Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs

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.

Lecture by Talya Zemach-Bersin, American Studies, Yale University.

Filmmaker Raúl O. Paz Pastrana and anthropologist/artist/activist Jason De León answer questions about their film documenting the stories of immigrants who have disappeared along the trail running from southern Mexico to the US border.

25 Years After Rwanda’s Genocide: Incredible Accomplishments & Continuing Challenges.
Carl Hobert has worked in Rwanda since the height of the genocide there in 1994. Along with Dr. Paul Farmer of Partners in Health (PIH), whose focus was on medical reform, Hobert has helped the Rwandan government’s Ministries of Education and Foreign Affairs to improve nursery to grade-12 education, and to create a national, youth-focused conflict resolution program.

“Coming Home to the Global” by Jan Nederveen Pieterse, Mellichamp Professor of Global Studies and Sociology, USC, Santa Barbara.