Please join the Center for German and European Studies for an event featuring IGS alum Matt Kupfer.

For more information on the speaker, and to RSVP for the talk, click here: https://www.brandeis.edu/cges/news-events/fall-2020/201102_kupfer_matt.html

Continue reading “Ukraine: Between the Impeachment and Coronavirus Crises”

Matt Kupfer’s work for an English-language newspaper in Ukraine took a strange turn last August, when President Trump tried to get the Ukrainian government to investigate Joe Biden, his rival in the 2020 election.  Suddenly Matt wasn’t covering allegations of corruption in a former Soviet state: instead, charges of abuse of power in Washington followed a paper trail back in Kyiv. It seemed every journalist in America needed Matt as a guide to twists and turns of a country where Russians, Europeans, and Americans were all fighting for influence.

Continue reading “An American In Ukraine – Reporting on the Trump Impeachment from Kyiv”

Interested in revisiting the IGS Class of 2020 online mini commencement and celebration? Watch the full video with the link below. A video transcript is available as well.

https://www.brandeis.edu/international-global-studies/news-events/2020-celebration.html

This event will be streamed at https://www.brandeis.edu/streaming/

Join us for an upcoming panel on the COVID-19 pandemic.

When: March 11, 2020, 3:00-5:00pm

Where: Online at https://www.brandeis.edu/streaming/

Join panelists Prof. Utretsky (Brandeis University), Katherine A. Mason (Brown University), and Jennifer Bouey (Tang Chair in Chinese Policy at the RAND Corp) as they discuss the COVID-19 virus and its global impact.

Co-sponsored by: IGS, East Asian Studies, HSSP, MS in Global Health Policy and Management, and the Asia Pacific Center

Join the Crown Center for Middle East Studies and the Brandeis community for “Urbanism and Kurdish Mobilization in Diyarbakir, Turkey”

A Brown Bag Seminar with Muna Güvenç Ospina Leon

In the early 2000s, pro-Kurdish parties in Turkey—banned by the state or denied access to parliament by legal restrictions—worked to preserve squatter settlements (gecekondus) in cities they controlled. This is puzzling because municipalities around the world often work to end urban informality. In this talk, Muna Güvenç Ospina Leon examines how pro-Kurdish municipalities sustained such conditions and used urban planning in Diyarbakır to mobilize Kurdish society and resist state coercion.

Muna Güvenç Ospina Leon is an assistant professor of fine arts at Brandeis and a faculty affiliate of the Crown Center.

When: Wednesday, March 4, 12:30pm—2:00pm
Where: Schwartz Hall 103, Brandeis University

Cosponsored by
Islamic and Middle Eastern studies program

Free and open to the public | Bring your lunch | Light refreshments will be served

Join the Crown Center for Middle East Studies and the Brandeis Community for “On the Margin of the Holocaust: Vichy Forced Labor Camps in North Africa, 1940-1945”

A Brown Bag Seminar with Aomar Boum

When: Tuesday, March 10, 11:00am—12:30pm
Where: Multipurpose Room (Room 236)
Shapiro Campus Center, Brandeis University

In the early 1940s, the colonial Vichy administration set up networks of forced labor camps in Algeria and Morocco to build a railroad system connecting the Sahara to the Mediterranean Sea. Using Muslim oral histories, Aomar Boum argues that these camps exemplify a model of internment in which Spanish Republican and European Jewish captives had a margin of hope of survival despite the harsh topography of the desert and environmental conditions that restricted their movements in and out of the camp. Boum addresses the bureaucratic management of camps and prisoners’ daily lives and analyzes the movement of internees between labor and internment camps in French North African colonies and their connections to camps in the French mainland. The collective experience of these camps by Jews and non-Jews contributes to both a historical ethnographic understanding of North Africa and a reevaluation of the Holocaust period.

Aomar Boum is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Cosponsored by
Islamic and Middle Eastern studies program
Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies
The Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry

Free and open to the public | Bring your lunch | Light refreshments will be served

When: Wednesday, December 4, 12:00pm—1:30pm
Where: Schwartz Hall 103, Brandeis University

Facebook Event: https://www.facebook.com/events/781625312266400/

How and why are some minorities neither fully included nor simply expelled by a state? What does it mean to be suspended in limbo—residing in a territory for extended periods without ever accruing any citizenship rights? In this talk, Noora Lori will discuss her recent book, Offshore Citizens: Permanent Temporary Status in the Gulf, an in-depth study of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) which uses new archival sources and extensive interviews to show how “temporary residency” can be transformed into a permanent legal status. This presentation will focus specifically on the UAE’s minorities—communities of South Asian, Persian, and East African descent whose Emirati citizenship was called into question when new biometric passports were introduced in 2008. After being stripped of their Emirati passports, these populations were issued passports from the Union of Comoros. This new legal status authorizes them to remain in the UAE, but as temporary ‘guest workers’. This arrangement codifies temporary residency into a formal citizenship status, allowing elites to effectively reclassify domestic minorities into foreign residents.

Noora Lori is an assistant professor of international relations at Boston University.

Cosponsored by

When: Wednesday, November 20, 12:00pm—1:30pm
Where: Schwartz Hall 103, Brandeis University

Facebook Event:  https://www.facebook.com/events/2186491834992662/

Despite regional pressures, Oman has somehow managed to maintain friendly and effective diplomatic ties with Iran, neighboring Gulf Arab states, and the U.S. Given growing tensions both within the GCC and between the GCC and Iran, as well as a looming succession question, can Oman continue its unique foreign policy? And what does this mean for the U.S.? In this talk, Gary Grappo—who served as U.S. Ambassador to Oman from 2006-2009 and as Deputy Chief of Mission in both Oman (1998-2001) and Saudi Arabia (2003-2005)—will give a brief history of Oman and its policies. He will outline the challenges Oman faces and the past and future of Omani-U.S. relations.

Gary Grappo is a former U.S. ambassador and currently a distinguished fellow at the Center for Middle East Studies at the Korbel School for International Studies, University of Denver. Previously, he was visiting senior scholar at the University of Wyoming. He possesses nearly 45 years of diplomatic and public policy experience in a variety of public, private and nonprofit endeavors.

Cosponsored by