Join the Taubman Center for a lunchtime conversation with George Barrett, former Chairman and CEO of Cardinal Health, as we explore the intersection of healthcare policy, leadership, and the evolving relationship between the public and private sectors. Drawing on his experience leading one of the nation’s largest healthcare services companies, Barrett will reflect on the challenges and opportunities in improving health outcomes, navigating regulation, and building collaborative solutions across industries and government.

This event is part of the Taubman Center’s Politics & Policy Lunch series and is open to students, and faculty interested in healthcare, public policy, business, and leadership.

Lunch will be provided.

Brown ID Required

The Taubman Center is honored to present the Noah Krieger ’93 Memorial Lecture featuring Justice Stephen Breyer, retired Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Justice Breyer will share insights from his distinguished career and discuss the themes of constitutional interpretation and democracy explored in Reading the Constitution: Why I Chose Pragmatism, Not Textualism. 

This event offers a rare opportunity to hear from one of the most influential legal minds of our time, reflecting on the role of the judiciary, the evolving meaning of the Constitution, and its impact on contemporary governance.

The conversation will be moderated by Justin Driver, Brown alumnus and Robert R. Slaughter Professor of Law at Yale Law School.

Please join us on Tuesday, April 15 from 6:00-8:00 pm at 135 Thayer Street, Room 101 for a film screening of three experimental documentaries directed by Janaina Wagner: “Curupira and the Machine of Destiny” (2021, 25’), “Quebrante” (2024, 24’) and “When the Second Sun Comes / A Comet in Your Eyes” (2025, 14’). The screening will be followed by a talk delivered by the director entitled Errant Ghosts of the Transamazonica: Worldling With Curupiras, Iracemas, Frankenstein Cattle, Stones and Baleias.

ABOUT THE PRESENTATION

In the fracture of time, like a scar that cuts through the earth, there is a straight road in Amazonas called BR-230 Rodovia Transamazônica. Opened as a wound during the civil-military dictatorship that entangled Brazil in the cries of order and progress, the asphalt rebar that cuts across the country was built, destroyed and is now drowning in a process of reconstruction. A lukewarm ruin of an addicted future.

Visual artist, filmmaker and PhD student in Contemporary Art Creation (Le Fresnoy-studio national des arts contemporains / CEAC - Université de Lille), Janaina Wagner portrays five of the creature-characters that inhabit her research around the Highway. They are Curupiras, Iracemas, Cattle Frankenstein, stones and Baleias: wandering ghosts of a crumbling present.

Illuminated by Wagner through her film trilogy set on the Highway, this talk aims to circumscribe each of the creatures mentioned within their past and present contexts, connecting them to three experimental documentaries by Wagner, whose realities they animate: “Curupira and the Machine of Destiny” (2021, 25’), “Quebrante” (2024, 24’) and “When the Second Sun Comes / A Comet in Your Eyes” (2025, 14’).

Each of the documentaries was filmed in different parts of the highway, which runs for more than 5,000 kilometers, crossing several Brazilian states and connecting the country from side to side. Throughout her research and filming, Janaina traveled along and recorded narratives that cross six of them: Rondônia, Amazonas, Pará, Ceará, Piauí and Paraíba. Each with its own particularities and mirrors, Janaina Wagner’s trilogy follows the path of the highway, portraying to the public a glimpse of the creatures whose ideology of developmentalist progress has devastated, and focuses her gaze on the remains of the stories and the stories of the remains, which in her thesis and in her films, she points out as “errant ghosts”.

ABOUT THE PRESENTER

Janaina Wagner (1989) develops her research in film, drawing and installations. Her work aims to present a critical understanding of the ways in which humans impose systems of order and control upon their surroundings. Currently a Phd student at Le Fresnoy-Studio National des Arts Contemporains (FR), Janaina has participated in several residencies, such as Gasworks (UK); VISIO - European Program on Artists’ Moving Images (IT); FID Campus (FR), Bolsa Pampulha (BR). Her work is part of important collections, such as KADIST (FR), Museu de Arte Contemporânea de São Paulo MAC USP (BR), Instituto Inhotim (BR), Galeria Municipal do Porto (PT) and Coleção Moraes Barbosa (BR). Among the main exhibitions, stand out the solo A Comet in Your Eyes - Sursock Museum (LB), Sala de Vídeo MASP – Museu de Arte de São Paulo (BR) e Baleia Fantasma – Pivô Arte e Pesquisa (BR); and the group 22a Bienal Videobrasil (BR), Ensaio de Tração - Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo (BR); Garganta - CIAJG - José de Guimarães International Arts Center (PT); Aliens are temporary - Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien (DE). Janaina has been participating in several film festivals, such as Berlinale (DE) and Tiradentes Film Festival (BR). Janaina Wagner is currently developing her first feature film, the experimental documentary A Mala da Noite. Janaina lives and works between Paris and São Paulo. www.janainawagner.com

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This event is hosted by the Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies and co-sponsored by the Brazil Initiative at the Watson Institute for International & Public Affairs. 

This talk examines the global turn in cinematic technology and infrastructure towards a wider, stretched, horizontal film screen amid the Cold War, as embodied in the fervor over CinemaScope in both socialist China and Western capitalist countries. I argue that the simultaneous rise of CinemaScope in the 1950s and ’60s on both sides of the Iron Curtain, on the one hand, registered shared structures of feeling in socialist and capitalist countries alike, wherein filmgoers sought visceral escape from the horrific and apocalyptic realities of the Cold War through the enhanced immersive realism; on the other hand, this transnational movement of widescreen technology led to a revival, in both the United States and socialist China, of the frontier western genre, which was retooled as an important vehicle in the domestic governance of the southwestern frontier area and politics of the “discovery of ethnic minorities” in socialist China. I explore the complex connections between cinematic technological development, transnational film genre migrations, and the politics of identifying, representing, and governing ethnic minorities in their native land in the People’s Republic of China. Challenging the narrative of “technological competition” between socialist and capitalist camps that currently dominates scholarship on the technological history of the Cold War, I present a vision of the existence of a cinematic universe in which vibrant transnational movements of film form, technology, and infrastructure penetrated Cold War borders and undermined geopolitical separationism.

Chuanhui Meng is a Watson China Initiative postdoctoral research associate in the Department of East Asian Studies at Brown University. She completed her Ph.D. in Asian Literatures, Cultures, and Media at University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, with a minor in Moving Image Studies. Her areas of specialization include modern and contemporary Chinese film and culture, with a particular interest in transnational migrations and translations of film genres, border-crossing circulations of film and media in the global 1950s and ’60s, as well as ecocritical studies of socialist and post-socialist China. Her current book project examines the formation of a “genre ecology” in socialist Chinese cinema of the 1950s and ’60s. It explores the domestic experiments as well as transnational constellation, circulation, and translation of film genres across Cold War geopolitical borders, tracing film genre as a dynamic process of becoming that mediates between the domestic cultural-political environment, transnational migrations of film forms and theories, and the affective and embodied experiences of audiences.

About the Event

This community-building workshop with Kichwa artist Adina Farinango is open to all graduate students engaged with Indigenous communities and the arts. Explore your creative potential, learn about Adina’s artistic journey, and collaboratively design a piece that embodies the collective values of our diverse research community. This is an opportunity to connect across disciplines and borders through art and shared vision.

About the Artist

Adina Farinango is a Kichwa-Otavalo artist who uses art as an act of resistance, healing, and self-expression. Her art practice serves as a means to navigate and strengthen her own identity as an Indigenous woman within the Kichwa diaspora. Influenced heavily by the resilience and strength of matriarchs in her community—past, present, and future—she seeks to Indigenize spaces, centering the reclamation of space through a matriarchal lens. She is currently based in Lenapehoking (New York City).

About the Event

Join us for a collaborative event highlighting the K’iche’ language, which is widely spoken in Guatemala as well as in our local communities. Hear from professors and students in the Linguistics and Education Departments at Brown, from leaders at the Coalition for a Multilingual Rhode Island, and from teachers who recently traveled to Guatemala to learn from K’iche’ speaking educators and activists. Walk away with a few new words in K’iche’ as well as a deeper connection with some of our neighbors in Rhode Island.

Middle East Colloquium

About the Event
This talk examines the relationship between the concepts of “transcription” and “transition” in the development of Jean Sénac’s poetics, paying close attention to his engagements with Algerian būqāla poetry,a genre of oral texts recited by women in Algerian Arabic. As a Francophone pied-noir intellectual committed to Algerian independence, Sénac understood French as a “transitional language” to be employed only while a new Arabophone literary class could emerge. Driven by his exploration of būqāla poetry, Sénac thus abstracted transcription, an ethnographic practice with considerable colonial roots in Algeria, into a translational paradigm that allowed him to maintain his authority as a Francophone Algerian poet––an authority whose ultimate purpose was to negate itself. An analysis of key poems written and translated between the early 50s and late 60s allows us to observe how transcription became a conceptual paradigm through which Sénac reconfigured his relationship to the “voice of the people,” and his status as an anticolonial and Third-Worldist poet.

About the Speaker
Maru Pabón is an assistant professor of comparative literature at Brown University. She received her Ph.D. in comparative literature at Yale University with a certificate of concentration in Middle East Studies. Her current book project examines efforts to construct the “voice of the people” across Palestinian, Cuban, and Algerian Third-Worldist poetry. Along with Laure Guirguis, she is the co-editor of the volume “Art and Politics Between the Arab World and Latin America,” forthcoming with Brill in Spring 2025. Her writing and research has appeared in Middle Eastern Literatures, Kohl: A Journal for Body and Gender Research, Bidoun, Momus, and Bidayat.

About the Event

After more than a year of conflict between Israel and Hizbullah, yielding over 4,000 deaths and more than a million people displaced on both sides of the border, a fragile ceasefire took hold in late 2024. Since then, Lebanon has witnessed a number of dramatic transformations to its political scene. Israel’s elimination of Hizbullah’s leadership and much of its military arsenal has emboldened the group’s Lebanese adversaries and local civil society, even as it has threatened to inflame sectarian divisions within the country. A new government led by Nawaf Salam, a Sorbonne and Harvard-educated jurist and former judge at the International Criminal Court, has sought to shore up state sovereignty and security. Meanwhile, the ceasefire continues to be punctuated by rocket attacks, airstrikes, and drone overflights. What does the future hold? In the wake of October 7th, how will Lebanon navigate its relations with the United States, Syria, the GCC countries, and Iran? How will it rebuild its infrastructure in a time of dwindling foreign aid? And what are the prospects for long-term political reform and economic recovery?

Featuring Amal Mudallali, former ambassador of Lebanon to the United Nations, and Firas Maksad, managing director, Eurasia Group. Elias Muhanna, director of the Center for Middle East Studies, and Serena Fadel ’25 will moderate. 

About the Speakers

Amal Mudallali, Ph.D., is a visiting research scholar at Princeton University and worked as an adjunct professor at Princeton University teaching multilateralism and space policy. She is the publisher of a space newsletter, SpaceFlash. Mudallali is the former Ambassador of Lebanon to the United Nations—the first woman to hold that post. She served as Vice President of the UN General Assembly and on UNICEF’s Executive Board, and the Peacebuilding Commission. She led global initiatives on COVID-19 vaccine equity and food security, and championed space governance. She has been a senior advisor to two Lebanese prime ministers, Rafic and Saad Hariri, and a scholar at the Wilson Center. A former journalist and BBC correspondent, she holds a Ph.D. in political communication and is a recipient of France’s Légion d’Honneur.

Firas Maksad is the managing director for the Middle East and North Africa practice at Eurasia Group. He oversees the team covering the region’s geopolitics and macroeconomics and US foreign policy toward that part of the world. Firas is a recognized expert on the politics of Lebanon and Syria, the geopolitics of the Arab Gulf states, and the broader dynamics of the Middle East.

Prior to joining Eurasia Group, Firas was a senior director and senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, a leading Washington-based think tank. He also managed his own boutique political consulting firm and has been an adjunct professor at George Washington University’s Elliott School for International Affairs. Earlier in his career, Firas worked for Eurasia Group as an analyst in the Middle East and North Africa practice.

Firas’s writings have appeared in leading publications such as the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, and the Los Angeles Times. He frequently offers expert commentary on US politics and the Middle East for global news networks, including CNN, the BBC, CNBC, Bloomberg, and others.

Firas holds a master of science in foreign service degree and an honors certificate in international business from Georgetown University. He completed his undergraduate degree in political studies at the American University of Beirut.

Organized by the Center for Middle East Studies and the Arab Society.

Made possible by the Peter Green Lectureship Fund on the Modern Middle East

About the Event

“Invitation to Ixcotel” is a series of ethnographic narratives, with essays, stories, and poems, along with conversations featuring inmates in a Mexican prison in Oaxaca, one of the poorest states with a large concentration of indigenous communities in the southwest part of the country. Over a period of more than 13 years, the main participants in the book became collaborating ethnographers who worked with sociolinguist Angeles Clemente.

About the Author

Angeles Clemente obtained a Ph.D. in Education in languages from the University of London and worked as a professor for 30 years at UABJO, the State University of Oaxaca in Mexico. A sociolinguist, she has researched the connection between language, culture, agency, and identity in Latin American contexts, both in Mexico and Brazil.

Panelists

Richard Snyder, Professor of Political Science, Brown University

Daniel A. Rodriguez, Associate Professor of History, Brown University

Please note that this talk will be presented in English.

For questions orto request special services, accommodations, or assistance, please contactclacs@brown.eduor (401)-863-2645.

Register here

John H. McWhorter is an associate professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University. He earned his B.A. from Rutgers, his M.A. from New York University, and his Ph.D. in linguistics from Stanford. 

Professor McWhorter is an author of more than twenty books including The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language, Losing the Race: Self Sabotage in Black America and Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English. In 2016 he published Words on the Move: Why English Won’t - and Can’t - Sit Still (Like, Literally), while in 2021 he published Nine Nasty Words and Woke Racism. He also writes a weekly column for The New York Times and hosts the language podcast Lexicon Valley. 

Glenn C. Loury, Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences at Brown University, is an academic economist who has made scholarly contributions to the fields of welfare economics, income distribution, game theory, industrial organization, and natural resource economics. He is also a prominent social critic and public intellectual, having published over 200 articles in journals of public affairs in the U.S. and abroad on the issues of racial inequality and social policy. A Fellow of the Econometric Society, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a past Vice President of the American Economics Association, Prof. Loury has been a visiting scholar at Oxford, Tel Aviv University, the University of Stockholm, the Delhi School of Economics, the Institute for the Human Sciences in Vienna, and the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and was for many years a contributing editor at The New Republic magazine.

Tightening US export restrictions of semiconductor technology toward China has become a key realm of tension between the two countries. What made this “chip war” highly disruptive was the considerable US-China interdependence in semiconductors prior to the conflict, made possible by relaxing US export control in the 1990s and 2000s. This talk discusses how US-China relations in semiconductors evolved. Going beyond structural and state-centered accounts, it highlights the role of business interests and contingencies in the turn from interdependence to conflict.

Yan Xu is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in International and Public Affairs at the Watson Institute. He studies comparative and international political economy, with focuses on technology, state-business relations, and China. His book project examines the rise of a vibrant tech startup sector in China — now the world’s second largest — and its impact on the country’s advance in high-tech. He has also conducted research on the relations between the state and top business tycoons in China, and U.S. dominance of the global semiconductor industry. He completed his Ph.D. in Political Science at the University of Chicago.

Join the Department of History and greater Brown community to celebrate the launch of Michael Vorenberg’s latest book, Lincoln’s Peace: The Struggle to End the American Civil War (Alfred A. Knopf, 2025). 

About the book: Lincoln’s Peace challenges the narrative of a Civil War that ended neatly with an iconic surrender in April 1865. The book examines the many endings and non-endings of the war, from failed peace meetings to emancipation celebrations, arguing that the choice of an end date determines how the war is defined and remembered.

About the author: Michael Vorenberg is an Associate Professor of History who specializes in nineteenth-century U.S. history, with a particular focus on the
topics of the Civil War, emancipation, law, and the U.S. Constitution.

Read a recent Q&A with Michael Vorenberg

Join Watson Senior Fellow Malika Saada Saar ’92, former Global Head of Human Rights at YouTube, for a fireside chat on Building AI for Humanity with Howie Wachtel, senior director and head of Microsoft’s UN and International Organizations policy team.

Howie Wachtel is a senior director and head of Microsoft’s UN and International Organizations policy team. Prior to this role, he was a senior director and head of global sanctions policy and strategy at PayPal. Howie spent over a decade in several roles in the U.S. government, including at the National Security Council, the U.S. Department of State, and the U.S. Mission to the UN. 

Howie began his career as a litigation associate at Simpson, Thacher & Bartlett LLP. He has taught courses on the UN, sanctions, international law, and counterterrorism at the University of Virginia, Duke, and NYU. He is a nonresident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s GeoEconomics Center and serves on the board of directors of the Global Center on Cooperative Security. He has also worked as a consultant/legal adviser for a UN team responsible for facilitating the export of food and fertilizer out of Russia and Ukraine.

Howie received a B.S. from Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service, a General Course diploma from LSE, and a J.D. and LL.M. in international and comparative law from Duke.

Malika Saada Saar is a highly accomplished human rights lawyer with extensive experience in civil and human rights law, tech policy development, multi-stakeholder engagement, and the responsible governance and use of AI. As Google’s Global Head of Human Rights at YouTube, she led a team responsible for integrating human rights principles across Trust & Safety, Government Affairs and Public Policy, Legal, and Product teams.

We will answer this question in relation to Nazi aspirations, relocation, the ubiquity of Holocaust places, mass removal of Jewish bodies, hiding, and lasting scars and silences in the landscape.

• Presenter: Anne Kelly Knowles
• Authors: Anne Kelly Knowles, University of Maine [organizer], Tim Cole, University of Bristol [organizer] and Paul B. Jaskot, Duke University [organizer] - Placing the Holocaust

This event is part of the April 25-26 conference:

The Spatial Turn in Holocaust and Genocide Studies: Space, Place and Mapping

Anne Kelly Knowles is a Historical Geographer and is the McBride Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Maine, where she leads the Digital & Spatial History Lab. She is the recipient of many grants and awards, including six grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her range of interests is reflected in monographs on Welsh immigration and the U.S. iron industry and edited volumes on historical GIS and the geographies of the Holocaust. Anne’s Holocaust research focuses on building, analyzing, and sharing spatio-temporal datasets of SS camps, Eastern European ghettos, and places in testimony. She is currently developing an atlas of the Holocaust.

Paul B. Jaskot is Professor of Art History & German Studies at Duke University. He is also the Director of the Digital Art History & Visual Culture Research Lab. Jaskot’s work focuses on the political history of culture during the Nazi period.

Tim Cole’s research ranges widely across social, landscape and environmental histories with a focus on the Holocaust and how it is remembered. He works in the digital humanities and co-produced research with communities and creatives.

Climate change demands bold interventions, and entrepreneurs are finding innovative ways to drive change. This panel discussion will showcase diverse approaches to climate-focused entrepreneurship and investment, featuring pioneers across energy, food, and finance from right here in Rhode Island.

The four panelists represent different sectors, stages, and sources of funding. Hear from Kipp Bradford ’95 ScM’96, an engineer and startup leader in energy efficiency; Kim Anderson of Plant City, a trailblazer in sustainable food ventures; Nick Napp founder of Xmark Labs, pioneering next generation energy efficiency sensors; and Frohman Anderson, serial investor and board member of Quaise — a leader in geothermal energy.

Hosted by Mark Tracy, IBES’ Professor of the Practice of Sustainable Finance and Investing, this engaging discussion will explore what drives these entrepreneurs, how they’re helping to tackle today’s climate challenges, and the many ways to navigate careers in climate innovation. A Q&A will follow.

Available via livestream and in person. In-person attendees are encouraged to register for the sake of headcount. Lunch provided!

Join us for a conversation with Kenneth Roth, the former executive director of Human Rights Watch who will discuss his book Righting Wrongs with Ieva Jusionyte.

Audience Q & A will follow the talk.

Lunch provided.

Presenting the fourth William R. Rhodes ’57 Ethics of Capitalism annual lecture:

How did business ethics come to be understood as something different from plain-old ethics? This lecture locates that departure in the middle decades of the nineteenth-century United States, specifically to the frictions that emerged from inter-regional commerce between Northern manufacturers and Southern slaveholders. The politics of slavery and abolition functioned in surprising ways to construct the business sector as a space where different rules applied. The outcome was a new notion of the market as a space functioning most efficiently when pesky concerns of morality did not intrude.

Q & A to follow moderated by Mark Blyth, Director of the Rhodes Center for International Economics & Finance.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Seth Rockman is a historian of the United States focusing on the period between the American Revolution and the Civil War. His research unfolds at the intersection of slavery studies, labor history, material culture studies, and the history of capitalism. Rockman’s latest book, Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery (2024), is an eye-opening rethinking of nineteenth-century American history that reveals the interdependence of the Northern industrial economy and Southern slave labor.

The Missing Link in Spurring Climate Action? A Spotlight on National Climate Institutions

How do countries organize themselves internally to address climate change? To what extent can internal governance arrangements help create a more favorable national politics for climate action? While a lot of thinking has gone into mechanisms for global collaboration on climate change, national climate governance has received far less attention. Drawing on national case studies, I argue that seemingly prosaic national and sub-national climate governance arrangements are an important, and understudied, link in accelerating transitions to low-carbon, climate resilient futures.

Prophecies that the dollar will lose its status as the world’s dominant currency have echoed for decades—and are increasing in volume. Cryptocurrency enthusiasts claim that Bitcoin or other blockchain-based monetary units will replace the dollar. Foreign policy hawks warn that China’s renminbi poses a lethal threat to the greenback. And sound money zealots predict that mounting US debt and inflation will surely erode the dollar’s value to the point of irrelevancy.

Contra the doomsayers, Paul Blustein shows that the dollar’s standing atop the world’s currency pyramid is impregnable, barring catastrophic policy missteps by the US government. Recounting how the United States has wielded the dollar to impose devastating sanctions against adversaries, Blustein explains that although targets such as Russia have found ways to limit the damage, Washington’s financial weaponry will retain potency long into the future. His message, however, is that America must not be complacent about the dollar; the great power that its supremacy confers comes with commensurate responsibility.

Audience Q & A to follow.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Paul Blustein has written about economic issues for more than 40 years, first as a reporter at leading news organizations and later as the author of several critically acclaimed books. A graduate of the University of Wisconsin and Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar, Paul spent much of his career reporting for The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. He lives in Kamakura, Japan.

This half-day workshop will consist of two panels that will bring together experts from academia, medicine, law, and journalism to discuss critical issues in reproductive justice. 

12:00 - 12:30 | Welcome and Introductions

12:30 - 2:30 PM | On the Ground: The Practice of Medicine, Law, Journalism

• Emma Roth, Senior Staff Attorney, Pregnancy Justice
• Ayiti Majaraj-Best, Medical Director, Planned Parenthood of Southern New England
• Stephania Taladrid, Contributing Writer and Pulitzer Prize Finalist, The New Yorker
• Astrid Ackerman, Staff Attorney, Center for Reproductive Justice

2:30 - 3:00 PM | Break 

Join us for a short coffee/tea break in between panels. 

3:00 - 5:00 PM | Theorizing the Present: Sociological and Legal Perspectives

• Zakiya Luna, Associate Professor of Sociology, Washington University
• Jocelyn Viterna, Professor of Sociology, Harvard University
• Siri Suh, Associate Professor of Sociology, Brandeis University 
• Mary Ziegler, Professor of Law, University of California Davis

About the Event

The Center for Latin American & Caribbean Studies welcomes faculty, students, and staff for a community celebration and our final Cafecito con CLACS of the semester. Enjoy music outside on the Starr Plaza. Coffee and pastries will be served by Café Modesto. All are welcome.

Rain location: Center for Latin American & Caribbean Studies: 59 Charlesfield, 2nd floor