Academic Affairs

Multiple faculty panels and speakers covering a variety of topics. More information can be found here. 

Olivier Knox is Senior National Correspondent at U.S. News and World Report, where he has written about national politics and foreign policy since June 2024. Before that, he worked at The Washington Post, SiriusXM, Yahoo News, and 15 years at Agence France-Presse. Throughout his three-decade career, he has focused on Congress and the White House, traveled the world on Air Force One, interviewed presidents and lawmakers and, crucially, talked to knowledgeable staff as he tried to tell readers and listeners all over the world what was really happening and how it might affect their lives.

“The Chief Ideologue” of the Islamic Revolution? Moretza Motahhari and the Formation of Islamist Thought in Pre-Revolutionary Iran

As a prominent student of Khomeini, Morteza Motahhari has long been portrayed as the “chief ideologue” of the Islamic Revolution in Iran. A critical examination of his works and life, however, reveals an erudite figure who, at his core, was an innovative theologian rather than a revolutionary ideologue. In this talk, Ata will focus on a few themes that highlight the centrality of a dialogical model to Motahhari’s theological thinking.

Mapping the Global: The Middlebury Atlas of Globalization

More than five years ago, three Middlebury College faculty embarked on an ambitious project: to create an atlas textbook for courses in global studies, international relations, and geography that offer a road map to the omnipresent strands of globalization. Our talk will cover the story behind the creation of the atlas and its companion website.  We will discuss the writing process, challenges of covering novel topics, and collaborating with 18 student researchers.

Radical Implications: Politicization, Pedagogy, and Planetary Ecological Crisis

This lecture will explore questions of politicization and planetary environmental crisis by looking at how these dynamics are playing out in three contexts: (1) among global change scientists, (2) among climate activists trying to formulate movement strategies, and (3) among environmental educators and their students.

Clocking In: Time and Painting

Since 2019, Visiting Assistant Professor Roger White (Studio Art) has been making a series of “Calendar Paintings” that explore variations of conventional time-keeping formats. In this lecture, White will present this body of work in the context of its art-historical precursors—from medieval books of hours to the “Date Paintings” of conceptual artist On Kawara—and his broader interest in art and the everyday.

‘Woe to Those Who Fail to Reckon with History’: The Brothers Karbelashvili and the Fate of Empire in the South Causasus, 1860-2024

In 1924, Fr. Vasili Karbelashvili penned a passionate letter to his former student, Joseph Stalin. His desperate bid to stave off Bolshevik violence failed: his family fell victim to Stalinist repression. Yet by 2011, Vasili and his four brothers were canonized by the Georgian Orthodox Church.

Mural Painting and the Nineteenth Century Civic Imagination

‘The Dance of Life: Figure and Imagination in American Art, 1876–1917’ exhibition explores the American Renaissance, a pivotal yet neglected period in American history, that inspired an ambitious generation of artists to develop a movement in mural painting that captivated a divided nation.

Bridging Scholarship and Practice: A Conflict Transformation Story

Conflict transformation is an approach that grew out of international relations (IR), and that intellectual history informed the work of IR scholar Sarah Stroup as she took the helm of the Conflict Transformation Collaborative at Middlebury. Yet the core ethics of conflict transformation are deeply interdisciplinary and applicable at all levels of conflict, from the interpersonal to the organizational to the global.

Pierre Bolotte and the Colonial Origins of the Anti-Crime Brigade

When we think of the police, we usually think of a local institution. However, this talk is about the global circulation of police power, tactics, and ideology. I will focus on the life of a mostly forgotten French civil servant who spent his career abroad in the French empire before bringing his expertise back home to the suburbs of Paris.