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.

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.

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 or to request special services, accommodations, or assistance, please contact clacs@brown.edu or (401)-863-2645.

Why did inequality worry Plato and what did he think could be done about it? In this public lecture, Professor Williams will share insights from his new book, which understands inequality as a problem from the beginning of the tradition of western philosophy.

Moderated by Alex Gourevitch

Lunch will be provided

Professor Williams teaches and conducts research in political theory, especially the history of political thought. He received his PhD in Government from the University of Texas at Austin.  Prior coming to DePaul in 2011, he was Professor of Philosophy and Political Science at the University of Wisconsin—Stevens Point.​ He is also an affiliate at the University of Chicago’s Stone Center for Research on Wealth Inequality and Mobility. 

*Lunch provided*

The power to create money is foundational to the state. In the United States, that power has been largely delegated to private banks governed by an independent central bank. Putting monetary policy in the hands of a set of insulated, non-elected experts has fueled the popular rejection of expertise as well as a widespread dissatisfaction with democratically elected officials. In Our Money, Leah Downey makes a principled case against central bank independence (CBI) by both challenging the economic theory behind it and developing a democratic rationale for sustaining the power of the legislature to determine who can create money and on what terms. How states govern money creation has an impact on the capacity of the people and their elected officials to steer policy over time. In a healthy democracy, Downey argues, the balance of power over money creation matters.

Audience Q & A to follow.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Leah Downey is a junior research scholar at St. John’s College, Cambridge where she works on democratic theory and macroeconomic policymaking. Downey holds B.A.s in Mathematics and Economics from UNC Chapel Hill, an MSc in Economics & Philosophy from the LSE, and a PhD in Government from Harvard University. Her research considers the democratic implications of how states make policy. As such, she has written on topics including the administrative state, monetary policy, macrofinance and the green transition, and the meaning of security in politics and economics.

*Lunch served*

The rise of an industry tasked with the collection of medical debts in the United States is a relatively recent development. Physicians and hospitals have long held themselves apart from profit maximization and have expressed a moral aversion to immiserating patients in the pursuit of unpaid debts. This is particularly true of nonprofit hospitals, which find their origins in almshouses, community associations and religious orders. In addition, while creditors have tremendous powers at their disposal in seeking to collect, including lawsuits, wage garnishment, and property liens, medical providers recoup relatively little even when they resort to such aggressive measures.

Why, then, in the last forty years, have US nonprofit hospitals increasingly turned to third-party debt collection, debt sales, and lawsuits against patient debtors? Answering this question demands an investigation of shifts in health insurance, hospital finance, and the moral economy of care. It also requires an understanding of physicians’ progressive disengagement from debt collection. What was once an unavoidably personal negotiation has become an administrative and legal process divorced from clinical obligations. This talk draws on historical research and new data to explain how unremunerative practices causing financial harm to patients became standard practice.

Audience Q & A to follow.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Luke Messac is a physician and historian at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. He received his BA from Harvard University, his MD and PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, and completed his residency training in emergency medicine at Rhode Island Hospital.

Dr. Messac’s early research was on the history and political economy of health care in Africa. His first book, No More to Spend (Oxford University Press, 2020) was a history of the practice of medicine under regimes of austerity in British colonial Africa. He has also published widely in medical and historical journals on a range of subjects including the development of national income accounting, the origins of trade regulations for medicinal opiates, and determinants of population-level mortality rates. His most recent work focuses on the rise of the medical debt collection industry in the United States. This is the subject of his book Your Money or Your Life (Oxford University Press, 2023). His has published in leading journals including the New England Journal of Medicine and Health Affairs and has testified before the United States Senate. He lives with his wife and two children in Pawtucket, Rhode Island.

Exploring family stories reveals the rich history of a seventh-century Buddhist shrine.

As a young girl in Bombay, Kirin Narayan was enthralled by her father’s stories about how their ancestors had made the ancient rock-cut cave temples at Ellora. Recalling those stories as an adult, she was inspired to learn more about the caves, especially the Buddhist worship hall known as the “Vishwakarma cave.” Immersing herself in family history, oral traditions, and works by archaeologists, art historians, scholars of Buddhism, Indologists, and Sanskritists, Narayan set out to answer the question of how this cave came to be venerated as the home of Vishwakarma, the god of making in Hindu and Buddhist traditions.

Cave of My Ancestors represents the perfect blend of Narayan’s skills as a researcher and writer. Her quest to trace her family’s stories took her to Ellora; through libraries, archives, and museums around the world; and across disciplinary borders. Equal parts scholarship, detective story, and memoir, Narayan’s book ably leads readers through centuries of history, offering a sensitive meditation on devotion, wonder, and all that connects us to place, family, the past, and the divine.

Join the Taubman Center for a compelling Book Talk with Yoni Appelbaum, senior editor at The Atlantic, as he discusses his new book, Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity.

In Stuck, Appelbaum explores how entrenched elites and systemic barriers have derailed social mobility and economic opportunity in America. With historical insights and sharp critique, he sheds light on the policies and practices that sustain inequality and proposes pathways to restore the promise of the American Dream.

The conversation will be moderated by Marc Dunkelman, Watson Institute Fellow and expert on the evolution of American political institutions.

*Lunch provided*

Economics of Hereness examines the east-central European origins of development concepts that came to dominate the postwar world. It treats social science as a situated phenomenon shaped by the twentieth century’s violent politics. It explains why and how developmental thought became the key instrument of defining, building, and contesting new nation-states in Europe after World War I—and then globally after World War II. The book reconstructs how Polish economists––mostly Jewish––converted Poland’s intermediary position between the industrialized West and the “underdeveloped” colonial territories into an epistemic advantage. Dubbed “Polish Keynesians,” these activist scholars developed a way of transforming a small, poor, multiethnic state into a self-expanding economy and, thus, an ethnically inclusive polity. They acted against the trend of separating nationalities and ethnic groups in new states with large minority populations. Economics of Hereness recasts the genealogy of development theory from the perspective of the blood-and-guts history of Poland and east-central Europe.

Q & A to follow.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Małgorzata Mazurek is an Associate Professor in Polish Studies in the History Department at Columbia University. Her interests include the history of social sciences, international development, the social history of labor and consumption in twentieth-century Poland, and Polish-Jewish studies. She published Society in Waiting Lines: On Experiences of Shortages in Postwar Poland (Warsaw, 2010), which deals with the history of social inequalities under state socialism. Her current book project, Economics of Hereness, revises the history of developmental thinking from the perspective of interwar Poland and its problem of multi-ethnicity.

She has recently written about the idea of full employment in interwar Poland for the American Historical Review, history of social sciences for a survey handbook, The Interwar World, and “The University as the Second-Third World Space in the Cold War” for the volume Socialist Internationalism and the Gritty Politics of the Particular edited by Kristin Roth-Ey.

Event Title: Janaki Bakhle — Savarkar

Date & Time: Friday, February 21, 2025, 2:00 PM - 4:00 PM EST
Location: Joukowsky Forum, 111 Thayer St
Details: Historian Janaki Bakhle delves into the complex legacy of Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, the chief ideologue of Hindutva, exploring his writings, influence, and role in shaping modern Hindu nationalism. The event includes a Q&A session and reception.
Commentators: Rohit De (Yale University), Ashutosh Varshney (Brown University), Sudipta Kaviraj (Columbia University).

Janaki Bakhle, a scholar of modern South Asian history, is currently working on her second book, Savarkar and the Making of Hindutva, which critically examines Savarkar’s intellectual and political contributions.

Please join us for a talk by Rune Nyord, Associate Professor of Ancient Egyptian Art and Archaeology at Emory University, on Wednesday, February 19, at 5:30 p.m. in Rhode Island Hall (Room 108). He will discuss topics from his forthcoming book Yearning for Immortality: The European Invention of the Ancient Egyptian Afterlife.

We look forward to seeing you there!

Paradise lost? The past, present, and future of the ancient Egyptian afterlife

The ancient Egyptians have been famous for their elaborate afterlife beliefs since long before the decipherment of hieroglyphs. The details are still familiar: The Egyptians believed they would be judged after death, leading either to damnation or to salvation and eternal life as reward for a virtuous life on earth. As I show in my new book Yearning for Immortality, the similarity of this picture to popular early modern and 19th-century versions of Christian doctrine is no accident, but the result of often quite systematic efforts to interpret Egyptian religion in ways that made sense to European scholars and their readers. Moreover, these efforts can be traced almost seamlessly both before and after Champollion’s decipherment of the hieroglyphic script, contradicting the widespread Egyptological idea of the decipherment marking a new, entirely empirical approach to the ancient culture. If the model still prevalent in Egyptology and popular culture alike was thus developed without input from ancient Egyptian sources on anything other than a surface level, where does that leave the study of Egyptian mortuary religion and funerary culture today? And how might we best go about exploring this central cultural phenomenon in the future?

Rune Nyord is Associate Professor of Ancient Egyptian Art and Archaeology at Emory University, where he is also Director of the Program in Ancient Mediterranean Studies. His research focuses on conceptions and experiences of images and personhood especially in funerary culture, as well as the history and concepts of the discipline of Egyptology. He is the author, editor, or co-editor of several books, the most recent being the monographs Seeing Perfection: Ancient Egyptian Images beyond Representation (Cambridge University Press, 2020) and Yearning for Immortality: The European Invention of the Ancient Egyptian Afterlife (University of Chicago Press, 2025).

Event Title: Yamini Aiyar — Lessons in State Capacity from Delhi’s Schools

Date & Time: Friday, February 14, 2025, 2:00 PM - 4:00 PM EST
Location: McKinney Conference Room, 111 Thayer St
Details: Yamini Aiyar explores how frontline bureaucrats, such as teachers and administrators, shape state capacity and public sector reform through the lens of Delhi’s government school transformation. The event includes a Q&A session and reception.
Commentators: Susan Moffitt and Emmerich Davies (Brown University).

Yamini Aiyar is a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Saxena Center for Contemporary South Asia, former President of the Centre for Policy Research, and a thought leader in governance, welfare policy, and India’s political economy.

At this week’s China Chat we will be joined by Professor Xiangli Ding from the Rhode Island School of Design, for a discussion of his book, Hydropower Nation: Dams, Energy, and Political Changes in Twentieth-Century China.

About the book:

China has the largest electricity generation capacity in the world today. Its number of large dams is second to none. Xiangli Ding provides a historical understanding of China’s ever-growing energy demands and how they have affected its rivers, wild species, and millions of residents. River management has been an essential state responsibility throughout Chinese history. In the industrial age, with the global proliferation of concrete dam technology, people started to demand more from rivers, particularly when required for electricity production. Yet hydropower projects are always more than a technological engineering enterprise, layered with political, social, and environmental meaning. Through an examination of specific hydroelectric power projects, the activities of engineers, and the experience of local communities and species, Ding offers a fresh perspective on twentieth-century China from environmental and technological perspectives.

Film Screening: Prisoner No. 626710 is Present
Thursday, February 6, 2025
4:00 PM – 6:00 PM EST
Joukowsky Forum, 111 Thayer St

Join us for a screening of Prisoner No. 626710 is Present (Kaidi No. 626710 Haazir Hai), a compelling documentary by Lalit Vachani that examines the arrest and ongoing imprisonment of Umar Khalid under India’s Unlawful Activities Prevention Act. Through archival footage and a forensic analysis of media framing, the film sheds light on the events leading to Khalid’s incarceration and the larger implications for dissent and democracy in India.

[60 min; India/Germany; 2024. In Hindi and English, with English subtitles.]

Lalit Vachani, acclaimed documentary filmmaker and research scholar at the University of Göttingen, will be present to discuss his work.

*Lunch provided*

Since the late 1970s, income inequality has been on the rise in many post-industrial democracies. Can public opinion help offset rising inequality through greater support for an egalitarian policy response? To answer this question, Cavaille proposes a new framework for understanding how people form opinions about redistributive social policies. First, people support policies that increase their own expected income. Second, they support policies that move the status quo closer to what is prescribed by shared norms of fairness. In most circumstances, saying the “fair thing” is easier than reasoning according to one’s pocketbook. But there are important exceptions: when policies have large and certain pocketbook consequences, people take the self-interested position instead of the ‘fair’ one. Fair Enough? builds on this simple framework to explain puzzling attitudinal trends in post-industrial democracies including a decline in support for redistribution in Great Britain, the erosion of social solidarity in France, and a declining correlation between income and support for redistribution in the United States.

Audience Q & A to follow.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Charlotte Cavaillé is an assistant professor of public policy at the University of Michigan’s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy and a Faculty Associate in the Institute for Social Research Center for Political Studies. In her research, Cavaillé examines the dynamics of popular attitudes towards redistributive social policies at a time of rising inequality, high fiscal stress, and high levels of immigration.

Made Possible by the Peter Green Lectureship Fund on the Modern Middle East
Cosponsors:
 Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs
Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women

About the Event:
A panel conversation on the release of “Resisting Far-Right Politics in the Middle East and Europe” (University of Edinburgh Press, 2024) with editors Tunay Altay, Nadje Al-Ali, and Katharina Galor, and panelist Elizabeth Berman.

About the Book:
“Resisting Far-Right Politics in the Middle East and Europe” provides an empirically grounded exploration of different case studies on anti-LGBTQ and anti-gender mobilizations of the far-right in Europe and the Middle East. The contributions engage with multilayered histories of gender and sexuality politics that connect the Middle East and Europe, informed by histories of colonialism, racism, and border controls. A second, underlying objective of this volume is to contribute to decolonized knowledge productions by de-centering Europe and simultaneously de-exceptionalizing the Middle East. The contributors commit to respecting the heterogeneity and complexity of these regions by focusing on grounded and life experiences. Ultimately, this volume illustrates a conceptualization of the broad spectrum of far-right politics and queer feminist critiques as manifested in a wide array of contexts, including academia, politics and everyday lives.

About the Speakers:
Nadje Al-Ali is Robert Family Professor of International Studies and professor of anthropology and Middle East studies. Her main research interests revolve around feminist activism and gendered mobilization, mainly with reference to Iraq, Egypt, Lebanon, Turkey and the Kurdish political movement. Her publications include What kind of Liberation? Women and the Occupation of Iraq (2009, University of California Press, co-authored with Nicola Pratt); Iraqi Women: Untold Stories from 1948 to the Present (2007, Zed Books), and Secularism, Gender and the State in the Middle East(Cambridge University Press 2000.

Tunay Altay is a postdoctoral researcher in sociology and gender studies at Humboldt University of Berlin. His research focuses on queer migration and sexual politics in Germany, Turkey, and the broader contexts of Europe and the Middle East. He has published in top-ranked journals, including Sexualities and Ethnic and Racial Studies. He co-chairs the Gender and Sexuality Research Network at the Council for European Studies.

Elizabeth Berman is a Ph.D. student in the department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. She was a Fulbright scholar and lecturer at Humboldt, where she taught on topics ranging from queer theoretical philosophies of death and reproduction to Germany’s imperial history and the afterlives of the Shoah. In her research and teaching, she interrogates theories of trauma, repair, and disability through engagement with postcolonial, feminist, and queer theories; psychoanalysis; and philosophies of technology.

Katharina Galor is the Hirschfeld Senior Lecturer in Judaic Studies at Brown, and an affiliate member of the Center of Middle East Studies and Urban Studies. She has published widely on Jewish, Israeli, and Palestinian visual and material culture, from antiquity through present times. Among her books are Finding Jerusalem: Archaeology between Science and Ideology (University of California Press, 2017), The Moral Triangle: Germans, Israelis, Palestinians (Duke University Press, 2000; co-authored with Sa’ed Atshan) ), and Jewish Women: Between Conformity and Agency(Routledge, 2024).

University of Edinburgh press discount code NEW30

Kunal Purohit: H-Pop: The Secretive World of Hindutva Pop Stars

Date: Thursday, December 5, 2024
Time: 4:00 PM - 6:00 PM EST
Location: Leung Conference Room, 280 Brook Street

Award-winning journalist Kunal Purohit delves into the rise of “Hindutva Pop” (H-Pop), a brand of popular culture spreading Hindutva ideology through music, poetry, and social media. In this talk, Purohit explores how H-Pop normalizes Islamophobia, promotes divisiveness, and shapes societal attitudes across India. He profiles the creators, their motivations, and the impact on India’s political landscape.

South Asia Seminar Series

About the Event
This talk draws on Prof. Mostafa Minawi’s latest book , Losing Istanbul: Arab-Ottoman Imperialist and the End of Empire (Stanford University Press), which offers an intimate history of the empire following the rise and fall of a generation of Arab-Ottoman imperialists living in Istanbul. He shows how these men and women negotiated their loyalties and guarded their privileges through a microhistorical study of the changing social, political, and cultural currents between 1878 and the First World War. He invites us to reconsider current tragedies in the Middle East and the massive population displacement in Syria, Turkey, and Palestine in the context of a long multi-cultural history of intimacies amongst the regions’ populations who converged in the former imperial capital, Istanbul.

Drawing on archival records, newspaper articles, travelogues, personal letters, diaries, photos, and interviews, Losing Istanbulshows how the loyalties of these imperialists were questioned and their ethnic identification weaponized. As the once diverse empire comes to an end, they are forced to give up their home in the imperial capital. An alternative history of the last four decades of the Ottoman Empire, Losing Istanbulframes global pivotal events through the experiences of Arab-Ottoman imperial loyalists who called Istanbul home, on the eve of a vanishing imperial world order.

About the Speaker
Mostafa Minawi is an associate professor of history and the director of Critical Ottoman and Post-Ottoman Studies at Cornell University. His first book, The Ottoman Scramble for Africa: Empire and Diplomacy from the Sahara to the Hijaz (Stanford University Press, 2016), was translated into Turkish and Arabic, and his latest, Losing Istanbul, was the co-winner of the Albert Hourani Book Prize in 2023 and was translated to Turkish and is currently being translated to Arabic. He works on questions of imperialism, race, and belonging in Ottoman spaces from Istanbul to the Horn of Africa. He is currently a fellow at the National Humanities Center, working on his latest project on Ottoman-Ethiopian relations in the context of intensified inter-imperial competition in the Horn of Africa.

Host and moderator:
Faiz Ahmed is the Joukowsky Family Distinguished Associate Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History at Brown University. He specializes in the late Ottoman Empire, legal and constitutional history, and the historical interconnectivity of modern world regions, from the Middle East and South Asia to the Americas.

Jennifer Johnson is an Associate Professor of History at Brown University. Her research and teaching focus on the Maghreb, decolonization, state building, public health, gender and modern African History.

Cosponsors
Department of History

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

Why do states start conflicts they ultimately lose? Why do leaders possess inaccurate expectations of their prospects for victory? Bureaucracies at War examines how national security institutions shape the quality of bureaucratic information upon which leaders base their choice for conflict – which institutional designs provide the best counsel, why those institutions perform better, and why many leaders fail to adopt them. Jost argues that the same institutions that provide the best information also empower the bureaucracy to punish the leader. Thus, miscalculation on the road to war is often the tragic consequence of how leaders resolve the trade-off between good information and political security. Employing an original cross-national data set and detailed explorations of the origins and consequences of institutions inside China, India, Pakistan, and the United States, this book explores why bureaucracy helps to avoid disaster, how bureaucratic competition produces better information, and why institutional design is fundamentally political.

Audience Q & A will follow the talk.

Lunch provided.

About the author

Tyler Jost is an assistant professor of political science at Brown University. His research focuses on national security decision-making, bureaucratic politics, and Chinese foreign policy. His research has been published in International Organization, International Security, Journal of Conflict Resolution and International Studies Quarterly.

Panelists

Mai Hassan, MIT

Rose McDermott, Moderator, Brown University

Susan Moffitt, Brown University

Yuhua Wang, Harvard University

Dan Honig, Associate Professor McCourt School of Public Policy, Georgetown University will join the Graduate Program in Development to discuss “Mission Driven Bureaucrats: Empowering People to Help Government Do Better”

This talk, drawn from Dan’s recent book, investigates the role of motivation and managerial practices that cultivate and direct same in bureaucratic performance. Specifically, it will explore the circumstances under which greater empowerment-oriented management—fostering autonomy, competence, and connection to peers and purpose —leads to improved public outcomes, as compared to more compliance-based managerial systems focused on rules, targets, and hierarchical top-down control. Drawing on novel empirical projects in Thailand, Liberia, Ghana, Bangladesh, and the US city of Detroit, as well as analysis of the largest extant database of civil service surveys (four million individual and 2,000 agency observations across five countries), this talk will explore when and where empowerment strategies can most effectively improve welfare.

(Lunch provided)

Smuggling is typically thought of as furtive and hidden, taking place under the radar and beyond the reach of the state. But in many cases, governments tacitly permit illicit cross-border commerce, or even devise informal arrangements to regulate it. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in the borderlands of Tunisia and Morocco, Max Gallien explains why states have long tolerated illegal trade across their borders and develops new ways to understand the political economy of smuggling. His book, “Smugglers and States – Negotiating the Maghreb at its Margins” examines the rules and agreements that govern smuggling in North Africa, tracing the involvement of states in these practices and their consequences for borderland communities. It demonstrates that, contrary to common assumptions about the effects of informal economies, smuggling can promote both state and social stability. States not only turn a blind eye to smuggling, they rely on it to secure political acquiescence and maintain order, because it provides income for otherwise neglected border communities. More recently, however, the securitization of borders, wars, political change, and the pandemic have put these arrangements under pressure. Gallien explores the renegotiation of the role of smuggling, showing how stability turns into vulnerability and why some groups have been able to thrive while others have been pushed further to the margins.

Audience Q & A will follow.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Max Gallien is a political scientist specialising in the politics of informal and illegal economies, the political economy of taxation and the modern politics of the Middle East and North Africa. He is a research fellow at the Institute of Development Studies and a Research Lead and the International Centre for Tax and Development. He is the author of “Smugglers and States – Negotiating the Maghreb at its Margins” (Columbia University Press, 2024).

Today’s consensus is that the key to curbing climate change is to produce green electricity and electrify everything possible. The main economic barrier in that project has seemingly been removed. But while prices of solar and wind power have tumbled, the golden era of renewables has yet to materialize.

The problem is that investment is driven by profit, not price, and operating solar and wind farms remains a marginal business, dependent everywhere on the state’s financial support. We cannot expect markets and the private sector to solve the climate crisis while the profits that are their lifeblood remain unappetizing.

Audience Q & A to follow.

Lunch provided

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Brett Christophers is Professor of Human Geography at the Institute for Housing and Urban Research, Uppsala University. His books include Rentier Capitalism: Who Owns the Economy, and Who Pays for It? and Our Lives in Their Portfolios: Why Asset Managers Own the World

Pulitzer Prize-Winning author Nathan Thrall will discuss his book “A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy.”

About the Book
Five-year-old Milad Salama is excited for the school trip to a theme park on the outskirts of Jerusalem. On the way, his bus collides with a semitrailer in a horrific accident. His father, Abed, gets word of the crash and rushes to the site. The scene is chaos—the children have been taken to different hospitals in Jerusalem and the West Bank; some are missing, others cannot be identified. Abed sets off on an odyssey to learn Milad’s fate. It is every parent’s worst nightmare, but for Abed it is compounded by the maze of physical, emotional, and bureaucratic obstacles he must navigate because he is Palestinian. He is on the wrong side of the separation wall, holds the wrong ID to pass the military checkpoints, and has the wrong papers to enter the city of Jerusalem.

Abed’s quest to find Milad is interwoven with the stories of a cast of Jewish and Palestinian characters whose lives and histories unexpectedly converge: a kindergarten teacher and a mechanic who rescue children from the burning bus; an Israeli army commander and a Palestinian official who confront the aftermath at the scene of the crash; a settler paramedic; ultra-Orthodox emergency service workers; and two mothers who each hope to claim one severely injured boy.

Immersive and gripping, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama is an indelibly human portrait of the struggle over Israel/Palestine that offers a new understanding of the tragic history and reality of one of the most contested places on earth.

About the Author
Nathan Thrall received the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction for “A Day in the Life of Abed Salama” (Metropolitan Books, 2023). The book was selected as a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and named a best book of the year by The New Yorker, Time, The Economist and fifteen other publications. Thrall is also the author of the critically acclaimed essay collection “The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine” (Metropolitan Books, 2017). His writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, London Review of Books, and The New York Review of Books and been translated into more than twenty languages.

Thrall has received grants and fellowships from the Open Society Foundations, Middlebury College Language Schools, and The Writers’ Institute. His commentary is often featured in print and broadcast media, including the Associated Press, BBC, CNN, Democracy Now!, The Economist, Financial Times, The Guardian, The New York Times, PRI, Reuters, Time, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. 

Thrall is the former director of the Arab-Israeli Project at the International Crisis Group, where from 2010 until 2020 he covered Israel, the West Bank, Gaza, and Israel’s relations with its neighbors.

About the Event
This book launch will feature Natalia Brizuela (University of California, Berkeley) in conversation with Jamille Pinheiro Dias (Brown University and University of London) and Laura Pensa (Brown University). They will be discussing Ailton Krenak’s newly released book “Ancestral Future” (Polity, 2024), recently co-translated by Jamille Pinheiro Dias. The conversation will be held in English, but participants are welcome to intervene in English, Spanish, or Portuguese. The books are also available in Spanish through Eterna Cadencia Press and in Portuguese through Companhia das Letras.

About the Book
In response to the escalating ecological, political, and social crises of our time, Indigenous leader and activist Ailton Krenak counters the lasting and destructive impacts of colonialism and capitalism. Krenak challenges the fixation on a supposed future of endless progress and growth, arguing that this overemphasis on what is yet to unfold is a harmful illusion that diverts our attention from the here and now. In Ancestral Future, Krenak points out how we often lose ourselves in either a nostalgic past or an imagined future, failing to confront the world as it is. He advocates for an alternative: an ancestral future, already embodied in the land and its living systems, challenging environmental perceptions that reduce rivers, mountains, trees, and other non-human entities—which he describes as our relatives—to mere resources for exploitation. Krenak’s work offers important insights for those concerned with the climate crisis and environmental degradation. Born in Brazil’s Doce River Valley, Krenak is a key figure in environmental advocacy and the fight for Indigenous rights.

About the Speakers
Natalia Brizuela is professor of Spanish & Portuguese and Film & Media, and is the Class of 1930 Chair of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

Jamille Pinheiro Dias is CLACS Craig M. Cogut Visiting Professor at Brown University. She is also Director of the Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University of London.

Laura Pensa is Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Hispanic Studies at Brown University.

Chandan Gowda — Another India

Date: Thursday, October 10, 2024
Time: 4:00 PM - 6:00 PM EST
Location: Leung Conference Room, 280 Brook Street

This event features Chandan Gowda, the Ramakrishna Hegde Chair Professor of Decentralization and Development at the Institute for Social and Economic Change, Bengaluru. Gowda is an accomplished scholar and editor, known for his work on Indian democracy, literature, and development thought. His recent works include translations and editorial contributions to key literary and academic texts, such as Theatres of Democracy and A Life in the World. Gowda has also completed a book on the origins of development thought in colonial India, focusing on the old Mysore state.

Joining the discussion are Parimal Patil (Harvard University), Peter DeSouza (Goa University), and Tiraana Bains (Brown University).

From Barak Obama’s lead negotiator on climate change, an inside account of the seven-year negotiation that culminated in the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015—and where the international climate effort needs to go from here. 

The 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change was one of the most difficult and hopeful achievements of the twenty-first century: 195 nations finally agreed, after 20 years of trying, to establish an ambitious, operational regime to address one of the greatest civilizational challenges of our time. In Landing the Paris Climate Agreement, Todd Stern, the chief US negotiator on climate change, provides an engaging account from inside the rooms where it happened: the full, charged, seven-year story of how the Paris Agreement came to be, following an arc from Copenhagen, to Durban, to the secret U.S.-China climate deal in 2014, to Paris itself.

Join Todd Stern in conversation with Prof. Christopher Rea.

Audience Q & A to follow.

Lunch provided.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Todd Stern is a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a nonresident distinguished fellow at the Asia Society, concentrating on climate change. He served from January 2009 until April 2016 as the Special Envoy for Climate Change at the Department of State, where he was President Barack Obama’s chief climate negotiator.

Please join us for this book launch event, featuring Prof. Amer Meziane, “The States of the Earth: A Conversation About How the Disenchantment of Empires Led to the Climate Crisis”

in conversation with Holly Case (Professor of European History), Bathsheba Demuth (Dean’s Associate Professor of History and Environment and Society, Director of Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative), Leela Gandhi (Director of the Pembroke Center, John Hawkes Professor of the Humanities and English), Adi Ophir (Visiting Professor of Humanities and Middle East Studies), Thangam Ravindranathan (Professor of French and Francophone Studies) and David Wills (Professor of French and Francophone Studies) [moderator] on Friday, October 4 at 4pm in Rm 110 at Andrews House, 13 Brown St. 

Did disenchantment lead to climate change? The States of the Earth argues that European empires have become secular as they were entering the age of coal and using orientalism as a way of racializing colonized subjects. While industrial States started colonizing parts of Asia and Africa in the aftermath of the French Revolution, massive conversion of natives to Christianity morphed into the civilizing mission. The book contends that “the critique of Heaven has overturned the Earth” through empire and racial capitalism. Our globalized civilization has not been able to get rid of Heaven but has decided to look for it on Earth by accumulating growth through the devastation of nature. Is the “secular age” an age of coal? Is the Anthropocene, a Secularocene? Far from defending a return to religion against a disenchanted modernity, this book sketches a new materialist of critique of religious formations, suggesting that they might partly be seen as effects of imperiality and secularization once the latter is not reduced to a mere decline of religion or the sacred. Religions themselves have adapted to a world in which steam and railways were sometimes considered as divine.

Mohamed Amer Meziane holds a PhD in Philosophy and Intellectual History from the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. After a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at Columbia University’s Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life, he joined Brown University as an Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies, with an affiliation with the Center for Middle East Studies. He is the author of The States of the Earth: An Ecological and Racial History of Secularization. Winner of an Albertine Prize for non-fiction in 2023, the book was published in English in April 2024 by Verso Books, and has been reviewed in The Los Angeles Review of Books.

New Directions in Palestinian Studies at Brown University is proud to host Palestinian novelist and poet, Ibrahim Nasrallah and Professor of Arabic Literature, Huda Fakhreddine, who will jointly deliver the inaugural Mahmoud Darwish Lecture, “Palestinian: Every time They Erase us, We Become Clearer.”

Launching their forthcoming limited-edition chapbook, “Palestinian” (World Poetry Books), Nasrallah and Fakhreddine will present a bilingual poetry reading followed by a conversation in which they reflect on their collaboration and discuss poetry, translation, history, and writing in a time of genocide.

“Palestinian” can be purchased here. $10 from the sale of each copy ordered before October 1 will be donated to KinderUSA, the leading American Muslim organization focused on the health and well-being of Palestinian children.

About the Speakers
Ibrahim Nasrallah is a poet and novelist; to date he has published 15 poetry collections and 25 novels, including 15 novels within the project “The Palestinian Tragicomedy” covering 250 years of modern Palestinian history. He has won several awards, including The Arabic Booker for his novel “The Second War of the Dog,”and the Jerusalem Prize for Culture. He succeeded in summiting Mount Kilimanjaro in a venture with two Palestinian amputee adolescents and wrote about this journey the novel “The Spirits of Kilimanjaro,” which was awarded the Katara Prize for Arabic Novels. He won the Katara Prize again for his novel “A Tank Under the Christmas Tree.” His work has been translated into many languages and has been published in more than 40 editions.

Huda Fakhreddine is a writer, translator, and Associate Professor of Arabic Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of “Metapoesis in the Arabic Tradition” (Brill, 2015) and “The Arabic Prose Poem: Poetic Theory and Practice” (Edinburgh University Press, 2021), and the co-editor of “The Routledge Handbook of Arabic Poetry” (Routledge, 2023). Her book of creative non-fiction titled “Zaman s̩aghīr taḥt shams thāniya” (“A Brief Time Under a Different Sun”) was published by Dar al-Nahda, Beirut, in 2019. Her translations of Arabic poems have appeared in Banipal, World Literature Today, Nimrod, ArabLit Quarterly, Asymptote, and Middle Eastern Literatures, among many others. She is co-editor of Middle Eastern Literatures and an editor of the Library of Arabic Literature.

Hosted by Beshara Doumani, Mahmoud Darwish Professor in Palestinian Studies.