Amiel Bize, The Post Agrarian Question, Tuesday, March 24, 2026, Klarman Hall KG42, 4:45 P.M. - 6:15 P.M. Spring 2026 New Conversations Series.

Amiel Bize, "The Post-Agrarian Question"

ICM NEW CONVERSATIONS SERIES Spring 2026 AMIEL BIZE (Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, Cornell University) Tuesday, March 24, 2026 (note new date) Klarman Hall, KG42

Wednesday, March 11–Thursday, March 12 ICM LECTURE + GRADUATE SEMINAR NASSER ABOURAHME Bowdoin College IN THE OPEN TIME OF DISPOSSESSION: CAMP, COLONY, PALESTINE Goldwin Smith Hall Kaufmann Auditorium | 4:45 P.M. –6:15 P.M. ON THE NECESSITY OF GENOCIDE: PALESTINE AND UNWORLDING Toboggan Lodge, 38 Forest Home Drive | 9:00 A.M. –11:00 A.M. (registration required) Co-sponsored by the Southwest Asian and North Africa Program

Nasser Abourahme, “In the Open Time of Dispossession: Camp, Colony, Palestine"

ICM LECTURE SERIES SPRING 2026 NASSER ABOURAHME (Assistant Professor, Middle Eastern and North African Studies, Bowdoin College) In the Open Time of Dispossession: Camp, Colony, Palestine Wednesday, March 11, 2026 (This date is rescheduled due to weather-related travel delays) Goldwin Smith Hall, Kaufmann Auditorium G64 4:45 P.M—6:15 P.M. GRADUATE SEMINAR On the Necessity of Genocide: Palestine and Unworlding Thursday, March 12, 2026 9:00 A.M. —11:00 A.M. REGISTRATION REQUIRED CONTACT ICM@CORNELL.EDU

Pop Art and South Asia Conference December 15-16, 2025 Jaffna Thiruvalluvar Cultural Center Jaffna, Sri Lanka

Pop Art and South Asia Conference in Jaffna, Sri Lanka

Pop Art and South Asia  Conference December 15-16, 2025 Jaffna Thiruvalluvar Cultural Center Jaffna, Sri Lanka This conference focuses on South Asian art’s engagement with popular culture from the mid-twentieth century through the present. The rapid development of capitalism, urbanism, media, technology, and mass politics since the late nineteenth century has engendered multiple resonances in the complex societies of South Asia, providing openings for artists to engage with popular social and cultural developments. Here, Pop art is not confined to what is commonly understood in a Western context as engaging primarily with late capitalist consumer culture and media imagery. Rather, Pop artistic practices unfold in the context of uneven development, multiple temporalities, layered aesthetic regimes, within societies that are in rapid and turbulent transition.                

Juliana Hu Pegues Colonialism is Gorges: The Confluence of Racial Capitalism and Settler Feminism" poster with painting "Reversing Manifest Destiny"

Juliana Hu Pegues, "Colonialism is Gorges: The Confluence of Racial Capitalism and Settler Feminism" 11.19

The Institute for Comparative Modernities is delighted to host Prof. Juliana Hu Pegues for a lecture on her current research, "Colonialism is Gorges: The Confluence of Racial Capitalism and Settler Feminism." Juliana Hu Pegues is Associate Professor of Literatures in English, and is affliated with Asian American Studies and American Indian and Indigenous Studies Programs at Cornell. Her book Space-Time Colonialism: Alaska’s Indigenous and Asian Entanglements (University of North Carolina Press, 2021) was awarded the 2022 Lora Romero First Book Publication Prize from the American Studies Association and the 2022 Sally and Ken Owens Award from the Western History Association.

book cover, Postwar revisited: A Global Art History, Red font on yellow background with faint, repeated years 1945 1952 1958

Postwar Revisited: A Global Art History Features Work by ICM Members

ICM board member Iftikhar Dadi’s essay published in Postwar Revisited: A Global Art History, co-edited by ICM Faculty Advisor Okwui Enwezor (late), and Atreyee Gupta. Okwui Enwezor’s 2016 exhibition Postwar: Art between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–1965 redefined the history of art produced in those two decades. Nearly a decade later, Postwar Revisited: A Global Art History (Duke University Press, 2025) returns to these debates to present an image of a historical period in which Western conceptions of art, aesthetics, and philosophy are all thrown into intense flux after Auschwitz and Hiroshima, while the cultural energies of decolonization generate myriad artistic and intellectual practices across the globe, which re-engage the connections of art to life itself. ICM board member Iftikhar Dadi’s essay published in Postwar Revisited: A Global Art History, co-edited by ICM Faculty Advisor Okwui Enwezor (late), and Atreyee Gupta. Okwui Enwezor’s 2016 exhibition Postwar: Art between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–1965 redefined the history of art produced in those two decades. Nearly a decade later, Postwar Revisited: A Global Art History (Duke University Press, 2025) returns to these debates to present an image of a historical period in which Western conceptions of art, aesthetics, and philosophy are all thrown into intense flux after Auschwitz and Hiroshima, while the cultural energies of decolonization generate myriad artistic and intellectual practices across the globe, which re-engage the connections of art to life itself. Focusing on modernist artists, artist collectives, and architects central to dissonant regional traditions, as well as influential exhibitions and patronage systems, the contributors produce a new understanding of emergent postwar global art. Provoking new ways of thinking, engaging, and narrating art history, Postwar Revisited is essential reading for those interested in debates on global art history and global modernism, the intersections between art and decolonization, the cultural aspects of the Cold War and the Non-Aligned Movement, and modern and contemporary art more generally. Contributors: Iftikhar Dadi, Okwui Enwezor, Patrick Flores, Hal Foster, Boris Groys, Atreyee Gupta, Elizabeth Harney, Jennifer Josten, Vivian Li, Tara McDowell, Alexandra Munroe, Nada Shabout, Terry Smith, Jenni Sorkin, Ming Tiampo Okwui Enwezor (1963–2019) was an internationally recognized and pathbreaking art curator, the former director of Haus der Kunst, founder of Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, and the coauthor of numerous books and exhibition catalogs. Atreyee Gupta is Associate Professor of Global Modern Art and South and Southeast Asian Art at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of Non-Aligned: Art, Decolonization, and the Third World Project in India. https://www.dukeupress.edu/postwar-revisited

Image of deity holding soda, french fries, mobile phone

Pop Art and South Asia: Conference

Pop Art and South Asia Conference December 15-16, 2025 Jaffna Thiruvalluvar Cultural Center Jaffna, Sri Lanka REGISTER TO ATTEND Space is limited. Preregistration required. This conference focuses on South Asian art’s engagement with popular culture from the mid-twentieth century through the present. The rapid development of capitalism, urbanism, media, technology, and mass politics since the late nineteenth century has engendered multiple resonances in the complex societies of South Asia, providing openings for artists to engage with popular social and cultural developments. Here, Pop art is not confined to what is commonly understood in a Western context as engaging primarily with late capitalist consumer culture and media imagery. Rather, Pop artistic practices unfold in the context of uneven development, multiple temporalities, layered aesthetic regimes, within societies that are in rapid and turbulent transition. Muvindu Binoy, Deity and the Feast, 2016. Giclée print on archival photo paper, 61 x 61 cm, edition of 10. Courtesy of the artist and Saskia Fernando Gallery. SCHEDULE DEC 15 9:30 am Registration 10:00 am Opening Remarks T. Sanathanan and Iftikhar Dadi Pop Art in South Asia: Methodologies and Approaches Iftikhar Dadi Panel 1: 10:45 am – 1:00 pm Between Pop Art and Political Montage: Manoeuvres in Dissent Sanjukta Sunderason Shomoy: Context and Journey of an Artists’ Group Dhali Al Mamoon The Popular and the Political: SAHMAT in the Public Sphere Rattanamol Singh Johal Panel 2: 2:00-3:30 pm Ambedkar Age Digital Bookmobile and State-Sponsored Statuary in Western India Shukla Sawant Political Pop After the 1990s in Sri Lanka: Meaning and Dissonance T. Sanathanan DEC 16 Panel 3: 10:00 am – 12:15 pm On the Possibilities of Pop: Testing Frameworks from Sri Lanka Sandev Handy & Nimaya Harris Pop Art in Pakistan Iftikhar Dadi Popular Cinema and Contemporary Art in Bangladesh Lotte Hoek Panel 4: 1.15-3:30 pm Black and Brown Seams Across Diasporas Natasha Bissonauth The Political and the Popular in the Era of M.I.A. Kaitlin Emmanuel South Asia Unbound Zahid Chaudhary

Atreyee Gupta,Non-Aligned: Art, Decolonization and the Third World Project in India. Two book covers featured side by side on poster.

Atreyee Gupta, "Non-Aligned: Art, Decolonization, and the Third World Project in India + Postwar Revisited: A Global Art History" 10.8

ICM NEW BOOK SERIES Fall 2025 ATREYEE GUPTA (University of California, Berkeley) Non-Aligned: Art, Decolonization, and the Third World Project in India + Postwar Revisited: A Global Art History Wednesday, October 8, 2025 Goldwin Smith Hall G22 4:45 p.m. — 6:15 p.m. Co-sponsored by Department of History of Art This talk brings into dialogue two recent book projects by Atreyee Gupta: Postwar – Towards a Global Art History (coedited with Okwui Enwezor, Duke 2025) and Non-Aligned: Decolonization, Modernism, and the Third World Project in India (Yale, forthcoming Nov 2025). Casting the years between 1945 and 1965 onto a broad intellectual canvas, Postwar assembles a global constellation of scholarly perspectives to interrogate the entanglements of art and politics in a period when the aftermath of the Second World War and the eclipse of colonial empires spurred efforts to reimagine the world in a future tense. Traversing an expansive terrain, Postwar challenges Westernist art historical paradigms to situate modernism within broader processes of decolonization and global realignment. Non-Aligned turns to India to reconcile globally expansive postwar histories with the specificities of South Asian modernism. Beginning with the anti-fascist movements of the 1930s, it traces the emergence of an anti-imperialist aesthetic imagination that was elaborated in India during the Cold War era and within the decolonizing Afro-Asian context of the Non-Aligned Movement. Together, these books ask how the cultural politics of decolonization might reshape our understanding of twentieth-century modernism and its afterlives. Collectively, they advance a methodology for global art history that is attentive to the entangled genealogies of aesthetics and politics, one that does not simply add new geographies to existing narratives but reimagines the very terms of modernism and world-making.

NIDHI MAHAJAN POSTER with aerial image of boats moored

Nidhi Mahajan, "Moorings: Voyages of Capital Across the Indian Ocean" 9.22

ICM NEW BOOKS SERIES Moorings: Voyages of Capital Across the Indian Ocean Monday, September 22, 2025 | 4:45 p.m. —6:15 p.m. Klarman Hall, KG42 NIDHI MAHAJAN (Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of California, Santa Cruz) The Institute for Comparative Modernities is thrilled to welcome Cornell alum Nidhi Mahajan '15 to campus for a talk about her recently published book Moorings: Voyages of Capital Across the Indian Ocean.

Fanon Free Screening poster with image of Fanon's profile as he stands near the ocean

FANON: Screening and Discussion at Cornell Cinema 9.17

Join us for a free screening of the biopic Fanon followed by a discussion with Cornell faculty members Naminata Diabate (Comparative Literature) Natalie Melas (Comparative Literature) and Olúfémi Táíwo (Africana Studies) about the great anti-colonial theorist and practitioner Frantz Fanon.

rina Troconis, "The Necromantic State: Spectral Remains in the Afterglow of Venezuela's Bolivarian Revolution" poster with book cover

Irina R. Troconis, "The Necromantic State: Spectral Remains in the Afterglow of Venezuela's Bolivarian Revolution" 4.21

ICM NEW BOOKS SERIES IRINA R. TROCONIS (Associate Professor, Department of Romance Studies, Cornell University) The Necromantic State: Spectral Remains in the Afterglow of Venezuela's Bolivarian Revolution Monday, April 21, 2025 | 4:45 p.m. – 6:15 p.m. Goldwin Smith Hall G22 Free and open to the public A conversation with Cornell faculty member Irina Troconis about her new book, The Necromantic State: Spectral Remains in the Afterglow of Venezuela's Bolivarian Revolution (Duke UP, 2025) In the spring of 2013, televisions across Venezuela announced the death of then-president Hugo Chávez, leader of the Bolivarian Revolution and key political actor in Latin America’s “turn to the left.” Chávez’s death, however, was not the end of Chávez’s life. In The Necromantic State, Irina R. Troconis examines how Chávez, as a “specter,” has lingered in Venezuela’s public, private, and digital spaces. Focusing on contemporary Venezuela and drawing from a diverse corpus that includes tattoos, toys, memes, graffiti, and a hologram haunting the streets of downtown Caracas, Troconis contends that, in moments of failed transitions, political tensions, and crises of legitimacy, the state brings the dead back to life to negotiate the terms of its survival. By showing how this necromantic performance enables the state’s material and visual manifestations in public and private spaces, Troconis untangles a sociopolitical moment in which the ghostly acts as the affective, social, and political force that grounds state authority and ensures the preservation of the status quo, as it circumscribes acts of political imagination and limits popular resistance. IRINA TROCONIS is Assistant Professor of Latin American Studies in the Department of Romance Studies. She holds a PhD in Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures from New York University, and an MPhil Degree in Latin American Studies from the University of Cambridge (UK). Her areas of specialization include: Memory Studies, Venezuelan Studies, Politics and Performance, Affect Theory, Visual Culture, Material Culture, and Digital Humanities. She is the co-organizer of the online conversation series (Re)thinking Venezuela/(Re)pensando a Venezuela, currently in its fifth seasonrina R. Troconis is Assistant Professor of Latin American Studies in the Department of Romance Studies. She holds a PhD in Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures from New York University, and an MPhil Degree in Latin American Studies from the University of Cambridge (UK). Her areas of specialization include: Memory Studies, Venezuelan Studies, Politics and Performance, Affect Theory, Visual Culture, Material Culture, and Digital Humanities. She is the co-organizer of the online conversation series (Re)thinking Venezuela/(Re)pensando a Venezuela, currently in its fifth season.

Pinar Ogrenci film still, marching line of people in the snow, aerial view

Pinar Ogrenci, "Gurbet is a Home Now" and "Aşît - The Avalanche" Screening and Discussion 4.15

ICM Film Screening and Conversation A screening of two films followed by conversation with filmmaker PINAR ÖĞRENCİ and ESRA AKCAN (Cornell University). Moderated by IFTIKHAR DADI (Cornell University) Monday, April 15, 2025 | 4:45 p.m. — 7:45 p.m. Milstein Hall, Abby and Howard Milstein Auditorium GURBET IS A HOME NOW (2020) Produced in collaboration with Esra Akcan and Heide Moldenhauer and based on Akcan’s book, Open Architecture. AŚÎT - THE AVALANCHE (2022)

head shot of Elizabeth Giorgis

Announcing the passing of Alumnus Elizabeth W. Giorgis, PhD '10

Alumnus Elizabeth Giorgis, PhD ’10, passed away in Sharjah, UAE, on March 16, 2025. Dr. Giorgis completed her PhD at Cornell in 2010, with Salah Hassan as her dissertation supervisor and Iftikhar Dadi as member of her dissertation committee. Before that, she had received her master’s degree in museum studies from New York University. Dr. Giorgis served in several leadership roles in Ethiopia: Director of the Institute of Ethiopian Studies, Dean of the College of Performing and Visual Art, and Director of the Modern Art Museum: Gebre Kristos Desta Center at Addis Ababa University.

Archival image of Toboggan Lodge on Beebe Lake

ICM Graduate Reading Group Awards Call for Proposals

CALL FOR PROPOSALS: 2025-26 ICM GRADUATE READING GROUP GRANTS The Institute for Comparative Modernities seeks to provide greater opportunities for graduate students from across the campus to engage each other through interdisciplinary and collaborative research working groups. To that end, the Institute provides a meeting space as well as seed money for the establishment and the maintenance of a small number of graduate student research working groups each year

Mother Nation, Shufukah, women in group

ICM Announces Spring 2025 Events Series

The Institute for Comparative Modernities is pleased to announce the 2025 Spring Events Series, a range of engaging hosted events featuring film screenings, co-sponsored seminars and talks; conversations from Cornell faculty members and guest speakers about recent publications, and lectures about ongoing critical research and practice. In the early spring, ICM is hosting a lecture and graduate seminar by editor and historian of Iranian modern history. Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi, new conversations with Cornell faculty members Michell Chresfield and Irina Troconis, a lecture by the Palestinian scholar Samera Esmier, and a screening of two films by Pinar Öğrenci, followed by discussion with ICM member Esra Akcan, whose book, Open Architecture, inspired the film Gurbet is a Home Now. 

Angela Davis, A World of Greater Freedom

Angela Davis: A World of Greater Freedom 10.3

A screening of the film Angela Davis: A World of Greater Freedom (2023) followed by a conversation with filmmaker Manthia Diawara and Salah M. Hassan. Thursday, October 4, 2024 Cornell Cinema, 104 Willard Straight Hall 4:45 p.m. Angela Davis: A World of Greater Freedom (2023) by Manthia Diawara reflects on the life and work of the North American activist Angela Davis. Diawara’s camera follows Davis as she walks through a forest of giant sequoias, works in the garden or walks her dog, while reflecting on myriad issues, including ideas of freedom, resistance, rebellion, remaking our world, political blackness, radical black thought, music, (inter)nationalism, (Global South) feminism, abolition, the industrial prison complex, generational shifts, dialectics, contradiction, Africa, sexuality, desire and also friendship. The film is neither a biography nor a fictional narrative. Instead, Diawara’s footage, which is interspersed with relevant archival material, presents itself as a poetic compendium of Davis’s critical thinking and an inspiration for new imaginaries and new relations within an emergent new world.

Mario Lewis, Forest Notebooks poster with detail of abstract design

Mario Lewis, "Forest Notebooks: The Interaction Between Art, Community, and Ecology"

POSSIBLE LANDSCAPES PROJECT Mario Lewis, an artist and agriculturalist practicing in Trinidad and Berlin, is one of several Trinidadian collaborators in the documentary film project making its debut at Cornell Cinema on Wednesday, September 25. On Wednesday September 25, just before the debut screening at Cornell Cinema, Mario Lewis will give an artist talk at Toboggan Lodge, with a micro exhibit of selected works connected to his talk. More details about Possible Landscapes screening: https://events.cornell.edu/event/possible-landscapes-world-premiere-screening More details about Possible Landscapes project: https://as.cornell.edu/news/professors-feature-length-documentary-film-debuts-cornell-cinema

Possible Landscapes debut screening poster with misty mountain image

Possible Landscapes Debut Test Screening

POSSIBLE LANDSCAPES --DEBUT TEST SCREENING Cornell Cinema, 104 Willard Straight Hall Wednesday, September 25, 2024 7:00 p.m. Directed by Kannan Arunasalam Produced and conceptualized by Tao DuFour and Natalie Melas "For no one had yet written of this landscape that it was possible.” Derek Walcott A collaboration between a documentary filmmaker, Kanan Arunasalam and two professors, Tao DuFour (Architecture) a spatial theorist and Natalie Melas (Comparative Literature) a postcolonial comparatist and scholar of Caribbean thought, Possible Landscapes is the outcome of the team research project, “Possible Landscapes: Documenting Environmental Experience in Trinidad and Tobago,” funded through the Cornell Migrations Initiative team research grant for the Mellon Just Futures Initiative.  The aim was to develop methods of field research and representation in documentary film that foreground intergenerational lived experience of landscapes and environments in the Caribbean islands of Trinidad and Tobago, and to query the formation of environmental and climate imaginaries, with a view to getting at larger historical questions—of migration, plantation societies, extractivism, race, and the legacies of colonialism—that inform everyday practices in ways that are difficult to identify and to articulate, because they are concretely lived.

Angela Davis seated in home

ICM Announces Fall 2024 Events Series

The Institute for Comparative Modernities is pleased to announce the 2024 Fall Events Series, a range of engaging hosted events featuring film screenings, co-sponsored conferences and talks; conversations from Cornell faculty members and guest speakers about recent work, and lectures about ongoing critical research and practice.

Peter Loewen

Peter Loewen named dean of Arts and Sciences

Coming from the University of Toronto, where he was the director of the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, Loewen began his five-year appointment as the Harold Tanner Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences Aug. 1.

Begum Adalet, Insurgent Mood, Tuesday, November 7, 2023, 4:45 pm Toboggan Lodge

Begüm Adalet, "Insurgent Mood" 11.7

ICM New Conversations Series BEGÜM ADALET (Cornell University) INSURGENT MOOD Tuesday, November 7, 2023, 4:45 p.m. – 6:15 p.m. Toboggan Lodge, 38 Forest Home Drive

La Langue, Colonial Legacie and Area Studies: Comparative Modernities poster image with speaker information

La Langue, Colonial Legacies, and Area Studies: Comparative Modernities 9.22—9.23

A Conference Sponsored by the Department of Asian Studies and the Institute for Comparative Modernities, Cornell University Friday, September 22 – Saturday, September 23, 2023 The conference proposes that what is taken for granted today as national or ethnic language, in the sense of “la langue,” came into existence in the world in modernity, that is, the world as it was gradually organized according to the basic schema of internationality instituted in Europe from the 16th to 19th centuries. Initially this understanding of an “international world” was limited to a special region called Europe, but as the territorial states in Europe moved into non-European regions and conquered their lands, the Eurocentric structure of the international world gained global dominance. Gradually, all the land surface of the earth came to be organized by the bipolarity of Europe (also called “the West” since the end of the 19th century) and the Rest. Thanks to the pioneering work of Cécile Canut (Provincialiser la langue, Edition Amsterdam, 2021), Jon Solomon (Spectral Translation), and Naoki Sakai (Voices of the Past) we now understand that the notion of la langue is closely associated with the colonial internationality of the modern world. Our attempts to seek national languages everywhere as the sign of indigenous cultural and political autonomy is, in fact, a continuation of the colonial imposition of the Eurocentric norm on colonial populations. Hence, Canut’s appeal for ‘provincializing Europe’ challenges the established modality of knowledge production about the Rest, particularly in area studies.

filmmaker shooting film on location
Behind the scenes of “We Love We Self Up Here.” with filmmaker Kannan Arunasalam. Provided

We Love We Self Up Here Receives SAH Award for Film and Video

We Love We Self Up Here, a documentary produced by ICM board member Natalie Melas and Cornell AAP faculty Tao Dufour, won the 2023 SAH Award for Film and Video.

Racial Capitalism poster with Image of redlined Chicago neighborhoods

Racial Capitalism: Past, Present, and Futures 4.21—4.22

This two-day conference, co-organized by ICM, the Einaudi Center for International Studies, and the Polson Institute for Global Development, brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars conducting innovative research on the topic of racial capitalism across the globe.

Reparations for Colonization poster

Reparations for Colonization Carbonization 3.3

ICM SYMPOSIUM SERIES SPRING 2023 “Reparations for Colonization/Carbonization” Friday, March 3, 2023 A.D. White House, Room 110 10:00 a.m —5:30 p.m. Given the intertwined history of industrial capitalism, extraction and colonialism, this symposium will explore the pending reparations to their victims from a multidisciplinary perspective. Acknowledging the accountability of the first industrializing countries of the Global North to the previously colonized countries of the Global South, the symposium will address the importance of material and moral reparations in bringing justice to the residual inequalities caused by slavery and racism, environmental extraction and pollution. The intention is to explore the intersections between colonialism and climate change, de-colonization and de-carbonization, transitional justice and energy transition. This symposium will continue the discussion from the “Repair and Reparations” panel series organized by Esra Akcan as director of the Institute for European Studies, at the Einaudi Center for International Studies at Cornell. Information and links to the recordings of the panels are included below.

ICM Global South Translation Symposium Saturday, February 11, 2023, 10:45 am online. Poster text on image of Arabic script. Content about speakers and text is repeated verbatim on article information

ICM Global South Translation Symposium 2.11

ICM EVENTS SERIES SPRING 2023 Saturday, February 11, 2023 10:45 a.m.–12:45 a.m Eastern/New York ONLINE REGISTER HERE: https://cornell.zoom.us/j/91538163732?pwd=RlBFWXVxdlpZb0hxS2NWay9Na0FrQT09

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