Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs

Eliot Borenstein’s forthcoming book, Plots Against Russia, is a study of the role of paranoid fantasy in contemporary Russian political discourse and culture. Rather than simply respond to every conspiracy theory that makes the news, or assume that conspiracy is somehow an exclusively Russian disorder, Borenstein examines the frameworks that have allowed conspiracy to flourish there.

Eliot Borenstein is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Russian & Slavic Studies at New York University.

In the interest of ensuring the safety of students, faculty, staff, and community members, the lecture by Ryszard Legutko scheduled for later today will not take place

Multilingual Poetry Slam featuring works of poetry from a variety of internationally renowned poets as well as students.

Join us for a lecture and Q&A by Brazilian artist Néle Azevedo.  She will be discussing her installation Minimum Monument: Art as Emergency.

Brazilian artist Néle Azevedo brings her internationally known “Minimum Monument” event to Middlebury. With help from students, faculty, staff and members of the Middlebury community, she will install 300+ ice sculptures (little men and women) outside Davis Library. And then we will leave them to melt… or will we? A visual metaphor for climate change, Azevedo’s work challenges the traditional meaning of the public monument: “in the place of the hero, the anonym; in the place of the solidity of the stone, the ephemeral process of the ice.” A community event not to be missed.

Middle East Policy Lecture by Barbara A. Leaf, the U.S. ambassador to the United Arab Emirates from 2014-2018, is a senior fellow at the Washington Institute. Before arriving in Abu Dhabi in 2014, she served as deputy assistant secretary of state for the Arabian Peninsula in the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs and as deputy assistant secretary of state for Iraq; directed the U.S. Provincial Reconstruction Team in Basrah, Iraq; and served as the department’s first director of the Office of Iranian Affairs.

Iván Thays will discuss the process of writing his 2008 novel, updating this with current information about this writing practice. In this novel, a white middle-class character travels from Lima, the capital of Peru, to Ayacucho, a rural region in the Andes where widespread human rights violations occurred during the bloody internal conflict (1980-1997) between the Peruvian government and insurgent organizations such as the People’s Guerrilla Army (armed wing of the Shining Path) and the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement.

Steve Barnes is Associate Professor of History at George Mason University. His lecture will examine the politics surrounding commemoration of the Gulag prison system in contemporary Russia and Kazakhstan. Each country sports an authoritarian government and engages in significant mythmaking about the history of Soviet repression. Those myths differ in key ways but the Gulag past is used in both cases to justify the current political system.

In this performance and artist talk, the renowned artistic duo better known as Las Nietas de Nonó will share the visceral motivations of their creative work and artistic practices in recent struggles for equity, visibility, and political change in Puerto Rico and beyond. 

Ilustraciones de la Mecánica takes up the history of medical experimentation and the pharmaceutical industry in Puerto Rico. It considers in particular the violence inflicted on Black women’s bodies in the name of medical research.