event is co-sponsored by the Department of History and the East Asian Studies Program.
Advances in technology are fundamentally reshaping the relationship between citizen and state. From artificial intelligence, data mining, and mass surveillance to DNA collection and facial recognition biometrics, authoritarian regimes are exploiting emerging technologies in new and disruptive ways. The implications for democratic governance and civil society around the world are alarming. This talk will look at specific technologies which are redefining the frontiers of repression, how particular authoritarian states are applying these technologies to consolidate power, and ideas for how citizens and democracies can navigate this rapidly changing environment.
Steven Feldstein is an Associate Professor and holder of the Frank and Bethine Church Chair of Public Affairs at Boise State University. He is also a nonresident fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Democracy and Rule of Law Program. Previously, he served as a deputy assistant secretary in the bureau of democracy, human rights and labor at the Department of State, and the director of the office of policy at the U.S. Agency for International Development. He has also served as counsel on the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee under Chairmen Joseph Biden and John Kerry. He earned a J.D. from UC Berkeley School of Law and a B.A. from Princeton University. His research interests include U.S. foreign policy, national security and counterterrorism, international politics, and democracy and human rights. His articles have appeared in Foreign Affairs, The National Interest, Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report, World Politics Review and The Hill.
This is an opportunity for members of GCP to share their experiences from the Spring Break Study Tour in Tokyo, Japan. Please join us for photo sharing, trivia, food and fun! This event is sponsored by the IAS program.
Thanks to the generosity of John and Penelope Biggs, a prominent scholar in Classics has visited Washington University in St. Louis each spring since 1990. The Biggs Family Residency in Classics (previously known as the John and Penelope Biggs Residency in Classics) has included lectures and conversations in a variety of settings, with participation by Washington University students and faculty and members of the community. On April 11th-13th fifteen former Biggs Residents in Classics will return for three days of scholarship and fellowship. The event is free and open to the public.
9:30-10:00am BREAKFAST
10:00-10:30am Tory Scordato
10:30-11:00am Jessie Schreier
11:00-11:30am Katie Blenko
11:30-12:00pm Rani Kubersky
12:00-1:00pm LUNCH
1:00-1:30pm Kelly Barr
1:30-2:00pm Divya Walia
2:00-2:30pm Melissa Kay
2:30-3:00pm Abby Hermes
CONGRATULATIONS International and Area Studies Class of 2018!!!
You are invited to join the program faculty and staff of IAS at a reception immediately following the Arts & Sciences Recognition Ceremony on Thursday, May 17, 2018. Family members are welcome. To RSVP, please click here.
We welcome the new cohort of the Global Citizenship Program with a morning of activities and lunch. For participants, their families and Faculty friends and staff.
Join us in McMillan Courtyard for a casual lunch to catch up after a long summer break. Faculty, staff, students and friends of IAS are all welcome! Rain location is McMillan Cafe.
Join us for this joint event with the Career Center. In the first hour, Professor White will share his expertise on this topic, and the second hour students will learn about his career path and be able to ask questions. Lunch and refreshments will be provided.
Timothy J. White is Professor of Political Science at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio. A native of St. Louis, White earned his BA and MA degrees from the University of Missouri and his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. He has twice been a Visiting Researcher at the National University of Ireland-Galway. His research interests include International Relations and US Foreign Policy with a focus on Northern Ireland. His recent publications include “American Diplomacy and Economic Aid in the Northern Ireland Peace Process: A Neoliberal Analysis,” Open Library of Humanities 4 (1) (2018): 1-19 and “Consociation, Conditionality and Commitment: Making Peace in Northern Ireland” in Consociationalism and Power-Sharing: Arend Lijphart’s Theory of Political Accommodation (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, pp. 85-102). His current projects on the role of the US in Northern Ireland include research with Emily Pausa entitled, “From the Sidelines to Mediating Peace: John Hume, Irish-America, Foreign Policy Entrepreneurs, and the US in Northern Ireland,” “Third Parties as External Actors in Peace Processes: Comparing the Role of the US and the EU in Northern Ireland” with Mary C. Murphy, and “Re-evaluating the Role of the US in the Northern Ireland Peace Process: Taking Dixon’s Theatrical Metaphor Seriously.” White has edited two volumes on Northern Irish Politics: Theories of International Relations and Northern Ireland published by Manchester University Press in 2017 and Lessons from the Northern Ireland Peace Process published by the University of Wisconsin Press in 2013. White has twice served as the Social Science Representative for the American Conference for Irish Studies and for four years chaired the Donnelly Prize Committee that annually selects the best book published in Irish history and the social sciences. White has also been selected three times to serve on the Fulbright Committee which screens and ranks applications from American students seeking to study at Irish Universities.
In the first hour, Sonni will discuss past surprises in national security and some ideas about how to avoid them in the future. In the second hour, she will give students pointers about how to communicate in the age of distraction. Lunch and refreshments will be provided.
Sonni Efron has more than 25 years of experience in international affairs, in journalism, government, and the NGO sector. She has been a foreign correspondent, an op-ed editor speechwriter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and the managing editor of a six-volume series on grand strategy for the RAND Corporation.
Born in London and educated at UC Berkeley, Efron spent nearly 20- years at the Los Angeles Times, where she worked as an investigative and political reporter, foreign correspondent, State Department correspondent, assistant op-ed editor, and editorial writer for global affairs and U.S. foreign policy. Overseas assignments included Kuwait (1991), correspondent in the Moscow Bureau (1993-1995), and Tokyo correspondent and then Bureau Chief (1996-1999). She has covered coups and conflicts on three continents, including the first Chechnya War, the coups in Cambodia. In 2000-2001, she was a Knight Fellow at Stanford University, focusing on Chinese foreign policy. She won numerous awards, including Scripps Howard Walker Stone prize for editorial writing (2007), and was twice nominated for Pulitzer Prize, for investigating reporting and for editorial writing.
At RAND, Efron focuses on foreign policy and national security issues, editing reports, and writing op-eds and speeches. She edited the first five volumes of the Strategic Rethink series and is a coauthor, with Andrew Hoehn, the late Richard Solomon et. al., of the sixth and final volume, “Strategic Choices for a Turbulent World: In Pursuit of Security and Opportunity” (Jan. 2017). She has helped write and edit reports in the Strategy 2040 series, and worked with RAND experts on subjects ranging from Fake News to Truth Decay, artificial intelligence, Iran and North Korea, bioterrorism, and U.S. infrastructure reform.
This event is cosponsored by the Career Center.
Please join us for an introduction to Sigma Iota Rho, the International and Area Studies Honorary. We'll give you a overview of what we do and how to join this semester.
Please join us for an introduction to Sigma Iota Rho, the International and Area Studies Honorary. We'll give you a overview of what we do and how to join this semester.
Today, Japan is often seen as a monoethnic state without significant minority groups. While scholars have found this monoethnic self-identity to be more myth than reality, its origins remain debated. This paper will address the historical construction of Japan’s national identity by examining its legal foundations in the late nineteenth century, just as Japan was emerging from a semi-colonial situation. The argument will suggest the complex interplay between law, society, and international politics.
Lunch will be provided.
Activists have exposed startling forms of labor exploitation and environmental degradation in global industries, leading many large retailers and brands to adopt standards for fairness and sustainability. This book is about the idea that transnational corporations can push these standards through their global supply chains, and in effect, pull factories, forests, and farms out of their local contexts and up to global best practices. For many scholars and practitioners, this kind of private regulation and global standard-setting can provide an alternative to regulation by territorially-bound, gridlocked, or incapacitated nation states, potentially improving environments and working conditions around the world and protecting the rights of exploited workers, impoverished farmers, and marginalized communities. But can private, voluntary standards actually create meaningful forms of regulation? Are forests and factories around the world actually being made into sustainable ecosystems and decent workplaces? Can global norms remake local orders?
This presentation will provide new answers by comparing the private regulation of land and labor in democratic and authoritarian settings. Based on studies of sustainable forestry and fair labor standards in Indonesia and China, Bartley will discuss not only how transnational standards are implemented 'on the ground' but also how they are constrained and reconfigured by domestic governance.
Kirill Kobrin (1964) is a historian, writer, literary and art critic, co-editor of Moscow magazine of sociology, history and politics Neprikosnovenniy Zapas [Emergency Rations]. Kobrin is an author of 21 books and a regular contributor to prominent Russian, British and Latvian magazines. Several of his books and a lot of essays and academic articles have been translated into European and Asian languages. Kobrin’s latest book «Разговор в комнатах. Карамзин, Чаадаев, Герцен и начало современной России» [Conversation in the rooms. Karamzin, Chaadaev, Herzen and the beginning of modern Russia] was recently published in New Literary Observer (Moscow). Kirill Kobrin lives in London, Riga and Chengdu (where he works as a visiting professor at Sichuan University).
This event is co-sponsored by the Department of History.
Mission: To facilitate interdisciplinary dialogue and forge connections between students, academics and seasoned practitioners whose advocacy, organizing or research addresses global injustice.
Thursday, October 25 | Brown Lounge
5:30p Panel Discussion: Frontline Justice: Building and Understanding Social Movements
7p Reception
7:30p Keynote: Gender Inequity Is Woven into Global Injustice: It Is NOT Inevitable, Cynthis Enloe, Professor, Clark University
Friday, October 26 | Brown Lounge
10a Panel Discussion: Local to Global: Law Enforcement, Engagement, and Intervention
11:45a Student Poster Presentations (Lunch provided)
1p Panel Discussion: Human Rights: Ideals and Challenges in Practice
Saturday, October 27 | Goldfarb 132
Gender & Security Case Competition
8a Registration and Welcome
8:30a Teams prepare case
11:30a Presentations
1p Lunch
2p Awards and Closing
This event is co-sponsored by the Global Citizenship Program and Sigma Iota Rho.
Featuring:
Free food provided by Shawarma King
The case competition will give students from different academic backgrounds an opportunity to critically analyze and develop a proposal for a case that spans topics of global injustice, gender, security and human rights. A lunch will be provided for participants and guests.
Please fill out the registration form below as an individual, and list requested team members in the space provided. We will use this information to form make teams of 4-5 people to ensure all interested students have a chance to participate. If you plan to fill your own team, please keep in mind that at least two different academic disciplines must be represented.
If you have any questions, please send them via e-mail to bkeiser@wustl.edu.
Deadline to Register: October 15 | 5:00pm
Team Meet and Greet: October 19 | 4:00pm, DUC 234
Case released to teams: October 19
Competition: October 27 | 8:00am-2:30pm, Goldfarb 132
Speaker Panel will feature:
Cultural showcase.
Food will be provided.
As a part of this event, GCP is supporting the Immigrant and Refugee Women’s Programme (IRWP) by asking that attendees consider bringing a donation of school supplies that will be given to support this local organization. Please note that this is completely voluntary and not required to attend the event.
Needed Supplies: Washable markers or dry erase markers, magnetic dry erase boards, dry erasers, wide-ruled spiral notebooks, index cards, copy paper, and new or used children/teen books
Featuring Andrew Seele, President of the Migration Policy Institute, Woodrow Wilson Center; Author of Vanishing Frontiers: The Forces Driving Mexico and the United States Together.
Lunch will be provided.
Andrew Selee is President of the Migration Policy Institute. Dr. Selee has worked closely in the past on two of MPI’s signature initiatives: the Independent Task Force on Immigration and America’s Future, and the Regional Migration Study Group, which was jointly convened by MPI and the Wilson Center. He also served as a member of the Council on Foreign Relations' Task Force on Immigration. Dr. Selee previously served as Executive Vice President at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
The founding Director of the Wilson Center’s Mexico Institute, Dr. Selee is a respected scholar and analyst of Mexico and U.S.-Mexico relations. A frequent commentator in the media, he has also written and edited a number of books and policy reports on U.S.-Mexico relations, Mexican and Latin American politics, and Latino immigrant civic engagement in the United States, and is a regular columnist with the Mexican newspaper El Universal. His latest book, Vanishing Frontiers: The Forces Driving Mexico and the United States Together, was published by Public Affairs in June 2018. He is also the author of a major book on think tank strategy, What Should Think Tanks Do? A Strategic Guide to Policy Impact (Stanford, 2013). Dr. Selee has regularly taught courses at Johns Hopkins University and George Washington University since 2006 and was a visiting professor at El Colegio de Mexico. Prior to joining the Wilson Center as an associate in the Latin American Program in 2000, he was a professional staffer in the U.S. House of Representatives and worked for five years with the YMCA of Baja California in Tijuana, Mexico, helping to start a community center and a home for migrant youth. He later served on the National Board of the YMCA of the USA and chaired its International Committee. Dr. Selee holds a Ph.D. in policy studies from the University of Maryland, an M.A. in Latin American studies from the University of California, San Diego, and a B.A. in Latin American studies (Phi Beta Kappa) from Washington University in St. Louis.
As part of the University Libraries Faculty Book Talk series, Tabea Linhard, WU Professor of Spanish and comparative literature, and Timothy Parsons, WU Professor of history and of African and African-American studies, co-editors of Mapping Migration, Identity, and Space (Palgrave Macmillan), will lead a panel discussion about the book. The panel will also include two of the book’s contributors, Sara Jay of the John Burroughs School and Linling Gao-Miles, WU lecturer in International and Area Studies. The discussion will focus on the ways in which the movements of people across natural, political, and cultural boundaries shape identities that are inexorably linked to the geographical spaces they experience.
A reception will follow the discussion. Free and open to the public.
Special Meeting with Seth G. Jones, Director, Transnational Threats Project. Senior Advisor, International Security Program, Center for Strategic and International Studies. Author of In the Graveyard of Empires: America’s War in Afghanistan.
Lunch is provided.
Questions: contact Dr. Krister Knapp, kknapp@wustl.edu.
The Political Science department Speaker Series will be hosting a lecture by Professor Jeffry Frieden. Dr. Frieden is Professor of Government at Harvard University. He has published several books on the politics of monetary and financial policy, as well as articles in both scholarly and general interest publications. His talk is titled "The Political Economy of the Backlash Against Globalization."
The talk will take place in the Seigle Hall Conference Room (#248) on Thursday, April 25, 2019 from 2:30pm to 4pm. Coffee and cookies will be served.
Lunch is provided.
Questions: contact Dr. Krister Knapp, kknapp@wustl.edu.
Lunch is provided.
Questions: contact Dr. Krister Knapp, kknapp@wustl.edu.
Join us to discuss international realtions with special guest Thomas Countrymen. Lunch is provided.
Questions: contact Dr. Krister Knapp, kknapp@wustl.edu.
Seth G. Jones (Transnational Threats Project; Center for Strategic and International Studies) discusses the potential end to the war in Afghanistan and what a U.S. exit would mean for the region.
Part of the Crisis & Conflict in Historical Perspective co-curricular initiative, which serves undergraduates considering careers in policy as well as the greater WashU and St. Louis communities seeking historically-informed discussion about global events.
Sponsored and funded by the Office of the Dean of Faculty of Arts & Sciences.
Free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be served.
A concert-lecture with PowerPoint that includes songs and instrumental tunes from Russia and the former-Soviet Union. Group will bring a number of new musical instruments and skills. Their playlist will contain dancing, marching, slow, acapella songs, and more.
This event is sponsored by the International & Areas Studies Program and University College.
The folk ensemble “Zolotoj Plyos” was founded in 1994 in the city of Saratov, Russia. Its members are Alexander Solovov, Elena Sadina, and Sergei Grachev. All three members of the group graduated from the Saratov State Conservatory and are professional musicians.
Elena and Sergei also graduated from the "Jef Denyn" Royal Carillon School in Mechelen, Belgium, the Antwerp Conservatory and the University of Leuven. They have won prizes at All-Russian and international folk instrument competitions and at the First All-Russian bell competition. While students in Russia the musicians collected old Russian folk songs and bell music in rural villages and towns.
The group’s repertoire includes folk songs and instrumental pieces from various parts of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Georgia, and other areas, and also features Gypsy music, Russian popular music, and Jewish music. The members of the ensemble play more than thirty Russian folk instruments, including the bayan, chromatic and diatonic accordions , the balalaika, domra, guitar, zhaleika, clarinet, saxophone, various percussion instruments, and Russian bells.
The ensemble has performed in countries such as Russia, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, Germany, France, Portugal, Switzerland, and the USA. “Zolotoj Plyos” has been frequently invited to perform on radio and television shows in Russia, Belgium, and Holland. From 2000-2013 the ensemble made seven tours of the United States, including a concert in the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and also directed the Russian Choir of the Middlebury College Kathryn Wasserman Davis School of Russian at Middlebury College (Vermont, USA). In 2008, the ensemble was given the honor of performing in the main hall of the Moscow State Tchaikovsky Conservatory and also in the main hall of the State Academic Choir in St. Petersburg. At the present time the members of “Zolotoj Plyos” live and work in Belgium.
The next generation of academics in this country must be able to address the growing diversity of the U.S. population in multiple ways, not just through traditional scholarship and in the classroom, but also by methods of sustained community engagement that brings residents together to address critical issues facing their neighborhoods and the nation as a whole. This talk will address a career of producing humanities Ph.D. students who are actively committed to public scholarship that explores questions of race, gender, and economic divides in Los Angeles through mentorship, training, and scholarly engagement. Utilizing interviews with current Ph.D. students in History and American Studies, and the careers of recent graduates making an impact on the public scholarship of Los Angeles, Sanchez will explore and reflect on establishing new paradigms in graduate education that work at healing the wounds of racial oppression while nurturing a generation of scholars ready to make a difference in urban America.
GEORGE J. SANCHEZ is professor of American studies and ethnicity, and of history at the University of Southern California (USC). He is the author of Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900–1945 (Oxford, 1993), co-editor of Los Angeles and the Future of Urban Cultures (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005) and Civic Engagement in the Wake of Katrina (University of Michigan Press, 2009), and author of “‘What’s Good for Boyle Heights Is Good for the Jews’: Creating Multiracialism on the Eastside During the 1950s,” American Quarterly 56:3 (September 2004). A past president of the American Studies Association, he now chairs its Committee on Graduate Education. Sanchez also serves on minority scholars committees of the Organization of American Historians and the American Historical Association.
His academic work focuses on both historical and contemporary topics of race, gender, ethnicity, labor and immigration, and he is currently working on a historical study of the ethnic interaction of Mexican Americans, Japanese Americans, African Americans and Jews in the Boyle Heights area of East Los Angeles, California in the 20th century. He is one of the co-editors of the book series “American Crossroads: New Works in Ethnic Studies” from the University of California Press. He currently serves as director of the Center for Diversity and Democracy at USC, which focuses on issues of racial/ethnic diversity in higher education and issues of civic engagement. In 2010, he received the Outstanding Latino/a Faculty in Higher Education (Research Institutions) Award from the American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education, Inc., and in 2011, he received the first ever Equity Award for individuals that have achieved excellence in recruiting and retaining underrepresented racial and ethnic groups into the historical profession from the American Historical Association. He earned his PhD in history in 1989 from Stanford University.
Photo by Ben Kucinski CC BY 2.0
RSVPProfessor Richa Nagar, Russell M. and Elizabeth M. Bennett Chair in Excellence, Beverly and Richard Fink Professor in Liberal Arts at the University of Michigan
Presented by the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and the Office of the Provost's Distinguished Visiting Scholar Program
This event is co-sponsored by the Departments of Anthropology, Performing Arts and Political Science, and the International and Area Studies Program. Supported in part through funding from the Office of the Provost: Distinguished Visiting Scholar Program.
Please join LIVE, the IAS Program, and the WGSS Department in welcoming Yasmeen Mjalli to Wash U, as a stop on her nationwide tour: Not Your Habibti: A Typewriter Project.
Yasmeen Mjalli is a Palestinian female activist, artist and entrepreneur. She started a company called BabyFist in Palestine, creating a movement to empower women against street harassment and other gendered issues through the reclamation of catcalls in her clothing, all of which is created locally in the West Bank and Gaza.
In addition to her clothing brand, she contributes to the broader discussions around gender issues in Palestine and now the United States through A Typewriter Project, where she invites you and all community members to share personal experiences with her as she types them in real-time. The project provides a cathartic moment for campus community members, Palestinians, and people from around the world to transcend our geographical locations to engage with each other about gender-based social issues. The product: tangible, typewritten personal narratives that contribute to conversations about gender.
April 5th, 10:30AM-1:00PM, Center for Diversity and Inclusion, Third floor of the DUC:
A follow up event to join the movement! Do you have an experience around gender that you want to share? Come tell and record your story with Yasmeen (and her typewriter), becoming part of a living archive of tangible, typewritten personal narratives that contribute to conversations about gender and sexual misconduct.
Thomas Countryman is the chair of the Arms Control Association board of directors, a position he has held since October 2017. Mr. Countryman was the Acting Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security. He served for 35 years as a member of the U.S. Foreign Service until January 2017, achieving the rank of minister-counselor, and was appointed in October 2016 to the position of Acting Undersecretary of State. He simultaneously served as assistant secretary of state for international security and nonproliferation, a position he had held since September 2011. Prior to his position as Assistant Secretary, he served as the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Political-Military Affairs, Deputy Assistant Secretary for European Affairs, and as the Foreign Policy Advisor to the Commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps.
Since 1982, Mr. Countryman has served at U.S. embassies in Belgrade, Cairo, Athens and Rome. From 1994-1997, he was responsible for advising Ambassador Albright on Middle East affairs at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations, and served as liaison with the UN Special Commission investigating Iraq’s weapons programs. From 1997 to 1998, Mr. Countryman served as Director for Near East and South Asian Affairs on the National Security Council staff, with responsibility for the region stretching from Morocco to Syria, and serving as the White House representative on Ambassador Dennis Ross’ peace process team. From 2001 to 2005, he was the Minister-Counselor for Political Affairs at the American Embassy in Rome, Italy. He served as Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Athens, Greece from 2005 to 2008, including as the Chargé d’Affaires for five months in 2007.
Mr. Countryman graduated from Washington University in St. Louis (summa cum laude) with a degree in economics and political science, and studied at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. His foreign languages are Serbo-Croatian, Arabic, Italian, Greek, and German.
Don't miss this opportunity, sponsored by the Career Center and Alumni and Development, to network with Wash. U. alumni working in the field of public policy and advocacy. Mocktails and light snacks will be provided.
Listen to an attorney, detective and forensic linguist discuss first hand applications of language and linguistics for immigrants in the American criminal justice system.
Join us for SIR's premier event of the semester. This year's panelists include:
Professor Gamal Gasim, Grand Valley State University
Tyler Parker, Ph.D. Candidate at Boston College
Sarah Masoud, International Institute of St. Louis
Dinner will be catered by Sameen Afghan Restaurant.
IAS seniors and their families are invited to the IAS graduation reception immediately following the Arts & Sciences Recognition Ceremony.
Please RSVP on this form no later than April 15, so that we may plan accordingly.
It's been exciting to see you all grow in the past four years, and the IAS faculty and staff look forward to celebrating with you next month!
Sponsored and funded by the Office of the Dean of Faculty of Arts & Sciences.
Free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be served.
For our annual IAS Welcome Back Social, we will be catering Tazé Street Food! All IAS majors, current and potential SIR members, and GCP students are welcome to come eat and mingle. And of course, all affiliated IAS faculty and staff are invited! Don't miss out!
the glow
noun / the•glow / t͟hə glō
A rare, awe-inspiring moment, executed by an entity, that hugely impacts and changes those who witness and accept it.
Epiphany “Big Piph” Morrow is a Stanford-educated international emcee and community builder. After a decade plus in the industry, his unique entertainment is relayed through the lenses of purpose, humor, creativity, race, and a global perspective. His latest project is a new age narrative, one-man show entitled, “The Glow”, with Corey Harris as music director.
Doors open at 6:30PM.
Hosted by IAS in coordination with the College Writing Program and others.
Bret Gustafson's work focuses on the anthropology of politics and the political, with a particular interest in Latin American social movements, state transformation, and the politics of development. For more information on Bret and his background and work, you can check out his page here.
David Makovsky is the Ziegler Distinguished Fellow; the Director for the Project on Arab-Israel Relations; and part of the Irwin Levy Family Program on the US-Israel Strategic Relationship. For more information on David Makovsky, please see his page here.
Join us as Professor Caitlyn Collins discusses her newly published book.
Taken from her website: I am an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Washington University in St. Louis. My research examines the production and consequences of social inequality. I use qualitative methods to understand gender inequality in the workplace and in family life.
My current project is a cross-national interview study of 135 working mothers in Sweden, Germany, Italy, and the United States. These four countries offer distinct policy approaches to reconciling the work-family conflict. I examine how different ideals of gender, motherhood, and employment are embedded in these policies, and how they shape the daily lives of working mothers in these countries.
Please click here to visit Caitlyn Collin's website and read about the book.
What kind of war was the Vietnam War? Many scholars and commentators have long depicted the Vietnam War as a war of national liberation. Others insist that it was a Cold War conflict born of communist aggression. Historian Edward Miller argues for a different framing: the Vietnam War as a civil war. Drawing on South Vietnamese state records and the testimony of individual South Vietnamese, Miller shows that the war that began in the Mekong Delta in the late 1950s and early 1960s was rooted in the longer history of civil warfare in the region. This interpretation suggests alternative ways of thinking about the political and military history of the war and the use of particular forms of violence in the war—including the violence later employed by American military forces in Vietnam.
Whether your parents are visiting or not, come share in some conversations with IAS faculty and staff, as well as desserts from Whisk Bakery!
Nori Katagiri is Associate Professor of Political Science at Saint Louis University. He is also Visiting Research Fellow, Air Staff College, Japan Air Self-Defence Force and Fellow Cohort 4 of the Mansfield Foundation’s US-Japan Network for the Future. Prior to Saint Louis University, he taught at Air War College, a graduate degree program for senior military officers and officials of the US government and foreign nations. He is the author of Adapting to Win: How Insurgents Fight and Defeat Foreign States in War (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). He received his PhD degree in Political Science from the University of Pennsylvania. (Information taken from E-International Relations website.)
For more on the Professor Nori Katagiri's background and research, click here.
For more information, please visit the festival's website by clicking here.
We hope to tackle questions about how western bias manifests in machine learning, how this bias affects real-world applications of artificial intelligence, and how we can combat/prevent it. We are seeing instances of algorithmic bias altering voting outcomes, social media participation, hate speech, decision-making in politics and many more important tools of communication. Given the ever-increasing reliance on artificial intelligence, we believe it is crucial to address inadequacies before they propagate even further.
Speakers include:
Anupam Basu, Washington University in St. Louis
Anupam Basu works at the intersection of literature and big data, drawing on emerging computational techniques like natural language processing and machine-learning to make vast digital archives of early modern print more tractable for computational analysis.
Kevin Scannell, St. Louis University
Kevin Scannell's current research uses machine learning to develop computational resources that support speakers of indigenous and minority languages around the world, particularly Irish and the other Celtic languages.
Amar Ashar, Harvard University
Amar Ashar's current research areas include issues of the ethics and governance of Artificial Intelligence with a focus on global governance, inclusion, and media/information quality.
In collaboration with Stage Russia HD, we will be hosting three film screenings of various Russian theatre performances throughout the semester. Join us for our first screening of Anna Karenina. English subtitles available.
ANNA KARENINA, Vakhtangov Theatre, Moscow
Staged by famed Lithuanian choreographer Anzelica Cholina, this multiple award-winning Vakhtangov Theatre production of Anna Karenina tells the story of Tolstoy’s classic novel entirely in contemporary dance. In this way, Cholina succeeds in finding the equivalent of Tolstoy's words in harmony and movement, with every gesture holding meaning. The distinctive music of Alfred Schnittke helps to reveal the inner turmoil of the characters and their depth.
Winner of the "Villanueva Award", Best Foreign Performance, International Havana Theatre Festival; Winner "Crystal Turandot" Best Debut Performance, Olga Lerman.
Captured on film before a live audience from Moscow's Vakhtangov Theatre.
2 hours 15 min (with one 15 minute intermission included)
In collaboration with Stage Russia HD, we will be screening the Russian theatre performance of Uncle Vanya. We will have one more screening this semester (The Brothers Karamazov) on December 3rd. English subtitles available.
UNCLE VANYA, Vakhtangov Theatre, Moscow
Stage Russia HD (Vakhtangov Theatre): Rimas Tuminas' reimagining of Anton Chekhov's tale about broken illusions and dashed hopes is freed from its traditional trappings, leaving behind a battlefield for passions and colliding ambitions. This "Uncle Vanya" is about what Chekhov’s characters think and what they admit to only at moments of emotional turmoil. They are at times tongue-tied or overly brutal, but their revelations break out of them fervently, desperately just as a man breaks out of a stuffy room into the open air. A Golden Mask Winner for Best Drama, featuring the inimitable Sergey Makovetskiy as Voynitsky.
Captured on film before a live audience from Moscow's Vakhtangov Theatre.
180 minutes (with one 15 minute intermission included)
Russian with English subtitles
For our last presentation of the Russian Film Series of the semester, we will be screening The Brothers Karamazov. Thank you to Stage Russia HD for making this semester's screenings possible!
THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV, Eifman Ballet, Saint Petersburg
The Brothers Karamazov novel is the epitome of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s creative work, the acme of the philosophic investigation carried out by this colossal and restless mind throughout his life.
World renowned choreographer Boris Eifman offers a remarkable vision of the core ideas within the novel, expanding upon them though body language as a way of exploring the origins of the moral devastation of the Karamazovs; creating through choreographic art an equivalent of what Dostoyevsky investigated so masterfully in his book, the excruciating burden of destructive passions and evil heredity.
Boris Eifman BIO: Boris Eifman is considered to be one of the leading choreographers in the world. After working for 10 years at the Vaganova Academy of Russian Ballet, in 1977, he formed his own ballet ensemble, interweaving classical ballet, modern dance and ecstatic impulses to create a completely different form of choreography where self-expression becomes the subject and in which there is drama, philosophy, characters and a central idea. A distinct feature of Eifman’s theater, its trademark, is that almost all of his performances have a plot and, often, a literary source. In this way he can plunge into a realm that is familiar, all the while discovering and revealing the unexplored. His unique lexicon and conceptual, authorial interpretations are a breakthrough into that fantastic dimension where the boundlessness of inner worlds comes to life.
Language: Russian (briefly)
Translation: English subtitles
Running time: 1 h, 26 min (No Intermission)
Professor Richa Nagar specializes in the politics of development, feminisms, praxis, and people’s movements, Intersectionality, translations, and people’s theater and the Blending/interrupting genres and languages in antidisciplinary research at The University of Minnesota. Her most recent book “Hungry Translations: Relearning the World with Radical Vulnerability” discusses many of the same ideas including the ongoing work of building embodied alliances in predominant hierarchies.
Sponsored by the Office of the Provost, and the departments of Women,Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Anthropology, Performing Arts, and Political Science, and the International and Area Studies Program.
Part of the Assembly Series at WashU. For more information, visit the Assembly Series website.
Sponsored and funded by the Office of the Dean of Faculty of Arts & Sciences.
Free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be served.
As Edward Said, Naoki Sakai, and others have noted, Asia is a place both real and imagined and its significance often derives from its deployment as a way of indexing relationality and positionality. Exploring the ways in which contemporary Asian/American speculative fictions register the evolving imaginability of the worlds we inhabit, study, and create—and drawing on the possibilities of Asian America as an ageographic concept—I suggest the importance of conceptualizing Global Asias as imaginable ageography and explore the critical and aesthetic implications of such conceptualization. The talk will first focus on the theoretical possibilities of ageography before elaborating on the ways in which Asian/American speculative fictions offer new means of imagining into being the structural incoherence of Global Asias as both place and concept.
Tina Chen is Associate Professor of English and Asian American Studies at The Pennsylvania State University and author of Double Agency: Acts of Impersonation in Asian American Literature and Culture, which was named a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title. Her national leadership roles include several stints as the co-Chair of the East of California caucus for the Association for Asian American Studies; serving on the Executive Board of the MLA's Division on Asian American Literature; and being the Founding Editor of Verge: Studies in Global Asias—an award-winning journal published by the University of Minnesota Press. She is also the Director of the Global Asias Initiative at Penn State.
Kristian (Kris) Orsini is Counsellor for Economic and Financial Affairs at the Delegation of the European Union to the United States. His primary areas of responsibility include US economic and economic policy developments, transatlantic economic relations and relations between the EU and Multilateral Financial Institutions, mainly the IMF.
Moreno Bertoldi is Special Advisor to the Ambassador and Head of the Economic and Financial Section at the Delegation of the European Union to the United States. Prior to this role, from 2007 to 2015, he was head of the unit responsible for countries of the G-20, International Monetary Fund, and G-Groups at the Directorate General for Economic and Financial Affairs of the European Commission. From 2010 to 2015 he was also the European Commission representative in the G20 Framework for Growth Working Group.
Debut director Mati Diop’s “Atlantics” — the Grand Prix winner at this year’s Cannes Film Festival — tells a star-crossed love story infused with supernatural elements. Along the Atlantic coast, a soon-to-be-inaugurated futuristic tower looms over a suburb of Dakar, but the laborers who built the edifice have not been paid in months. Ada, 17, is in love with Souleiman, one of the tower’s young construction workers, but their relationship is blocked because she is promised to another man. Frustrated in both love and work, Souleiman leaves the country with his co-workers, taking to the sea in pursuit of a better future in Europe. Several days later, a fire ruins Ada’s wedding, and a mysterious fever starts to spread. The LA Times writes of this plot turn: “The story becomes both a detective thriller and a ghost story rooted in elements of local folklore, and pulled off with a light, shivery touch. Meanwhile, Diop never loses sight of the men who have left home for a better future, or the women they have left behind; hers is the rare picture to address the global migrant crisis with intense storytelling imagination as well as moral outrage.”
Dr. David Warren discusses Islam and Politics and how studying with Jewish, Islamic, and Middle Eastern Studies helps in understanding issues of our current world.
*Please RSVP to each session separately.
4:00 - 5:30pm Violence and Conflict Panel Click here to RSVP for panel.
Moderator and panelist: Amy Heath-Carpentier, PhD – Lecturer, International & Area Studies; Assistant Director, Career Center, Washington University in St. Louis
Panelists:
Jillian J. Foster, MA – Founder, Global Insight; PI, Independent Commission for Aid Impact (ICAI); and PhD student in Political Science, Yale University
Ariel Ruiz Soto, MA – Associate Policy Analyst, Migration Policy Institute (MPI)
Kim Thuy Seelinger, JD – Washington University in St. Louis – Founding Director, Center for Human Rights, Gender and Migration; Research Associate Professor, Brown School; Visiting Professor of Law, School of Law
5:30 – 6:00pm Reception Click here to RSVP for reception and keynote.
6:00 – 7:30pm Keynote Address
10:00-11:30am Climate Change Panel Click here to RSVP for panel.
Moderator: Mattie Gottbrath – Coordinator for International Programming, Washington University in St. Louis
Panelists:
11:45-12:45pm Art Exhibit, Tabling from Organizations, Presentations of Research and Practice (Lunch Provided) Click here to RSVP.
Featuring Lens on the Border, Photo exhibit by the Sierra Club’s Borderlands team
1:00-2:30pm Self-Reliance and Social Mores Panel Click here to RSVP.
Moderator: Lindsay Stark, DrPH – Associate Professor of Social Work and Public Health, Washington University in St. Louis; Co-Director, Center for Violence and Injury Prevention; Co-Director, ICHAD
Panelists:
Members:
Mai Sugimoto – alto saxophone
Raymond Boni – guitar
Paul Steinbeck – electric bass
Paul Rogers – double bass
The Bridge
Jazz – owing to its particular history – has always been an unmatched medium that allowed the sounds and music of different worlds to express themselves with passion and singularity, shaped by a musical art dedicated to collective invention and reinvention. Jazz was the original “world music,” long before this label became widespread.
In the recent years, after a century of stories and legends when every improviser, group, and scene grew ever more specific, many French and American musicians have expressed a renewed interest in experiencing the musical and sociomusical realities of their transatlantic counterparts, to really create mutual knowledge. But often with the regret that these adventures, swift to go “beyond expectations,” do not continue beyond a few concerts, a tour, or a recording, due to the lack of adequate structures.
The Bridge intends to form such a network for exchange, production, and diffusion, to build a transatlantic bridge that will be crossed on a regular basis by French and American musicians as part of collaborative projects. And, in addition to the scheduled projects, encourage meetings and relationships between creative musicians and perpetuate them. In other words: to give them the times and spaces to join and rejoin on both sides of the ocean and to deepen their exchanges.
This event is co-sponsored by the Center for the Humanities, American Culture Studies, Jazz at Holmes, and International and Area Studies.
The Bridge #2.2 – experimental residencies have been made possible through the Jazz & New Music, a program of FACE Foundation, in partnership with the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States.
"Young at Heart, Wise in Time – Creative Music Through Post-Modern Times."
Alexandre Pierrepont is an anthropologist whose work focuses on Patrick Chamoiseau’s concept of “diversalité”, from poetics to politics full circle, and on the phenomena of “double consciousness” and internal otherness in Western societies – more specifically on African-American music as an alternative social institution – Alexandre Pierrepont spends his time between North America and France, between different “jazz worlds” and the academia. He strives to open channels of communication, on the field, between the universes of scientific research and musical or socio-musical experimentation.
After a PhD on the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM, based in Chicago and New York), prepared in the U.F. Anthropologie, ethnologie et science des religions (Anthropology, Ethnology, and Science of Religions Department) at the Université Paris 7 – Denis Diderot, and defended at the Université Paris 5 – Sorbonne (2007), followed by a post-doctorate in the Philosophy Department at the McGill University in Montréal (2014), Alexandre Pierrepont is now a research associate at CANTHEL in the College of Human and Social Sciences at Université Paris 5 – Sorbonne and CERILAC in the Literature, Arts, Cinema Department at Université Paris 7 – Denis Diderot, as well as in the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation (IICSI), based in Canada.
Since the mid-2000s, he teaches in the Literature, Arts, Cinema Department at Université Paris 7 – Denis Diderot and in the Sciences Po – Paris Undergraduate College. He also gives lectures in the French Cultural Studies at the Columbia-Penn Program, in Paris, in the Center for Jazz for Jazz Studies at the Columbia University in New York, and at the University of Chicago – Center in Paris, most notably in the Department of Political Science, Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture.
An artistic director and educational programs manager for several festivals (among which Blanlieues Bleues from 1999 to 2009, and Sons d’hiver since 2003) and jazz and improvised music record labels, Alexandre Pierrepont was associate curator for several institutions, chief among them the Bleu Indigo series which was held in the Musée du quai Branly from 2009 to 2013, but also for the project “Beyond Black – De Bamako à Chicago, de Chicago à Royaumont” by Nicole Mitchell and Ballaké Sissoko, at the Fondation Royaumont (October 2014), and for the “Chicago à Paris” focus and 50th anniversary of the AACM at the Théâtre du Châtelet, as part of the Festival d’Automne (October 2015). He also worked with the Centre Culturel Suisse, the Cité de la musique, the Dynamo de Pantin, the Atlantique Jazz Festival, the Festival des Champs-Elysées, the Mona Bismarck Foundation for American Culture, or the Rendez-vous Contemporains de Saint-Merry.
Since 2012, Alexandre Pierrepont is the artistic director of the French-American exchange program The Bridge, which brings together several dozens of musicians of the jazz field, numerous clubs, festivals, and concert venues, as well as several academic institutions on both continents. This program is supported by the Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication, the Ministère de l’Education Nationale, the Institut Français, the cultural services of the United States of America Embassy in Paris, the University of Chicago, the DePaul University, and the Roosevelt University in Chicago.
A member of the editorial committees of L’Art du jazz and Multitudes, co-publisher of the biannual and bilingual publication Les Tisserands / The Weavers – creative writing about creative music, from 2001 to 2009, supervisor of the publication Secteur Jazz, the journal of the Banlieues Bleues’ outreach programs, from 2001 to 2009, Alexandre Pierrepont regularly publishes articles in the music press (Jazz Magazine, Improjazz, Jazz Etcetera, Musica Falsa, Peace Warriors et Point of Departure), as well as in numerous scientific or political publications. He has organized several forums and symposiums around on issues related to the intersection of artistic and social issues, the in-between-worlds position that is typical of the African-American experience of the world, and of our “post-modernity.”
He is the author of “Le Champ jazzistique” (Éditions Parenthèses, 2002) and “La Nuée - l’Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM): un jeu de société musicale” (Éditions Parenthèses, 2015), as well as the co-editor, with Philippe Carles, of a contemporary history of jazz and creative music: “Polyfree – La jazzosphère, et ailleurs (1970-2015)” (Éditions Outre Mesure, 2016). He frequently collaborates with improvisers on projects which associate poetry and music in an original fashion, the accounts of which can be found on the albums “Maison Hantée” co-produced with Mike Ladd (Rogue Art label, 2008), “Passages” co-produced with Didier Petit (Rogue Art label, 2012), “De Fortune” with the Bonadventure Pencroff ensemble (MZ Records, 2014), “Traités et accords” with Denis Fournier (Vent du Sud, 2016), and “Wrecks” with the Third Coast Ensemble (Rogue Art label, 2017).
This event is co-sponsored by the Center for the Humanities, American Culture Studies, Jazz at Holmes, and International and Area Studies.
The Bridge #2.2 – experimental residencies have been made possible through the Jazz & New Music, a program of FACE Foundation, in partnership with the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States.
Lecture by: Dr. Yanming Gao
Vice Dean of the Training Center of Ministry of Education (MOE) of China for Study Overseas, Northeast Normal University; Associate Professor; Member of the Advisory Committee of English Languages Programs of MOE Training Centers in China; Visiting Scholar for Applied Linguistics Research with Professor Cindy Brantmeier, Department of Education, Washington University in St. Louis
It has been more than 100 years since China began to send its students and scholars to study abroad. The scale of studying abroad has steadily but greatly expanded, especially in recent years. In 2018, the number of Ministry funded visiting scholars and students has reached about 31000, 77% of whom go to universities in the USA, Britain, Canada and five other traditional countries with strong education in science and technology. Despite some of these positive aspects, the individual scholars and students who move across country borders often experience difficulties in adjusting to their new environments, mainly due to language and cultural differences. Training Centers of Ministry of Education for Study Overseas are committed to cultivating international talents to be competent in cross-cultural communication in English. The center, based at Northeast Normal University, is one of the biggest that provides English training programs, enabling its students to think globally, actively take part in international academia in English, and achieve success in intercultural communication. The lecture will discuss the goals of the training center and discuss possibilities for students and scholars from Washington University to teach English and/or conduct research.
Hosted by Sigma Iota Rho. Free Seoul Taco included!
<p>Washington University in St. Louis’s Chapter of World Without Genocide is thrilled to present you this semester’s Professor Panel. We will be bringing together Washington University Professors from a variety of disciplines in dialogue about the long-term ramifications of genocide. Examining topics such as trauma, refugees, recognition, the panel will open a dialogue on how different disciplines and individuals can work together for genocide awareness, prevention and survivor protection.<br>
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Panelists Include:<br>
Dr. Anika Walke<br>
Dr. Elizabeth Borgwardt<br>
Dr. Rebecca Clouser<br>
Dr. Rupa Patel</p>
All IAS majors, current and potential SIR members, and GCP students are welcome to come eat and mingle. And of course, all affiliated IAS faculty and staff are invited! Don't miss out!
Steve Ceccoli (GSAS ’94, ’98) is the P.K. Seidman Professor of Political Economy and Professor of International Studies at Rhodes College. His current research focuses on the origins of the U.S. drone strike program, public attitudes toward drones and drone strikes in the United States and Europe, and the political economy of drone proliferation. His recent work on these topics has appeared in the Journal of Transatlantic Studies, Policy Studies, Presidential Studies Quarterly, and Studies in Conflict and Terrorism.
Professor Ceccoli chairs the Political Economy Program at Rhodes and is former chair of the Rhodes International Studies Department. His regular course offerings include international relations theory, international political economy, and comparative politics as well as a writing seminar on drones and drone warfare. He is a former participant in the American Political Science Association’s Congressional Fellowship Program, where he served on Capitol Hill working on the staff of Sen. Blanche L. Lincoln (D-AR). Professor Ceccoli also regularly leads a summer study program for Rhodes College students in Tianjin, China in conjunction with Tianjin Foreign Studies University, where he is a visiting summer scholar. He is the recipient of the Clarence Day Award for Outstanding Teaching and the Jameson Jones Award for Outstanding Faculty Service at Rhodes, and previously served as the Faculty Fellow for International Programs, where he promoted the internationalization of the Rhodes campus.
Steve holds a PhD and MA in Political Science from Washington University and a BA cum laude from Heidelberg College.
Co-sponsored by the Career Center
Lindsey Grossman (AB ’07) is a leader in the global technology industry with experience at top companies like N26, Netflix, Intuit, and Stripe, but she did not get a degree in engineering or business. Grossman majored in political science, studied abroad in India, and minored in photography. In this engaging talk, Grossman will describe how she evolved into a tech leader with a non-tech education background and why a liberal arts degree is actually an asset. She will also discuss living and working outside the US, confronting gender bias in the workplace, and navigating career changes and pivots.
Dr. Catherine Kelly is an Assistant Professor of Justice and Rule of Law at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies (a Department of Defense institution located on the National Defense University in Washington, DC). Dr. Kelly is a Washington University in St. Louis alumna (AB '06, Postdoctoral Fellow '14/15).
Drawing on her experiences as an academic and a practitioner, Dr. Kelly addresses the importance of rule of law for security sector governance and accountability in sub-Saharan Africa, using examples from multiple local and national contexts. The talk describes current criminal and civil justice challenges that relate to security governance in sub-Saharan Africa. It also walks listeners through some contrasting (though not mutually exclusive) ways of understanding what the rule of law can mean in practice. With evidence from recent interdisciplinary and applied research on rule of law and security sector governance, the talk analyzes the promises and challenges of thinking about the rule of law in two different ways: first, through "top-down" understandings, which often emphasize the primacy of state institutions and formal rules over the non-state and informal; and second, through "bottom-up," grassroots understandings of the rule of law as it is lived and practiced in relation to people’s everyday security challenges.
Peter Cole, Professor of History at Western Illinois University
My presentation examines dockworkers in the San Francisco Bay Area, Durban (South Africa) and other ports from the 1950s to recent times. In many port cities, militant dockworkers—generally their unions—at times have exerted shocking power for overtly political ends. While many unions have been decimated by changes in technology and neoliberalism, organized dockworkers have preserved some of their power. This presentation uses both comparative and transnational methods to examine efforts to express working class and racial solidarity as well as anti-fascist ideals. In particular, activists in Local 10 (San Francisco Bay Area) of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) have an eighty-year-and-counting history of boycotting vessels hailing from nations whose politics ILWU members disliked. Local 10’s efforts were initiated and led by African American members, who promoted racial equality, socialism, and African liberation. This presentation highlights three decades of Local 10’s anti-apartheid activism, culminating in its eleven-day boycott of South African cargo in 1984. Similarly, dockworkers in other ports also boycotted South African cargo to demonstrate opposition to apartheid. Dockworkers proved to be among the most important forces in the global struggle. Dockworkers continue to engage in transnational solidarity activism, most recently against a Saudi ships to protest its ongoing war in Yemen. Examining this subject demonstrates how working-class people and unions can advocate for and act radically. Their activism is particularly noteworthy considering the long-term decline in union membership and power in worldwide.
Join us for a half day event that kicks off with opening remarks from Provost Marion Crain and Dean Mary McKay, followed by ‘TED-style’ talks presenting the five papers comprising the Lancet Series on Gender Equality, Norms and Health. A moderated panel of regional policy makers and practitioners will then speak to the ways in which the themes highlighted in the Series resonate and are relevant in their work locally.
Agenda:
2:00 - 3:30 | Opening Remarks and Paper Presentations
3:30 - 3:50 | Author Q&A
3:50 - 4:30 | Regional Panel
4:30 - 4:50 | Panelist Q&A
4:50 - 5:00 | Closing remarks
A reception with light appetizers and refreshments will follow.
Stay tuned for more detailed information on each speaker and panelist!
Please note: While there is no admission charge for this event, please RSVP on the Eventbrite link here, so that we can plan appropriately for seating and catering.
This event is co-sponsored by The Brown School | Institute for Public Health | WU School of Medicine's Office of Faculty Affairs and Department of Medicine | Iris Group | Stanford School of Medicine | The Office of the Vice Provost for Faculty Advancement and Institutional Diversity
For general inquires, e-mail bkeiser@wustl.edu.
What do we know about the Chernobyl disaster? Working through Soviet archives, Brown encountered many contradictory accounts of the catastrophe and its effects. Local doctors reported “a public health disaster” among people exposed to Chernobyl fallout. International experts refuted that claim. Realizing that though people and archives lie, trees probably don’t, Brown turned to scientists—biologists, foresters, physicians, and physicists—to help her understand the ecology of the greater Chernobyl territories. She learned that contaminants saturated local eco-systems long before the Chernobyl accident and continued long after the 1986 event. Brown argues that to call Chernobyl an “accident” is to sweep aside the decades of radiation exposure that rained down on the globe during the period of nuclear testing. Instead of a one-off accident, Brown argues that Chernobyl was a point of acceleration on a timeline of radioactive contamination that continues to this day.
Kate Brown is the author of the prize-winning histories Plutopia: Nuclear Families in Atomic Cities and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (Oxford 2013) and A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland (Harvard 2004). Brown was a 2009 Guggenheim Fellow. Her work has also been supported by the Carnegie Foundation, the NEH, ACLS, IREX, and the American Academy of Berlin, among others. Her latest book, Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future, was published in 2019 by Norton (US), Penguin Lane (UK), Czarne (Poland), Capitán Swing (Spanish). In 2020, it will be translated into Ukrainian, Russian, Czech, Slovak, Lithuanian, French, Chinese, and Korean.
This event is organized by the Wastelands Faculty Seminar and is being co-sponsored by the Center for the Humanities, Department of History and International and Area Studies Program.
In anticipation of our 2020 Global Migration Conference, walk through the basement hallway between Goldfarb and Hillman Hall to examine the 24 photos brought to Wash U by the Borderlands Program of the Sierra Club.
"The Lens on the Border photo exhibit features vibrant images of the Southwest landscape, the people, and the communities that have been impacted by walls and would be impacted by more border walls." See more details on this photo exhibit via the link here.
Written by Alexander Pushkin
Red Torch Theatre, Novosibirsk
Timofey Kulyabin's Golden Mask Award-winning Onegin removes all expectations of Pushkin's novel in verse and places you not in some historical epoch, but in today's world, immersed in the inner thoughts, hopes, despairs, passions and disappointments that drift in, through and around the 4 central figures, Onegin, Tatiana, Olga and Lensky. There are no grand balls, no fans, no lorgnettes, no "Encyclopedia of Russian life". Just a quiet love story that perfectly conveys the attitude of the great poet and how very much his masterwork still resonates with our 21st century reality.
The film shows Osipova in rehearsal for classical roles at The Royal Ballet (where she's currently a principal) and for contemporary works with choreographers like Arthur Pita. There's no shortage of performance footage that showcases her physics-defying leaps, and old videos of her in ballet classes as a child give a glimpse of both her prodigious talent and impish personality.
As a part of Interfaith Week at Wash U, Sigma Iota Rho and the Catholic Student Center at Washington University are co-sponsoring a Welcome Neighbor STL Syrian Supper Dinner! The meal will be cooked and presented by a local Syrian refugee. Join beforehand for the World Mass at 4:30PM!
If interested in attending, a $10 donation is optional, but highly encouraged to offset costs and support the refugee cooks! You can sign up and donate through the link here: https://www.signupgenius.com/go/508084da5ad2ea4f49-world1
Danilo Mandić is based at Harvard University where he is a Postdoctoral College Fellow in the Department of Sociology. He lectures on war, forced migration, political sociology and research methods. His research focuses on social movements, nationalism, ethnic relations, civil war and organized crime. He is interested in conceptualizing organized crime as a neglected non-state actor and in understanding the interrelations of states, social movements and illicit flows of people, goods and ideas in regions with separatist disputes.
View Mandić's most recently published book: Gangsters and Other Statesmen: Mafias, Separatists, and Torn States in a Globalized World.
Please register for this event by clicking on the RSVP button below. Upon completion of the form, you will receive information for attending the virtual event.
Courtesy of Hostile Terrain 94 and the Undocumented Migrant Project, Border South will be available for screening for 24 hours from September 24 at 3pm CDT to September 25 at 3pm CDT (1pm PST).
There will be a live Q&A with director Raúl O. Paz Pastrana and Jason De León at 4pm CDT on the 25th. Register here to participate in the live Q&A on Zoom (limited to 300 participants). Otherwise, watch the live stream on Facebook here.
To access the film during the 24 hours, use the appropriate link and password below:
To stem the immigration tide, Mexico and the U.S. collaborate to crack down on migrants, forcing them into ever more dangerous territory.
Every year hundreds of thousands of migrants make their way along the trail running from southern Mexico to the US border. Gustavo’s gunshot wounds from Mexican police, which have achieved abundant press attention, might just earn him a ticket out of Nicaragua. Meanwhile anthropologist Jason painstakingly collects the trail’s remains, which have their own stories to tell. Fragmented stories from Hondurans crossing through southern Mexico assemble a vivid portrait of the thousands of immigrants who disappear along the trail. Border South reveals the immigrants’ resilience, ingenuity, and humor as it exposes a global migration system that renders human beings invisible in life as well as death.
Learn more about HT94@WUSTL
We will be gathering together to honor those who have lost their lives in the hostile terrain of our border regions, as well as to reflect on our unique experiences with the toe tags. Whether you have filled out toe tags before the event, or have yet to do so, all are welcome to join. Registration required--click here.
We will be accompanied by local artist, Mee Jey, who will show and expand upon her art performance, My Baby, as it connects to the humanitarian crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Since the pandemic broke out in January, fiction of disaster gained renewed popularity in China. French author Albert Camus’s La Peste hit new sales record in Chinese bookstores, and local literature, such as Xu Yigua’s White Mask and Bi Shumin’s Corona Virus witnessed overwhelming demand. Despite their popularity, fictions of disaster have also invited heated debate over how they should be written. Wuhan diary - also known as Fang Fang's Diary in China, which describes the hardship of life under lockdown in Wuhan, drew flak from critics who believe that the account undermines Wuhan’s international image and discredits the effort of local authorities.
The portrayal of national disasters in fiction can reveal much about the function of individual memory and the shifting status of national identity. In the context of Chinese culture, works such as Hou Hsiao-hsien's City of Sadness, Wang Xiaobo's The Golden Age and Liu Qingbang’s The Ballad of the Champaign reimagine past traumas and give rise to alternative historical narratives. In today’s COVID-19 outbreak, media technology has enabled a chaotic jumble of accounts and narratives to prevail. Some would lament that we lack a work of fiction that documents this disaster coherently and thoughtfully. In this context, does Fang Fang’s Diary qualify as a work that captures the collective memory of the Chinese nation?
In this talk, Professor Brantmeier will discuss how to achieve effective research collaborations with international partners that are compliant with university policies as well as how to meet the regulatory requirements and procedures that exist in the international setting. Cindy will emphasize the pre IRB submission process and discuss challenging issues, such as: understanding country-specific laws and regulations around data collection instruments and procedures, recruitment of subjects and informed consent, how to identify appropriate translators and cultural reviewers, protocol training for on-site individuals, transporting and storing consent forms and data, research identification, and what to do if the international sites do not have a local IRB or equivalent ethics committee approval. Cindy will assist IAS faculty and students in thinking through the best approach to making the international research process efficient while simultaneously following the necessary regulatory requirements for conducting research abroad and at Washington University. The talk will include examples and will allow time for questions and discussion from the attendees.
Please register for this event by clicking on the RSVP button below. Upon completion of the form, you will receive information for attending the virtual event.
This discussion is part of the St. Louis Inter-faith Committee on Latin America's (IFCLA) Week of Action for Alex Garcia, an undocumented immigrant who has been living in sanctuary here in St. Louis for three years to avoid deportation and separation from his family. Check out the week's programming via this link.
Courtesy of Hostile Terrain 94 and the Undocumented Migrant Project, IFCLA will offer the film Border South, which offers an intimate perspective on undocumented migration from Central America to the US, available for viewing at no cost on your own computer! Check out the trailer here. After you register (using this link), you’ll receive details for how to access and view the film online. Please make time to watch the 90-minute documentary before our discussion on Wednesday evening.
Then, join Attorney Nicole Cortes from the MICA Project and Sara John from IFCLA for a discussion to help us understand how US laws and policies have shaped Alex’s circumstances in this country. We look forward to sharing some clips of the film throughout the evening, but please make time to watch it in advance.
THE ST. LOUIS INTER-FAITH COMMITTEE ON LATIN AMERICA: Through education and organizing, we convene an inter-faith community to accompany the people of Latin America in their work for human rights and social justice.
The Migrant and Immigrant Community Action Project (MICA Project) is a community organization committed to working with low-income immigrants to overcome barriers to justice. The MICA Project utilizes legal services, organizing, advocacy, and education to promote the voice and human dignity of immigrant communities.
Join Hostile Terrain 94’s central team for the launch of a new Undocumented Migration Project monthly webinar series! Virtually “sit down” with UMP Director Jason De León and the team to chat about our organization, Hostile Terrain 94, and ways in which the public can get involved and take action right now. Moderated by Kgomotso Magagula, a student working with the HT94 team at St. Olaf College.
Live Q&A to follow. This event will take place via Facebook Live on Hostile Terrain 94’s page.
This monthly live series will feature guest speakers to discuss critical themes related to our mission including immigration policy reform, activism and nonprofit work, and migration and detention. The October episode will focus on human rights, incarceration, and immigration reform with world renowned topic experts.
Please visit the UMP website for additional information on upcoming episodes and to access previous installments.
Your friends, your classmates, and your student groups can all participate in our TOE TAG EVENT in a tent in Wash U’s McMillan Courtyard!
The tent event is a socially-distanced opportunity to participate in this political art project by filling out Toe Tags with the names and identifying information of migrants who have died trying to cross the border between Arizona and Mexico.
Why Participate? Because crossing a national border can cost a human being their home, their belongings and, sometimes, their life. By an accident of birth these individuals were on the “wrong” side of the border and died while trying to cross over. This is one thing we can do to remember these individuals and to call attention to the crisis at the border. Please sign up and join us on October 12 between 3:30-5:30pm!
If you are studying remotely and would still like to participate, please fill out our form here with the number of toe tags you would like to receive via mail.
Hear from leading academics and senior experts from across the world and across disciplines as they share which societal problem has them most concerned and what gives them hope for the future. Opening remarks will be provided by Chancellor Andrew D. Martin, Washington University in St. Louis.
Friday, December 4th, 12:00 - 2:00pm (CT)
In the weeks leading up to the event, you can see who is attending, contact them to express interest in their program(s) or department and “star” them as a reminder to visit their booth during the event!
Sigma Iota Rho and Washington University in St. Louis' International and Area Studies Department Present Town Hall Fall 2020. We will be discussing the dynamics between police and protesters in a comparative study of South America, Nigeria, Ukraine, and Canada
Register HereYour friends, your classmates, and your student groups can all participate in our TOE TAG EVENT in a tent in Wash U’s McMillan Courtyard!
The tent event is a socially-distanced opportunity to participate in this political art project by filling out Toe Tags with the names and identifying information of migrants who have died trying to cross the border between Arizona and Mexico.
Why Participate? Because crossing a national border can cost a human being their home, their belongings and, sometimes, their life. By an accident of birth these individuals were on the “wrong” side of the border and died while trying to cross over. This is one thing we can do to remember these individuals and to call attention to the crisis at the border. Please sign up and join us on October 29th between 3:30-5:30pm!
If you are studying remotely and would still like to participate, please fill out our form here with the number of toe tags you would like to receive via mail.
Inspired by the legend of Tristan and Isolde, Vicente Huidobro’s "Sky-Quake: Tremor of Heaven" is a stunning prose poem driven by a relentless seismic energy that takes metaphor-making and image-building to unimaginable heights. Originally published in Madrid in 1931 under the title “Temblor de cielo” and in Paris in 1932 as “Tremblement de ciel,” this groundbreaking text stands as one of the most significant bilingual poems of twentieth-century letters. Infante and Leong will be joined by Derick Mattern, who is a PhD student in the International Writers Track. Pre-registration is required.
To present the festival virtually, SLIFF has partnered with Eventive, a secure online platform. Access to most SLIFF programs will be restricted to Missouri and Illinois, but select programs are available either in the full U.S. or throughout the world. Here is instructions on how to fest!
Check the program to determine whether select content will be available in your area. For more details, check out the SLIFF website.
SLIFF free events: https://cinemastlouis.org/sliff/free-events
SLIFF film listings: https://cinemastlouis.org/sliff/film-listings
Drawing on insights from her research among meatpackers in central Illinois with transnational families in Mexico and Togo, Faranak Miraftab takes a close look at the contradictory dynamics that fuel the globally displaced labor force we call “immigrant workers” and the role they play in revitalizing the US rustbelt. She asks, “How does place matter for diverse displaced workers and how they negotiate their relationship with the rustbelt’s predominantly white population?” Focusing on the micro-politics of the everyday in life-making spaces outside the workplace, Miraftab challenges the metro-centrism of globalization and immigration studies that theorize based on immigrant experiences of metropolitan areas or so called “global cities.” Moving across local and global analytic scales, Miraftab reveals the invisible in-flow of resources that revitalize the rustbelt, a perspective critically relevant in the current era of demonizing and criminalizing immigrants.
Co-Sponsored by the Dean of Arts and Sciences and the Center for Race, Ethnicity, and Equity at WashU. Please contact Prof. M. Moraña: moranamabel@gmail.com with any questions and for the Zoom info
Co-Sponsored by the Dean of Arts and Sciences and the Center for Race, Ethnicity, and Equity at WashU. Please contact Prof. M. Moraña: moranamabel@gmail.com with any questions and for the Zoom info
Coeditors Nancy E. Berg, PhD, Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at Washington University, and Naomi B. Sokoloff, PhD, Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of Washington, will discuss their book Since 1948: Israeli Literature in the Making.
Toward the end of the twentieth century, an unprecedented surge of writing altered the Israeli literary scene in profound ways. As fresh creative voices and multiple languages vied for recognition, diversity replaced consensus. Genres once accorded lower status—such as the graphic novel and science fiction—gained readership and positive critical notice. These trends ushered in not only the discovery and recovery of literary works but also a major rethinking of literary history. In Since 1948, scholars consider how recent voices have succeeded older ones and reverberated in concert with them; how linguistic and geographical boundaries have blurred; how genres have shifted; and how canon and competition have shaped Israeli culture. Charting surprising trajectories of a vibrant, challenging, and dynamic literature, the contributors analyze texts composed in Hebrew, Yiddish, and Arabic; by Jews and non-Jews; and by Israelis abroad as well as writers in Israel. What emerges is a portrait of Israeli literature as neither minor nor regional, but rather as transnational, multilingual, and worthy of international attention.
The conversation will be joined by: Michael Raizen (Ohio-Wesleyan University), Shachar Pinsker (University of Michigan), Melissa Weininger (Rice University), Shai Ginsburg (Duke University), Eric Zakim (University of Maryland), and Riki Traum (Farleigh Dickinson University).
This event is co-sponsored by The Department of Jewish, Islamic, and Middle Eastern Studies at Washington University, the Israel Institute, and Near Eastern Languages & Civilization at the University of Washington.
This talk is about the Conference of Women of Africa and African Descent held in July 1960 in Accra, Ghana, an event that has remained somewhat obscure in the historiography of African and indeed black feminist internationalism. It contextualizes the Conference of Women of Africa and African Descent as exposing the possibilities and constraints of women’s transnational alliances during a historical moment in which different strands of political ideologies and agendas constituted the global order.
JOIN HEREJoin Eve Rosekind, PhD student in the Department of Art history & Archaeology in Arts & Sciences, for a talk about Orientalism, the artistic representation of the Middle East by European artists. The most common subjects of orientalist artwork that emerged in the nineteenth century were the desert landscape, hunters and warriors, market scenes, and odalisques in harems. These orientalist themes continued throughout the twentieth century, demonstrating the longevity of Orientalism within the history of art.
Initially these orientalist artworks appear as beautiful and straightforward representations of their subject matter, but the ideas that underlie these artistic depictions stem from European histories of colonialism and empire. This talk will scrutinize the common artistic themes of Orientalism and how they constructed a specific European vision and fantasy of the Orient. The Museum’s collection of paintings, photographs, and works on paper will take participants on a journey through the complex themes of European Orientalism.
This program is free, but registration is required.
Katja Perat’s novel, The Masochist, is a serio-comical fictional romp through the Habsburg Empire of the fin de siècle, beginning in 1874 Lemberg (present day Lviv/Lvov in Ukraine), continuing to Vienna, and ending in the Habsburg Adriatic seaport of Trieste in 1912. Along the way, the protagonist, Nadezhda Moser, the daughter of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (notorious author of Venus in Furs), encounters luminaries of the Empire's cultural elite. Pre-registration is required.
Exploring the brutality of history while conjuring the astonishment of magical realism, The Immortals of Tehran is a novel about the incantatory power of words and the revolutionary sparks of love, family, and poetry–set against the indifferent, relentless march of time.
This is the inaugural season for the International Writers Series, a new collaboration between the International Writers track of the Program in Comparative Literature and the University Libraries at Washington University to celebrate new publications of creative works by writers and translators in the Washington University in St. Louis community. The discussions are moderated by Matthias Goeritz, professor of the practice, Comparative Literature Program.
Free and open to all.
Free popcorn delivered for those who register before Thurs 2/18
*Non-SIR members welcome!
Get to know your new major peers, as well as our faculty and staff. We will cover what you need to know in order to make the most of your new major!
Learn what you need to know in order to write a Senior thesis!
This is a socially-distanced opportunity to participate in Hostile Terrain 94, a participatory art project memorializing migrant death in the Sonoran Desert. Help us by signing up to fill out toe tags with the names and identifying information of migrants who have died.
Why Participate? Because crossing a national border can cost a human being their home, their belongings and, sometimes, their life. By an accident of birth these individuals were on the “wrong” side of the border and died while trying to cross over. This is one thing we can do to remember these individuals and to call attention to the crisis at the border. Will you join us in this effort?
If you are studying remotely and would still like to participate, please fill out our form here with the number of toe tags you would like to receive via mail.
Due to snow this event has been cancelled. Please participate by signing up for a time slot for our event on Thursday, Feb. 25th from 1-4PM.
This is a socially-distanced opportunity to participate in Hostile Terrain 94, a participatory art project memorializing migrant death in the Sonoran Desert. Help us by signing up to fill out toe tags with the names and identifying information of migrants who have died.
Why Participate? Because crossing a national border can cost a human being their home, their belongings and, sometimes, their life. By an accident of birth these individuals were on the “wrong” side of the border and died while trying to cross over. This is one thing we can do to remember these individuals and to call attention to the crisis at the border. Will you join us in this effort?
Join International and Area Studies and Political Science alumni for a discussion on their work for Democratic campaigns.
Sign up will begin 15 minutes before the start of the event.
Join International and Area Studies alumni, Matt Russell, for a discussion on his work as an analyst at Invariant GR.
Sign up will begin 15 minutes before the start of the event.
Join International and Area Studies alumni, Madeline Wilson, for a discussion on her work as Senior Project Management Associate at Chemonics International.
Sign up will begin 15 minutes before the start of the event.
Join WUSTL alumni, Emily (Reinhart) Adeleke, for a discussion on her work as Senior Financial Sector Specialist in the Office of the Managing Director, Development Policy and Partnerships at The World Bank.
Sign up will begin 15 minutes before the start of the event.
Washington University in St. Louis faculty and students will provide instruction at CAM toward the creation of an interactive memorial exhibition on the school campus. Participants will complete toe tags with the identification information of migrants who have died while attempting to cross the border between Mexico and the United States, from the mid-1990s through 2019. When the memorial is completed, 3,200 lost lives will be represented.
If you are studying remotely and would still like to participate, please fill out our form here with the number of toe tags you would like to receive via mail.
As the world faces increasing environmental threats due to climate change, Israel was marked as a promising source of technological innovation in solar energy. What happened to that promise, and what are Israel's chances of decarbonizing its own energy market?
Dr. Elai Rettig is the Israeli Institute Teaching Fellow in Israeli and Environmental Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. In this three-part study, Dr. Rettig will explore the interplay between energy security and foreign policy in Israel from 1948 to the present.
This lecture is the third of a three-part series.
Victoria Grace Assokom-Siakam is a fellow at the Secretary General’s Office at the National Commission for Human Rights and Freedoms – Cameroon where she supports writing activity proposals and reports. Throughout undergrad, Assokom-Siakam has always been involved with organizations that seek to improve the quality of life of people whether that be through increasing access to healthcare, education, or other social services. Some notable experiences include: her three years supporting gun violence prevention activities at Washington University’s Institute for Public Health and her time as a user researcher for the ReImagine UCollege project which sought to make University College more accessible to professionals in the St. Louis community. She graduated in May 2020 from Washington University in St. Louis with a B.A in International and Area Studies concentrated in Development.
In this virtual reading and discussion, doctoral candidate Olivia Lott will present her recent translation of Lucía Estrada’s Katabasis, the first full collection of poetry by a Colombian woman to be translated into English. It takes its title from the Greek word for descent, referring to both classical knowledge quests into the underworld by epic heroes and, more broadly, to any journey into madness, darkness, the unknown. A three-part plunge into the darkness of the world, and of the mind, Estrada’s prose poems depict the night, the subconscious, and the surreal. Katabasis is longlisted for the 2020 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. Lott will be joined in discussion by Rebecca Hanssens-Reed, a doctoral student in Comparative Literature and fellow literary translator.
Dr. Thomas Baudinette is a cultural anthropologist whose work has explored consumption of popular culture among LGBTQ communities in Japan, Thailand and the Philippines. He has a particular interest in the global spread of Japanese popular culture and its impacts on conceptualizations of gender and sexuality.
Co-sponsored by Asian American Studies Minor and East Asian Studies
Gregory White is the Mary Huggins Gamble Professor of Government and a member of the Environmental Science and Policy Program Committee. He is the author of Climate Change and Migration: Security and Borders in a Warming World (Oxford University Press, 2011).
Dr. Robin Bronen works as a human rights attorney researching and working with communities forced to relocate because of climate change. She is a senior research scientist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and co-founded and works as the executive director of the Alaska Institute for Justice, a non-governmental organization that is the only immigration legal service provider in Alaska.
Erol Yayboke is a deputy director and senior fellow with the Project on Prosperity and Development (PPD) at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Some of his research interests include U.S. foreign assistance, migration and forced displacement, state fragility, and climate change. Mr. Yayboke teaches at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University and is a member of the board of directors for the Andi Leadership Institute for Young Women.
The annual Cultural Expo showcases many of the cultural groups at WashU! Access this virtual event through the Zoom link at the bottom of this page. To receive free food, sign up via the link below before Wednesday, March 24th at 11:59pm.
Access ZoomStop by the North Entrance of the DUC (near Mudd Field) to experience the finished Hostile Terrain 94 exhibit memorializing over 3,200 lives lost in the Arizonan Sonoran Desert.
*For the greater St. Louis community, please stay tuned for our outdoor opportunities to experience the exhibit.
Join faculty and student speakers in an open discussion.
Please contact gao-miles@wustl.edu for the event Zoom link.
For more information, visit the African Film Festival website.
Violence against and hatred of Asian Pacific Islander Desi Americans stems from a toxic, unique brew of racial supremacy, xenophobia, and for some communities, histories of colonialism. Anti-Asian violence is expansive, from subtle to extreme, driven by practices including scapegoating, flattening diverse cultures into a single racialized category, sexualized fetishizations casting Asian Americans as "perpetual foreigners."
Panelists:
Yashica Dutt is a prominent anti-caste journalist, her work ranging from arts, culture, fashion, and gender to the CISCO caste discrimination case from 2020. Dutt has worked for the Hindustan Times and graduated from the Columbia Journalism School with an MA in Arts and & Culture. Her work has appeared in notable publications such as the New York Times, The Atlantic, The Wire (India), Scroll.in and many others; she currently works as a freelance journalist and social media consultant in New York. In 2019, she published her memoir, Coming Out as Dalit, in which she explores the braided histories of her own life and the institution of caste in India. Her memoir won the prestigious Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar (Indian Government Literary Honor) in March 2021.
This event is brought to you by the WashU student groups Ekta (South Asian political education discussion group) and Ashoka (South Asian cultural group). And it is sponsored by the History Department; Jewish, Islamic, Middle Eastern Studies Department; Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department; the Asian American Studies program.
The event inaugurates Ekta's larger efforts to add caste protections to WashU's non-discrimination policy.
Learn more about the work here:
Sign up to help us complete the physical Hostile Terrain exhibit. You will be pinning toe tags to their respective locations on our 8ftx16ft installation.
Please sign up for as many slots as you would like. You can come late or leave early if you need to from any slot sign-up. Click here to watch this video for an example of what you will be doing.
Stop by the Women's Building Lawn to experience the finished Hostile Terrain 94 exhibit memorializing over 3,200 lives lost in the Arizonan Sonoran Desert.
Masks still required, even outdoors!
In the case of bad weather (even misting or sprinkling), the exhibit will not be outside in order to protect it.
The U.S Department of State's Office of Public Liaison will host a Virtual Student Foreign Policy Summit, an effort to connect university and college students from across the country to hear from U.S. foreign policy practitioners.
Students will hear from experts in the Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs, the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration, and the Bureau of Global Talant Management.
This event is a chance for students to connect directly with U.S. Department of State experts and ask critical questions about U.S. foreign policy priorities. Students will also have the chance to ask about U.S. Department of State careers and internships.
Join us for a conversation with Wash U Alumni and CEO of Xi’an Famous Food, Jason Wang. We will discuss:
- Ethnic Entrepreneurship
- Global Asian Cuisine
- Challenges in the Time of Covid-19
Dr. Marion Kaplan, Skirball Prof. of Modern Jewish History, New York University
Dr. Kaplan will describe the travails of refugees escaping Nazi Europe and awaiting their fate in Portugal. Drawing attention not only to the social and physical upheavals of refugee existence, the talk highlights their feelings as they fled their homes and histories while begging strangers for kindness. Life in limbo has at its core anxiety and fear, but also courage and resilience. Most refugees in Portugal showed strength and stamina as they faced unimagined challenges. For them, Lisbon emerged as a site of temporality and transition, a “no-man’s-land” between a painful past and a hopeful future. Paying careful attention to the words of refugees in Portugal may help us to understand Jewish heartbreak and perseverance in the 1940s and also to listen compassionately to refugees’ stories in our own times.
This lecture is the third part of a three-part series of webinars covering this topic.
The other two speakers are Karen Auerbach (3/22) and Anna Hájková (4/7).
Global Health Work in Progress (GHWIP) meetings bring together members of the Washington University global health community to learn about each other's work. Individuals working on a grant, paper or a new idea are encouraged to present their research and get feedback.
This event will have both in-person and virtual options for attendees. Please register here in advance even if you plan on attending in person.
Guerrillas and states alike deploy gendered tactics in war, yet these are often later obscured in the official War Stories that focus on battlefield heroics. Similarly, the scholarly literature gravitates towards bullets, bombs, and maneuvers while ignoring war’s political and discursive components. In this talk, I explore revolutionary struggles for “hearts and minds,” in which gender differences are magnified, minimized, or otherwise reshaped to best address the perceived needs of militarization. In Cuba and Nicaragua, rebels and the revolutionary states used gender tactics—drawing on both femininity and masculinity—to demoralize enemy soldiers, recruit new combatants, mobilize support among the nation at large, and sway the foreign policy of other nations. Examining gender tactics in war enhances our understanding of how wars are waged and won and how this, in turn, constrains postwar efforts at gender equality.
Lorraine Bayard de Volo is a political scientist in the Department of Women and Gender Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her areas of interest include gender, sexuality, and race as they relate to militarization, war, and revolution in Latin America. She is the author of Women and the Cuban Insurrection: How Gender Shaped Castro’s Victory and Mothers of Heroes and Martyrs: Gender Identity Politics in Nicaragua, 1979-1999. She takes a postcolonial, feminist approach to Cold War Cuba and is developing a book that goes beyond the superpower narratives through a Cuba-centric analysis of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
REGISTER HERE (EVEN IF ATTENDING IN-PERSON)
Join Tabea Linhard, professor of Spanish and comparative literature and Global Studies affiliate; Mattie Gottbrath, coordinator for international programming in Global Studies; and Ila Sheren, associate professor of art history & archaeology, all in Arts & Sciences, as they discuss Hostile Terrain 94, a global pop-up exhibition that gives representation to the thousands of migrants who died crossing the US–Mexico border since the mid-1990s and raises awareness of this humanitarian crisis. They will discuss the impact of border policies and border crossing on local and global communities and will share their experiences organizing this participatory exhibition in St. Louis.
The program will begin with a performance of “MY BABY” by artist Mee Jey that honors the unidentified people who lost their life in the desert of Arizona. Visitors are invited to view the exhibition before and/or after the program.
Tabea Linhard is professor of Spanish, comparative literature, and Global Studies at Washington University. She is the author of Fearless Women in the Mexican Revolution and the Spanish Civil War (2005), Jewish Spain: A Mediterranean Memory (2014), and the co-author of Mapping Migration, Identity, and Space. She recently completed Unexpected Routes: Refuge in Mexico (1931–1945) and regularly teaches courses on global migration.
Mattie Gottbrath is the coordinator for International Programming for Washington University’s undergraduate Global Studies major, and one of the lead organizers for St. Louis’s Hostile Terrain 94 exhibit. In her current role she teaches first-year students in the workshop for the Global Citizenship Program, which includes an immersive border awareness program in Tucson. She enjoys connecting locally with individuals impacted by immigration by volunteering with Casa de Salud, the International Institute, IFCLA, and other organizations. Gottbrath graduated from Washington University in 2018 with degrees in international affairs and Spanish. After graduating, she volunteered for a year in Guayaquil, Ecuador, with Rostro de Cristo. While there, she developed youth outreach programs with a local community development nonprofit, Hogar de Cristo.
Ila N. Sheren is associate professor in the Department of Art History & Archaeology at Washington University in St Louis. She is the author of Portable Borders: Performance Art and Politics on the US Frontera since 1984 (University of Texas Press, 2015), as well as articles published in The Journal of Borderlands Studies, GeoHumanities, and the anthologies Border Spaces (University of Arizona, 2018) and Liquid Borders/Fronteras Liquidas (Routledge, 2021). As part of the Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity, and Equity’s Innovation Space initiative, she is launching a collaborative map of community art on the US–Mexico Border in 2022. Click here for more information about the map.
Mee Jey is a multidisciplinary artist concerned with lived experiences. Mee focuses on the collective politico-cultural identity and experiences, communal creativity and connections through her immersive installations, performances, relational art projects, and time-based media. She is a recipient of McDonnell International Scholarship and Legislative Fellowship, USA. She works out of St. Louis and New Delhi.
Drop in between 11:30AM-2PM for our closing event of Hostile Terrain 94 in St. Louis. We will have the toe tags taken down from the exhibit itself, which participants can simply take home, or re-create into a collage, booklet, or other craft. There will be plenty of supplies available for crafting. Additionally, there will be an opportunity to fill out more tags with the information of migrants who have passed away since the beginning of the exhibit. Participants can then send these to their local representatives.
Each year, the Whitney R. Harris World Ecology Center organizes and co-sponsors the Whitney and Anna Harris Conservation Forum in partnership with the Missouri Botanical Garden, the Saint Louis Zoo, and the Academy of Science St. Louis. The forum provides an opportunity for interaction between conservation organizations and the general public. The forum hosts 3-4 speakers with a panel discussion following. This event is meant to promote learning, discussion, and new viewpoints.
prefer virtual instead? REGISTER FOR ZOOM HERE
Please note that the Zoom event will be limited to one device per registration.
Tiffanie Hardbarger, Ph.D. (Cherokee Nation)
Assistant Professor, Cherokee and Indigenous Studies
Northeastern State University - Tahlequah, Oklahoma
Remembrance: The Roots of Relationship to the Land
In this talk, Dr. Harbarger will share the philosophical roots of the EuroAmerican relationship to land and "sustainability" ethic in the United States using historiography, and how it has shifted in modern times. Examples of specific indigenous models and concepts will be shared as a way to examine how such relationships are remembered from an indigenous viewpoint.
Robin Kimmerer, Ph.D. (Citizen Potawatomi)
SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor, SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry - Syracuse, New York
Restoration and Reciprocity: Renewing Relationships with the Land
Sustainability of indigenous cultural landscapes is based on the philosophy and practice of reciprocal relationships between land and people. Conservation of biodiversity remnants alone is insufficient for the urgency of the times. Among the most powerful acts of reciprocity we can undertake, is restoration, healing the damage we have inflicted on land and our more-than-human relatives. However, repairing ecosystem structure and function must be complemented by restoration of reciprocal relationship to land. Synergy between indigenous and scientific knowledges, can guide the process of healing both land and relationship, through biocultural approaches, leading to reciprocal restoration and justice for the land.
Kyle Whyte, Ph.D. (Citizen Potawatomi)
George Willis Pack Professor of Environment and Sustainability, University of Michigan
Sustainability is a Matter of Kinship
Kinship traditions of ethics are needed more than ever if there will be progress toward sustainability. They are systematic, and demonstrate how norms of consent, reciprocity, trust, and accountability are entwined with ecological understandings of climate change and biodiversity conservation. Kinship is especially important as sustainable solutions, including renewable energy, turn out to pose threats to Indigenous peoples and other groups globally.
View full Conference schedule here
Sponsored by the Asian American Studies minor, the Center for Diversity and Inclusion, the Office of Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs.
AIDS was a deadly pandemic that devastated the gay community in the 1980s and 1990s. Typical stories about the AIDS movement are full of death, suffering, and anger. Asian American AIDS activists were no stranger to this grief and loss, but they also charted a different path of resistance, one that celebrated joy and sex as a way to bring the community together. In so doing, they redefined a queer Asian identity that is rooted in social justice. Their emphasis on joy is never more important in movement building today.
Register for virtual or in-person here
Eric C. Wat is the author of Los Angeles Times-bestselling novel SWIM (Permanent Press, 2019). His first book, The Making of a Gay Asian Community: An Oral History of Pre-AIDS Los Angeles (Rowman & Littlefield, 2002) was hailed as “a significant and trailblazing work” in queer Asian historiography when it was published. The follow-up to this book, Love Your Asian Body: AIDS Activism in Los Angeles (University of Washington Press, 2021), will be released in October. For a listing of his publications, please visit: www.ericwatbooks.com. He continues to consult with social movement organizations on program design and evaluation, action research, organizational development, and diversity, equity and inclusion, through coaching, technical assistance, facilitated reflection and storytelling. Occasionally Eric teaches Asian American studies and American studies at California State University at Long Beach.
Sign up for a volunteer slot here
When you arrive, please come to the glass wall inside the south entrance to the museum (closer to Forsyth) to be checked in. Remember to complete your self-screening before coming. You will be asked to present it.
Hosted by: Alaso Olivia, Lubega Wendy and Kelsey Nielsen
Joining directly from Kampala, Uganda, Olivia, Wendy and Kelsey, will be sharing about No White Saviors, which is an advocacy campaign working toward anti-racist and more equitable development and aid work. They will also be presenting on the Kusimama Collaborative as an example of local, community-run development work happening in Uganda.
Register for the Zoom event here (no longer active)
As an Ugandan Social Worker born and raised in Jinja, Olivia has a passion for helping vulnerable populations and supporting community-driven initiatives. After years of working with various NGOs and seeing harm caused by western do-gooders, she has imagined a better way forward. Olivia is a Mum to Lebron James Jr. and to a husband who really enjoys basketball. Family, history, and identity are all very important to her and a main source of her motivation.
A human rights activist and advocate by profession with a degree in ethics and human rights. A 27-year-old Ugandan, she is very passionate about social change that is justice driven with the human person as a focal point.
When we refer to Kelsey as the “white savior in recovery” on the team, we are not kidding. It’s important to realize that this is an ongoing process. Her main role is holding herself and fellow white people accountable in a real way. Kelsey received both her bachelor’s and master’s in Social Work from Temple University in Philadelphia.
This week of virtual events will include our annual Fall Undergraduate Research Symposium as a venue for students to present their research to the greater WashU community. The symposium will open September 27th and run concurrently with panels and workshops.
The Fall Undergraduate Research Symposium showcases the diverse range of impressive research projects completed by WashU undergraduates and provides opportunities for students to share their research, to engage in peer networking and cross-disciplinary conversations, and to develop presentation skills.
All undergraduates involved in research are invited to submit their work in the form of pre-recorded poster presentations or oral presentations. The deadline to submit a presentation is Monday, September 20. If you are interested in presenting, please complete your registration here.
9:00 - 9:30: Coffee & Chat
9:30 - 9:40: Opening Remarks
9:40 - 10:10: Welcome Session
10:20 - 11:20:
Building Community Trust, Agency, and Allyship
Intersections: Affirming LGBTQIA+ Immigrant Experiences
11:30 - 12:30
Intersections: Navigating the St. Louis Ecosystem as a Black Immigrant
Providing Trauma-Aware Care
1:00 - 2:00
Intersections: Addressing Mental Health Needs of AAPI Youth
Immigration Policy: What's Changed, What's Next?
2:10 - 3:10
Intersections: DACA-mented in St. Louis
COVID-19 Impacts in St. Louis: Policy Roundtable
3:15 - 3:30: Concluding Remarks
4:00 - 6:00: Optional In-Person Happy Hour at John D. McGurk’s (1200 Russell Blvd, St. Louis, MO 63104)
Register here
This exhibit is sponsored by Washington University's Brown School of Social Work, with collaboration of the Global Studies Program and the Central Reform Congregation of St. Louis.
The 45,000 Quilt Project is a beautiful work of art and brings together the work of over 60 immigrant justice activists and artists. Its large size represents the enormity of immigrant detention in our country with each of its 45 squares containing 1,000 marks. In total, 45,000 marks represents the average of 45,000 in immigrant detention on any given day. This is the largest immigrant detention system in the world. While the beautiful squares reflect the care felt for immigrants who are in jail for no crime other than seeking a better life for themselves and their families, the beauty should not mask its purpose - to alert people to the cruelty encountered by asylum seekers and other immigrants who are jailed.
For full program and more information, please visit the festival's website by clicking here.
A JIMES graduate, Fahim serves as an Army Intelligence Officer with the Army National Guard. Fahim is a regular writer on foreign affairs. His writings have appeared in the Jerusalem Post, University of Southern California Center on Public Diplomacy, Khama Press, & International Policy Digest. He has been quoted in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, CNN, and several other major publications.
Click here to see the flyer.
For a zoom link, please contact Dr. Younasse Tarbouni (ytarbouni@wustl.edu)
In many popular religious traditions, gods/spirits/energies become visible through their material realization in the corporeal bodies of shamans and spirit mediums and via ensouled statues, paintings, and masks. In Hindu and Buddhist worlds, such objects are produced in commercial workshops where knowing craftsmanship entangles (what we commonly call) technique with what we might (more cautiously) call magic to produce an efficacious or agentive image. In Korean shaman practice and among spirit mediums in Vietnam, Myanmar, and Bali, these statues, masks, and paintings are intended to facilitate the presence of otherwise unseen entities in ritual settings. This presentation describes a comparative project that became Dr. Kendall's recently published book, Mediums and Magical Things. It considers the fabrication and use of empowered images among shamans in Korea and spirit mediums Vietnam, Myanmar, and Bali. As a work of comparison, the discussion reveals how questions derived from ethnographic encounters in one place may yield surprising answers in another.
Laurel Kendall is Curator of Asian Ethnographic Collections at the American Museum of Natural History and Senior Research Scholar at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University.
image from Kendall's book cover: Mediums and Magical Things (University of California Press, 2021)
The Morrell Memorial Lecture in Asian Religions commemorates the work of the late Professor Emeritus Robert E. Morrell, a specialist in Japanese literature and Buddhism who taught at Washington University for 34 years and who holds special significance for the campus, as Morrell was the first to teach a course on Buddhism. This annual series commemorates his life work by bringing distinguished scholars of Asian religions to campus.
Cosponsored by the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures and the Program for Religious Studies.
A Zoom panel with David Warren, Nancy Reynolds, and Aria Nakissa to discuss Warren's new book, Rivals in the Gulf: Yusuf al-Qaradawi, Abdullah Bin Bayyah, and the Qatar-UAE Contest Over the Arab Spring and the Gulf Crisis, which analyzes the competing political interventions of two of the most famous Sunni Muslim scholars and their relationships with Qatari and Emirati foreign policy.
Join us for SIR's biannual town hall event! This year we are bringing in four unique speakers to talk about the current and historical situation and what's next for Afghanistan.
Attend in-person or via Zoom
COVID-permitting, we will host an in-person welcome session for Sophomores to meet Global Studies professors, staff, and fellow students. This is also a great opportunity to learn about study abroad, research opportunities, and our partnerships with the Career Center.
Abstract: The recent scholarship of civil rights historians and ethnic studies scholars have troubled the notion that appeals to a “common oppression” as “people of color” can unify multiracial coalitions. Rather, they have built their analysis around the concept of “differential racialization,” which emphasizes the unique experiences that racial groups have with white supremacy: slavery and its afterlife, settler colonialism, and foreigner/enemy racialization. While distinct racial experiences should not be conflated, we also know that communities of color do not live in isolation. With this later point in mind, this talk examines an understudied history of Black and Filipino labor solidarity in the Pacific Northwest. Specifically, my analysis centers the Alaska Cannery Worker Association (ACWA), a group of Filipino and other non-white white cannery workers in Alaska that formed in the summer of 1973. While they were a product of a long history of Filipino labor radicalism on the West Coast, they drew upon the resources and strategies of militant black workers, who were radicalized by Seattle’s Black Power Movement against institutionalized racism in the Building Trades, the United Construction Workers Association (UCWA). Through an examination of the fluid exchange of resources, people, and ideas between these laboring populations, this talk will make a case for the political potential of what I refer to as polycultural movement space, political sites were multiracial radical traditions overlap and mutuality, solidarity, and cross-fertilization across racial lines are nurtured across space and time.
Bio: Michael Schulze-Oechtering Castañeda is Assistant Professor of Comparative Ethnic Studies in Fairhaven College at Western Washington University (WWU) and a former Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow. His research uses social movement history and relational ethnic studies to explore how communities of color in the United States have both questioned and crossed racial boundaries. He is currently working on a book manuscript under contract with the University of Washington Press, No Separate Peace: Black and Filipinx Workers and the Labor of Solidarity in the Pacific Northwest, 1970-2000. This study examines the parallel and overlapping activist traditions and grassroots organizing practices of Filipino cannery workers in Alaska and Black construction workers in Seattle between the 1970s and the early 2000s.
The existence and persistence of a socialist economy aiming to achieve self-sufficiency in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) is often explained solely by coercive factors: Soviet influence or tyrannical domestic leadership.
By looking at scientific literature, economics textbooks and North Korean Workers' Party documents from the late 50s to the 1980s, this talk shows that both the adoption of a planned economy and the search for self-reliance after the Korean War were not just sudden ideological pronouncements or the product of geopolitical pressures, but also technoscientific solutions to a set of domestic economic and social issues.
Yet these solutions also brought on new problems of their own. The transition to a planned economy, for instance, greatly increased data collection and processing needs quickly leading to a national shortage of human computational labor. It seemed, however, that these new problems too could be solved with the help of technology, as "electronic counting machines" and the new field of cybernetics promised the tools that would allow for the automation of planning. The North Korean leadership's continuing adherence to socialism, then, was less a matter of stubborn attachment to orthodoxy than the product of faith in the ability of science and technology to keep engineering solutions to the country's problems.
Sponsored by East Asian Languages and Cultures and Global Studies
image: researchers from the Automation Institute under the Academy of Sciences using computers to automate economic planning, from "Korea Today", vol. 12, 1974.
IAS/Global Studies graduates and their families are invited to join us for heavy appetizers and drinks as we announce student awards and raise a toast to your accomplishments over the past four years.
Please RSVP below by Friday April 22nd.
In this student-faculty collaborated talk, Shailaja Paik (University of Cincinnati) and Prem Pariyar (California State University, East Bay) join Shefali Chandra (Washington University) and members of the student group Ekta and the Asian Multicultural Council to discuss how caste functions in college campuses within the South Asian diaspora, brainstorm tools to combat it, and connect caste with other transnational hierarchical systems. Join Ekta and AMC to kick off Dalit History Month this April!
Shailaja Paik is associate professor in the Department of History and affiliate in the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Cincinnati. Her scholarship and research interests focus on the politics of caste, gender and sexuality, and she is committed to advancing the dialogue in anti-caste and anti-colonial struggles, human rights, transnational women’s history, women-of-color feminisms and particularly on gendering caste and subaltern history. She is working on her third monograph, “Becoming ‘Vulgar’: Caste Domination and Normative Sexuality in Modern India,” and co-editing a book on Dr. B.R. Ambedkar (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). Paik has published several articles on a variety of themes, including the politics of naming, Dalit and African-American women, Dalit women’s education and new Dalit womanhood in colonial India in prestigious international journals.
Prem Pariyar (MSW, ASW) is a Bay Area social worker and alumnus of California State University, East Bay’s master’s of social work program. He is a prominent Dalit Rights activist in the United States, and was instrumental in the implementation of caste protections in the California State University system in January of this year. In 2021, he was a recipient of the SOLAR Award (Outstanding Student Leader) at Cal State East Bay. Currently, he is an elected delegate to the National Association of Social Workers assembly from the California Chapter. Pariyar has been featured in Al Jazeera, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle and Kathmandu Post.
Co-sponsored by Ekta (South Asian equality collective) and the Asian Multicultural Council with the Program in Global Studies and the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Generous support from the Center for Humanities; Department of History; Law, Identity, and Culture; South Asian Languages and Cultures; and the Department of Jewish, Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies.
RSVPFood provided!
The First World War provided one of the first definitions of war trauma in modern history, and is continually invoked in present-day narratives of PTSD. But how did this diagnosis develop, and what were the consequences for those who didn't meet those criteria? In this presentation, we will consider the ways in which 'shell shock' developed as a diagnosis that focused on combatant men, what the effects were on women, on the British and Irish battlefront and the home front, and what the consequences of this history are for present-day studies and treatments of war trauma.
Bridget Keown earned her PhD in history at Northeastern University, where her research focused on the experience and treatment of war-related trauma among British and Irish women during the First World War and Irish War of Independence, and the construction of history through trauma. She has written blogs on this research for the American Historical Associationand Lady Science, and is a contributing writer for Nursing Clio. She is also researching the history of kinship among gay and lesbian groups during the AIDS outbreak in the United States and Ireland. Her other interests include the history of emotions, history of medicine, gender and the horror genre, and postcolonial queer theory and performance. Bridget is a co-chair of the Gender and Memory Working Group of the Memory Studies Association and serves on the Executive Council of the American Conference for Irish Studies.
Click here for Zoom
Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen, Acting Director of the Williams Graduate Program in Art History, will speak about her new book Modern Art and the Remaking of Human Disposition (University of Chicago Press, 2021). The book examines how modern artists departed from the conventions of posing the human figure, thus destabilizing the prevailing visual codes for signifying the existence of the inner life of the human subject. Combining formal analysis with inquiries into psychology and evolutionary biology, the talk will focus on major works by George Seurat, Gustav Klimt, and Vaslav Nijinsky.
The Office of Undergraduate Research is excited to host a Celebration of Undergraduate Research this spring, which kicks off with our annual Spring Undergraduate Research Symposium on April 20. Featuring nearly 180 students’ poster presentations and talks, the symposium showcases the diverse range of projects completed by WashU undergraduates and mentored by WashU faculty. Presenters stem from over 30 major and minor programs across Arts & Sciences, McKelvey, Sam Fox and Olin. See a full list of presenters here.
We hope that you are able to “stop by” the virtual event to support the students. The community’s participation means a great deal to them, and this year it will look like posting comments and questions on students’ pre-recorded poster presentations and talks. Also, many students are hosting Zoom Q&A sessions. Find the session time and link on the student's presentation page.
Additionally, the symposium is running concurrently with Departmental events featuring undergraduate research. We are particularly excited to join Departments in congratulating Senior researchers completing theses, capstones, and other culminating projects. For more details on some of the upcoming events, visit the OUR’s Events Page here.
Join the Event
SIR Cultural Expo is an annual event hosted by Washington University in St. Louis' chapter of Sigma Iota Rho. Modeled after a club fair and featuring live performances by student groups, this event exposes the greater Washington University community, especially students, to the variety and diversity of cultures and experiences present at the university. This event also hopes to celebrate diversity and inclusion, to offer a moment of festivity and enjoyment at the end of the winter season, and to initiate and facilitate conversation around campus cultural groups.
Join in-person or via Zoom webinar for a panel discussion with:
We often like to think of decolonization in terms of binary struggles between European oppressors and indigenous resistance. But what happens when an anticolonial war is combined with a civil war? Based on extensive research on three continents and in three languages (Vietnamese, French, and English), this lecture focuses on the “forgotten” part of the First Indochina War (1945-54): the war for the Mekong delta, the heart of southern Vietnam. It examines the interactions between existing racial and ethnic stereotypes and a dynamic of violence on an unstable agricultural frontier. This mix led to a particularly vicious war for the countryside, and led to massive out-migration from the delta. Understanding this conflict helps us understand the strange birth of South Vietnam (1954-1975).
The speaker is the author of two books and a range of articles on Vietnamese cultural, social, and political history. His latest work is The First Vietnam War: Violence, Sovereignty, and the Fracture of the South, 1945-56 (Cambridge University Press, 2021).
Shawn McHale, a specialist in Southeast Asian History is a Professor in the Dept of History and International Affairs, at The George Washington University and Thanks for your assistance.
In Dr. Amy D. Ronner’s sixth book, Dostoevsky as Suicidologist: Self-Destruction and the Creative Process, she analyzes multiple suicides in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s writings to show how his understanding of self-homicide prefigures theories of prominent suicidologists. Based on her book, Dr. Ronner’s talk will reveal answers to some of the most mystifying questions. Why do people kill themselves? Is suicide a social fact? Why does a town plummet into chaotic ruin in Dostoevsky’s Demons? Why does Nikolay Stavrogin churn with pent-up rage and why does he choose that thickly soaped noose in lieu of a bullet for his self-demise? But there is an penultimate question mark: can there be a ligature between artistry and the pluripresent impulse to self-annihilate?
In 2015, the anonymous leak of the Panama Papers brought to light millions of financial and legal documents exposing how the superrich hide their money using complex webs of offshore vehicles. Spiderweb Capitalism takes you inside this shadow economy, uncovering the mechanics behind the invisible, mundane networks of lawyers, accountants, company secretaries, and fixers who facilitate the illicit movement of wealth across borders and around the globe. Kimberly Kay Hoang traveled more than 350,000 miles and conducted hundreds of in-depth interviews with private wealth managers, fund managers, entrepreneurs, C-suite executives, bankers, auditors, and other financial professionals. She traces the flow of capital from offshore funds in places like the Cayman Islands, Samoa, and Panama to special-purpose vehicles and holding companies in Singapore and Hong Kong, and how it finds its way into risky markets onshore in Vietnam and Myanmar. Hoang reveals the strategies behind spiderweb capitalism and examines the moral dilemmas of making money in legal, financial, and political gray zones.
Bio:
Kimberly Kay Hoang is an Associate Professor of Sociology and the College and the Director of Global Studies at the University of Chicago. She is the author of two books Spiderweb Capitalism and Dealing in Desire.
This event will bring together students, faculty, and staff to celebrate the start of the year. Tabea Alexa Linhard will share her vision for the future of our program. We will enjoy food as SIR, the global studies honor society, facilitates games related to the global.
Between 1918 and 1921, over 100,000 Jews were murdered in Ukraine by peasants, townsmen and soldiers who blamed the Jews for the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. In hundreds of separate incidents, ordinary people robbed their Jewish neighbors with impunity, burned down their houses, ripped apart their Torah scrolls, sexually assaulted them and killed them. Largely forgotten today, these pogroms — ethnic riots — dominated headlines and international affairs in their time. Aid workers warned that 6 million Jews were in danger of complete extermination. Twenty years later, these dire predictions would come true.
Drawing upon long-neglected archival materials, including thousands of newly discovered witness testimonies, trial records and official orders, acclaimed historian Jeffrey Veidlinger shows for the first time how this wave of genocidal violence created the conditions for the Holocaust. Through stories of survivors, perpetrators, aid workers and governmental officials, he explains how so many different groups of people came to the same conclusion: that killing Jews was an acceptable response to their various problems.
Jeffrey Veidlinger is the Joseph Brodsky Collegiate Professor of History and Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan and author of In the Midst of Civilized Europe: The Pogroms of 1918-1921 and the Onset of the Holocaust.
Supported by the Silk Foundation.
For more on the Holocaust Memorial Lecture, click the button below.
Headline image: “Jews marching in protest of pogroms,” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
More infoFrances S. Hasso is Professor in the Program in Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies at Duke University. She holds secondary appointments in the Department of Sociology and the Department of History. She was a 2018-2019 Fellow at the National Humanities Center. She is an Editor Emerita of the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies (2015-2018). She joined the Duke faculty in 2010 after 10 years at Oberlin College. Her scholarship focuses on gender and sexuality in the Arab world. ORCID
This event is co-sponsored by Jewish, Islamic, and Middle Eastern Studies.
Professor Sreenivas's book: Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India, asks how biological reproduction—as a process of reproducing human life—became central to reproducing India as a modern nation-state. While “reproductive politics” in India is often assumed to begin with population control in the 1960s, my research takes a longer historical perspective to show that reproduction was first called into public question in response to colonial-era crises, and was central to feminist, nationalist, and modernizing projects from the late nineteenth century onward. To tell this story, I investigate debates commonly understood to be part of reproductive politics, including about about marriage, family, and contraception. However, my research reveals that concerns about reproduction were also woven through a much wider range of political questions—about poverty and crises of subsistence, about migration and claims of national sovereignty, and about normative heterosexuality and drives for economic development.
The Global Futures Initiative aims to strengthen our Global Studies program, covering both the needs of students interested in an innovative and interdisciplinary liberal arts education from a global perspective and of faculty committed to collaborative teaching, scholarship and public-facing endeavors.
All faculty and graduate students are welcome, but attendance is limited to registered participants. Upon registration, you will receive a copy of the introduction to Hoang’s recent book Spiderweb Capitalism. Please register by October 6.
If you have any questions, please contact Tabea Linhard.
RSVP
This student-run event aims to provide space for students to interact with European Union Deputy Ambassador to the US, Michael Curtis.
Students from Sigma Iota Rho and the Alexander Hamilton Society will moderate the discussion.
Using creative-based and popular education methods, this workshop invites students to brainstorm strategies to build community while studying abroad. The workshop will share tools to embody critical interculturality and provide space for students to share the tools they already have to engage with others across difference.
Chelsea Viteri, Program Coordinator for Global Studies, will facilitate the space.
Join us in Simon 1 at 8:00 PM on Thursday, December 1st, to watch and participate in our live panel discussion with Dr. Matthew Gabel and Dr. Seth Jolly, both expert political scientists with extensive research experience on the European Union. We will discuss the alleged rise in authoritarianism in the past two decades in the European Union, with a period of audience questions and answers following the panel discussion.
The Vine Cafe will cater dinner.
Join us for hot chocolate as we celebrate the first edition of the Global Futures class, the GCPodcast launch, Dr. Amy Heath-Carpentier on her recent book publication, our senior thesis writers, our first cohort of Global Futures grants recipients, and more!
Panelists include:
This panel discussion is being sponsored by the Department of History's Crisis and Conflict in Historical Perspective Lecture Series and the Office of the Dean of Arts and Sciences.
Will also be available on Zoom.
Light refreshments will be served.
For more information, click here to view the poster for this event.
Click here to access recording of this webinar.
The OUR's biannual symposia showcase the diverse range of research and experiential learning projects completed by WashU undergraduates and mentored by WashU faculty. The Spring 2023 Symposium will take place on Tuesday, April 25, with a full-day (9 am - 6 pm) of events, including over 200 in-person poster and oral presentations in Frick Forum/Emerson Auditorium (Bauer Hall) and over 40 online presentations.
This event provides an important opportunity for undergraduates to share their research, engage in peer networking and cross-disciplinary conversations, and develop presentation skills. The symposium also provides a chance to celebrate the culminating achievements of our graduating seniors. Whether you are already involved with undergraduate research, curious about getting started, or just want to cheer on the presenters, all are welcome to attend the Symposium. We hope to see you there!
More information can be found on the Spring 2023 Symposium webpage. For further questions, please contact the OUR at undergradresearch@wustl.edu.
This breakfast event will share information about studying abroad, research opportunities, our student organization Sigma Iota Rho, and more. The primary purpose of this gathering is to welcome students to our Global Studies community, answer any questions and provide guidance and resources for their journey as GS majors.
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If so, there’s a lot to know as you make your plans. Prof. Seth Graebner will host an information session (in person and streamed on Zoom).
Join us for the 2023 Global Studies Thesis Conference. Five graduating senior writers will present their work.
We work with Arcadia on a variety of programs in Australia, Ireland, and the United Kingdom. Drop by these office hours to speak with Wendy Lombardo about Arcadia programs and extracurriculars. McMillan 259 is tucked away in the corner of the hallway above the Overseas Programs’ offices.
Paul Amar is the Director of the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies and Professor at the Department of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
He is a political scientist and anthropologist who speaks seven languages and has published in nine languages. He holds affiliate appointments in Feminist Studies, Sociology, Comparative Literature, Middle East Studies, and Latin American & Iberian Studies, and has been awarded two Fulbright Fellowships in the past. Before he began his academic career, he worked as a journalist in Cairo, a police reformer and sexuality-rights activist in Rio de Janeiro, and as a conflict-resolution and economic-development specialist at the United Nations.
His books include: Cairo Cosmopolitan (2006); New Racial Missions of Policing (2010); Global South to the Rescue (2011); Dispatches from the Arab Spring (2013); and The Middle East and Brazil (2014). His book “The Security Archipelago” was awarded the Charles Taylor Award for “Best Book of the Year” in 2014 by the American Political Science Association.
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In this talk, Prof. Paul Amar, recent Department Chair and founder of the PhD program in the Department of Global Studies and current Director of the Orfalea Center for Global & International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, will highlight some of the most exciting trends in the evolving field of Global Studies. He will map the centering of perspectives and scholars from the Global South and the shift in research ethics from extraction toward community partnerships and public action. And he will identify the challenges and opportunities of interdisciplinary institution-building in the context of austerity politics and isolationist anti-globalism.
Join Dr. Kia Caldwell, Black Latin American feminist scholar, Professor of African & African American Studies & Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs & Diversity alongside Black feminists & activists, Velma Reis & Monica Cunha, in-person or by webinar, as they discuss the current and future political state of Brazil, specifically centralizing the conversation around black feminism and how it fits into the political, health equity, public defense, and congressional Brazilian landscape.
Maya J. Berry is a dancer, performance scholar, and social anthropologist by training who brings a Black feminist approach to her research on the Black political imagination in Havana, Cuba. Her writing appears in American Anthropologist, Afro-Hispanic Review, Black Diaspora Review, Cultural Anthropology, Cuban Studies, Dance Research Journal, and the Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology. Prior to joining the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as assistant professor of African diaspora studies, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Sacred Music at Yale University. Her research has been supported by the Ford Foundation, the Institute for Citizens & Scholars (formerly the Woodrow Wilson Foundation), and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, among others.
Town Hall is a panel discussion hosted by Sigma Iota Rho focusing on the 2023 World Cup hosted by Qatar and their impact on conversations surrounding human rights, international relations, and globalism. This event brings together experts from various fields, including sports, politics, and human rights activism, to discuss the intersection of these topics and their impact on Qatar and the world.
The event aims to facilitate an open and honest discussion about the challenges facing Qatar after hosting the World Cup, including concerns about labor practices and human rights violations. Panelists will explore the various issues surrounding the event, including the treatment of migrant workers, gender inequality, and environmental concerns.
Town Hall also provides an opportunity for participants to engage in constructive dialogue about how to improve the situation in Qatar and create a more inclusive and equitable world. The event encourages active participation from the audience, with opportunities for questions and comments from the floor.
Overall, Town Hall seeks to provide a platform for meaningful conversation by bringing together diverse voices and perspectives. The event hopes to promote understanding, collaboration, and positive change for Qatar and the world.
Focusing on East Asian security issues and Sino-American relations, Mr. Blumenthal has served in and advised the US government on China issues for more than a decade.
Before joining AEI, Mr. Blumenthal served as senior director for China, Taiwan, and Mongolia at the US Department of Defense. He served as a commissioner on the congressionally mandated US-China Economic and Security Review Commission from 2006 to 2012, and he was vice chairman of the commission in 2007. He also served on the Academic Advisory Board of the congressional US-China Working Group.
Mr. Blumenthal is the author of “The China Nightmare: The Grand Ambitions of a Decaying State” (AEI Press, November 2020) and coauthor of “An Awkward Embrace: The United States and China in the 21st Century” (AEI Press, November 2012).
He has testified before Congress and has been published in The Atlantic, Commentary, Foreign Policy, The Hill, Los Angeles Times, The National Interest, National Review, The New York Post, The New York Times, Newsweek, RealClearWorld, and The Wall Street Journal, among other outlets. His broadcast appearances include C-SPAN, Yahoo News, Bloomberg Radio, and many top-rated talk radio programs.
Crisis and Conflict in Historical Perspective is a co-curricular initiative serving undergraduates considering careers in policy, as well as the greater WashU and St. Louis communities seeking historically-informed discussions about global events.
This lecture is being sponsored by the History Department of Washington University. Free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be served.
For more information about AEI, please visit: https://www.aei.org/profile/dan-blumenthal/
Using creative-based and popular education methods, this workshop invites students to brainstorm strategies to build community while studying abroad. The workshop will share tools to embody critical interculturality and provide space for students to share the tools they already have to engage with others across difference.
Chelsea Viteri, Program Coordinator for Global Studies, will facilitate the space.
Join SIR, the Global Studies student organization, for their yearly Cultural Expo.
To learn more, you can check out SIR on Instagram.
Lunch will be provided by Revel Kitchen!
Followed by Happy Hour in the Bear Public House (on lower level of the Knight Center).
Join our open house to learn more about the program's vision, major, and our thriving academic community.
Reverence for literature and disregard for law have been often seen as persistent attributes of Russian cultural identity. In this talk, I will suggest that there is a connection between these attitudes, and that the outsize role of literature and the tremendous authority of the Russian writer in the late imperial period hindered the development of a strong legal consciousness. In the literature-centric courtroom of the day, lawyers sought to project the image of the writer’s surrogate; questions of law were displaced by concerns with psychology, morality, verbal artistry, and civic-mindedness; and a relaxed attitude toward facts found legitimacy behind appeals to “higher reality,” “inner meaning” and other categories imported from literature. While literature no longer enjoys the same prestige and influence, aspects of these attitudes endure to this day, underwriting some of the worst abuses of law committed in and by Russia in recent years.
Eurasianism, Russia’s superiority and exceptionalism are the cornerstones of Putin's official ideology and, more generally, of Russian identity. In this presentation I will show how, starting as the philosophical duel between "Slavophiles" and "Westernisers" in the mid-19th century, the
ideas of Russian uniqueness, anti-Westernism, and anti-modernity resulted in Eurasianism, the concept that defines Putin’s ideology and ultimately the present Russia’s policy. I will primarily focus not on the Eurasianist doctrines themselves but on the way they have been twisted and manipulated in the works of today’s Russian ideologists. As I will show, Eurasianism is not just a philosophical school of thought anymore - it is the core ideological background that defines Putin's foreign policy and justifies Russian expansionism. I shall also explain why Russia’s war against Ukraine could be just the beginning.
Maria Kurbak is a Fellow with the Institute of International Education Scholar Rescue Fund and Visiting Scholar in the Memory Lab, Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences, Washington University in St. Louis
Panelists:
Tabea Linhard, Director of Global Studies, Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature
Erin McGlothlin, Professor of German and Jewish Studies and Vice Dean of Undergraduate Affairs in the College of Arts and Sciences
Anca Parvulescu, Professor of English; Liselotte Dieckmann Professor of Comparative Literature
Timothy Parsons, Professor of History and of African and African-American Studies
Moderator: Stephanie Kirk, Director of the Center for the Humanities, Professor of Spanish, Comparative Literature, and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
The roundtable discussion will take place on October 20, 3:00, in Hurst Lounge, Duncker Hall. A reception will follow.
Unexpected Routes chronicles the refugee journeys of six writers whose lives were upended by fascism in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War and during World War II: Cuban-born Spanish writer Silvia Mistral, German-born Spanish writer Max Aub, German writer Anna Seghers, German author Ruth Rewald, Swiss-born political activist, photographer, and ethnographer Gertrude Duby, and Czech writer and journalist Egon Erwin Kisch.
In a study that bridges history, literary studies, and refugee studies, Tabea Alexa Linhard draws connections between colonialism, the Spanish Civil War, and World War II and the Holocaust to shed light on the histories and literatures of exile and migration, drawing connections to today's refugee crisis and asking larger questions around the notions of belonging, longing, and the lived experience of exile.
Sebastiaan Faber writes about Unexpected Routes: “Tabea Alexa Linhard movingly tells the stories of six mid-century antifascist writers and artists who were lucky enough to escape death through circuitous routes of exile. Unexpected Routes helps us understand the challenges these exiles faced, and how their views of their new surroundings were often marked by a colonial violence they weren’t always able to acknowledge.”
For a preview, see On the Refugee Stories That Begin Where Casablanca Ends.
Dr. McInnis’ research areas include the intersection of gender and national security; global security strategy; defense policy; and transatlantic security. Before rejoining the Center, Dr. McInnis served as a specialist in international security at the Congressional Research Service (CRS), where she served as a senior expert to Congress on strategic issues including defense policy, military operations, civilian-military relations, irregular warfare, and global strategy.
Prior to CRS, she worked as a research consultant at Chatham House in London, writing on NATO and transatlantic security matters.
Dr. McInnis is the author of two books, How and Why States Defect from Contemporary Military Coalition (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) and the novel The Heart of War: Misadventures in the Pentagon (Post Hill Press, 2018).
Sponsored by the Department of History and the Office of the Dean of Arts & Sciences. Free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be served.
Moving Stories brings together participants from scholarship, the art field, and advocacy to discuss the challenges of incorporating and honoring the dignity of immigrant narratives in different practices.
Following the format of a critical conversation, the discussion will touch on relevant topics such as the presence of surveillance and climate change and its impact on migratory movements, the challenges involved in researching long-term immigrant communities, and the privileged forms of engagement used by migration-inspired art pieces.
Moving Stories is a transdisciplinary project led by faculty from Visual Arts, Art History, Romance Languages and Literatures, Sociology, and Design that reflects on how narratives work to bridge divides between migrants and the communities in which they settle.
This roundtable with migration specialists will be moderated by Dr. Ila Sheren, Associate Professor, Department of Art History & Archaeology, Associate Director, Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity, and Equity and Director of Graduate Studies, American Culture Studies.
The roundtable participants include:
Nicole Cortes-Co-Director and attorney at the Migrant and Immigrant Community Action (MICA) Project. Her practice includes deportation defense, asylum, and other humanitarian relief.
Pia Singh- Art writer and independent curator based in Chicago. Born in Mumbai, her proposed research investigates community-engaged arts practices at the intersection of contemporary art and design thinking.
Ria Unson- Filipino American artist centered in the construction of narratives of a mixed race, post-colonial Filipino American.
Mitra Naseh- Assistant professor at Brown School, WUSTL
Research Director of the Initiative on Social Work and Forced Migration (ISWFM)
Co-chair of the Society for Social Work and Research (SSWR) Immigrants and Refugees (I & R) cluster
Adriano Udani- Associate Professor, Department of Political Science
Director, Public Policy Administration Program, UMSL
Research Advisor, Community Innovation and Action Center, UMSL
This event is being supported by the American Culture Studies Program, The Incubator for Transdisciplinary Futures, The Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity & Equity, the Global Studies Program and the Department of Romance Languages & Literatures.
Panelists:
Nicole Svobodny, Senior Lecturer in Global Studies and Russian Literature and Culture
Tili Boon Cuillé, Professor of French and Comparative Literature
Elinor Harrison, Lecturer in Dance
Anca Parvulescu, Professor of English; Liselotte Dieckmann Professor of Comparative Literature
Moderator: Tabea Linhard, Director of Global Studies and Professor of Spanish
Nijinsky’s Feeling Mind: The Dancer Writes, The Writer Dances is the first in-depth literary study of Vaslav Nijinsky’s life-writing. Drawing on extensive archival research, Nicole Svobodny illuminates the modernist contexts from which the dancer-writer emerged at the end of World War I.
Through close textual analysis combined with intellectual biography, Svobodny puts the spotlight on Nijinsky as reader. She elucidates Nijinsky’s riffs on Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche, equating these intertextual connections to “marking” a dance, whereby the dancer uses a reduction strategy situated between thinking and doing. By exploring the intersections of bodily movement and verbal language, this book addresses broader questions of how we sense and make sense of our worlds.
Kimerer LaMothe writes about Nijinsky’s Feeling Mind: “In Svobodny’s thorough account, Nijinsky’s notebooks appear as one face of a multimodal art project—involving dancing, writing, and drawing—whose interlocking pieces break down easy dichotomies between interiority and exteriority, thought and feeling, writing and dancing, and in so doing, enact (both performing and representing) the creative process as a key to healing a world ravaged by war.”
Hass focuses his research and analysis on enhancing policy development on the pressing political, economic, and security challenges facing the UnitedStates in East Asia.
He is the author of Stronger: Adapting America’s China Strategy in an Age of Competitive Interdependence (Yale University Press, 2021), a co-editor of Global China: Assessing China’s Growing Role in the World (Brookings Press, 2021), of the monograph, The future of US policy toward China: Recommendations for the Biden administration (Brookings, 2020), and a co-author of U.S.-Taiwan Relations: Will China’s Challenge Lead to a Crisis? (Brookings Press, 2023). He also leads the Democracy in Asia project at the Brookings Institution and is co-chair of the international task force on Taiwanconvened by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Sponsored by the Department of History and the Office of the Dean of Arts & Sciences.
Free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be served.
Crisis and Conflict in Historical Perspective is a co-curricular initiative of the History Department at Washington University in St. Louis serving undergraduates considering careers in policy, as well as the greater WashU and St. Louis communities seeking historically-informed discussions about global events.
Extracting Power: Lithium Mining and the Indigenous Communities of the Northern Andes. This panel is hosted by WashU Sigma Iota Rho, the Global Studies Honorary. Expert panelists Dr. Fernando Serrano, Ms. Melisa Escosteguy, Dr. Javier Barandiarán, and Ms. Dámare Araya, a representative from MODATIMA (Movement for the Defense of Access to Water, Land, and Environmental Protection), will discuss the effect of lithium mining on Indigenous communities of Latin America. Join us in Seigle L006 at 6:45 pm on Thursday, November 30th!
This talk introduces the Pangdatsangs, one of the wealthiest and most powerful Tibetan families of the mid-20th century. In the decades leading up to WWII, the Pangdatsang family expanded their long-distance transportation firm from India to China through strategic alliances with both the Tibetan Government and the Chinese Nationalists. This talk traces the Pangdatsang firm’s engagement with transnational and state-backed financial infrastructures as they learned to navigate the often opposing forces of an emerging state bureaucracy and unofficial market pressures. Additionally, it argues that managing long-distance trade in a borderland environment required the use of old and new financial networks, from monasteries to modern banks and foreign exchange, and an ability to adapt to rapidly shifting norms.
Between 1917 and 1925, the United States deported more than 1,000 foreign-born leftwing radicals in the largest expulsion of political dissidents in US history. This presentation places this event in global perspective by tracing the transnational experiences, networks, and impacts of these deportees. Like deportees today, many were separated from families and communities, exposed to persecution and violence in their native countries, or transformed into refugees and exiles. But their trajectories reveal other, unanticipated consequences: "repatriated" radicals—most of whom had acquired or evolved their political views in the United States—influenced labor and revolutionary movements abroad, often in ways contrary to American foreign policy objectives. Deportation supplied leaders as well as rank-and-file members to anarchist, syndicalist, socialist, and Communist movements in a long list of countries, including Russia, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Finland, Germany, Canada, Cuba, and Argentina. A handful of deportees even returned clandestinely to the United States under false names and resumed their activities on American soil. The forced migrations of the First Red Scare, in other words, contributed to leftwing radicalism on a global scale by expanding and forging new links in transnational radical networks.
Featured artists include Janna Añonuevo Langholz, Arleene Correa Valencia, Zlatko Ćosić, Mee Jey, Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya, Kiki Salem, Rafael Soldi, and Laurencia Strauss. An experiment in collaborative curating, the exhibition demonstrates how stories can shift entrenched attitudes toward immigration and how art can foster connections between migrants and the communities in which they become a part.
Moving Stories invites all to participate in a slate of free programs associated with the exhibition. (Don't worry, there will be more reminders.)
Moving Stories is also excited to promote upcoming events organized concurrently with the exhibition by partners and friends of the project.
Moving Stories in the Making: An Exhibition of Migration Narratives reflects the work of an organizational partnership between Moving Stories and The Luminary. Moving Stories is a collective of Washington University researchers supported by a programmatic grant from the Incubator for Transdisciplinary Futures. Moving Stories in the Making would not have been possible without the support of the Mark S. Weil and Joan M. Hall Fund for Art History and the Department of Art History and Archaeology at WashU.
Please join us for a reading and reception with filmmaker and co-founder of the Asian American Writers' Workshop, Curtis Chin. His memoir, Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant (Little, Brown 2023), about coming of age and coming out traces the author's journey through 1980's Detroit as he navigated rising xenophobia, the AIDS epidemic, and the Reagan Revolution to find his voice as a writer and activist — all set against the backdrop of his family's popular Chinese restaurant.
This event is brought to you thanks to generous sponsors at Washington University the American Culture Studies program, the Center for Diversity and Inclusion, Center for the Humanities, Center for the Literary Arts, & the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.
About the Speaker:
Curtis Chin is co-founder of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop in New York City. Curtis served as the non-profit’s first Executive Director. He went on to write for network and cable television before transitioning to social justice documentaries. Chin has screened his films at over 600 venues in sixteen countries. He has written for CNN, Bon Appetit, the Detroit Free Press, and the Emancipator/Boston Globe. His memoir, Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant was published by Little, Brown in Fall 2023.
Many scholars argue that a key feature of Putin's Russia is the re-legitimization of the Soviet past, especially the glorification of successes including the victory in the Second World War. One consequence of this, they contend, is the prevention of full democratization. Dr. Toymentsev, on the contrary, argues that the memorialization of the Soviet past is much more complex, with traumatic facts such as the gulag not being suppressed, with the result that the past is both condemned and glorified at the same time. In his talk Dr. Toymentsev examines the ambivalent nature of the memorialization of the Soviet past in a range of media, including history textbooks, films, television programs and novels, and concludes that the contradictory attitude to the Soviet past is entirely in step with the hybrid nature of the current regime.
Dr. Elizabeth Blake will present on research for her book project, Dostoevsky, the Siberian, by focusing on the reception history of his autobiographical novel, Notes from the House of the Dead, based on his confinement in the Omsk Stockade (1850-54) for his participation in the Petrashevsky Circle. The presentation will examine observations by former political prisoners Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Nicholas Berdyaev, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Varlaam Shalamov in an attempt to assess the significance of the literary work for the twentieth century and beyond.
KS (Kara) Lack moved to Kyiv in 1994 to help launch one of Ukraine’s first independent newspapers—Dzerkalo Nedeli (ZN,UA)—when she was 22. Now a writer and letterpress artist, she is interested in the interplay between presswork and poetry and in transcending constraints by working with them. KS is a founding member of the Introspective Collective consortium of artists. A native New Yorker, she received degrees in Post-Soviet Studies from Columbia University (B.A.) and the London School of Economics (M.Sc.). KS has been living with chronic pain and disability since childhood.
Her talk will draw from two projects she is currently spearheading to raise awareness and funding for Ukrainian humanitarian aid: her hybrid chapbook, Kyivsky Waltz—a love story | Київський Валь—любовна історія, published in February 2024 by Finishing Line Press, and its companion piece Sunflower Variations—this is Ukraine | Соняшникові Варіації – це Україна, a multimedia exhibition scheduled for public viewing this Fall. While Kyivsky Waltz is a memoir, Sunflower Variations addresses the current invasion and ongoing humanitarian crisis.
This session will share information about studying abroad, research opportunities, our student organization, Sigma Iota Rho, and more. The primary purpose of this gathering is to welcome students to the Global Studies community, answer questions, and provide guidance and resources for their journey as GS majors.
Cultural expo is a yearly event hosted by Sigma Iota Rho, Washu’s global studies honorary meant to celebrate and showcase the diverse range of cultures present within the WashU community. The event will feature booths hosted by WashU students sharing everything from their culture and heritage to their experiences abroad in other cultures. In addition performances by student groups will be held and food will be provided."
If the answer is "yes," consider coming to an information and question-and answer session on Wednesday 27 March at 4 p.m. in McMillan 259, to hear what you need to know to make your decision and to go through the process smoothly.
The session will be recorded and available for viewing later.
Please remember that the deadline for submission of your "Intent to Write a Senior Thesis" form is Monday 15 April at 5 p.m. This form requires the signature of a faculty adviser and asks you to describe the project briefly and to provide a very short initial bibliography for it. Our purpose in asking to review the forms at the end of this semester is purely to push thesis writers to begin thinking about their projects before the summer.
Join us on Thursday, April 18th in Seigle 301 for our Spring 2024 Town Hall! Be there at 6:40 pm for food from Garbanzo! The topic is the global impact of the war on drugs. We'll be hosting special guests Dr. Petter Grahl Johnstad, Dr. Corina Giacomello, and Dr. Guillermo Jose Garcia Sanchez.
Global Studies seniors and their families are invited to the Global Studies graduation reception.
Please RSVP on this form as soon as possible, so that we may plan accordingly.
The Global Studies faculty and staff look forward to celebrating with you next month!
