Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs RCGA

Plots against Russia: Cultural Contamination and the Language of Conspiracy

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.

Robert A. Jones '59 Conference Room

Open to the Public

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.

Davis Family Library

Open to the Public

Middle East Policy Lecture by Ambassador Barbara Leaf, U.S. ambassador to the United Arab Emirates from 2014-18

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.

Robert A. Jones '59 Conference Room

Open to the Public