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

Pinar Ogrenci, "Gurbet is a Home Now" and "Aşít - 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.

AŚÍT - 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.

Samera Esmeir, Territorial Imperatives, Revolutionary Leaning poster with image of detail of mosaic, tree and animals

Samera Esmeir, "Territorial Imperatives Revolutionary Leanings: Thinking with the Palestinian Revolution" 3.26

ICM LECTURE
SAMERA ESMEIR (Associate Professor, Department of Rhetoric, UC Berkeley)

"Territorial Imperatives, Revolutionary Leanings: Thinking with the Palestinian Revolution"

Wednesday, March 26, 2025 | 4:45 p.m. — 6:15 p.m. (Rescheduled from postponed fall semester date)
Kaufmann Auditorium, Goldwin Smith Hall

Free and open to the public.



BIO

Samera Esmeir is associate professor in the Department of Rhetoric at UC Berkeley. Her research is at the intersection of law, political thought, and Middle Eastern studies. She is the author of Juridical Humanity: A Colonial History (Stanford University Press, 2012) and is currently working on a book with the working title The Struggle that Remains: Between the World and the International.


Co-sponsored by Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA) Initiative, Einaudi Center for International Studies

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

ICM SPRING 2023 EVENT SERIES POSTER TEXT IN ARTICLE

ICM Announces Spring 2023 Event Series

The Institute for Comparative Modernities is pleased to announce the 2023 Spring Event Series, a range of engaging hosted events featuring conversations from Cornell faculty members and guest speakers about recent publications, and lectures about ongoing critical research and practice. ICM is additionally hosting symposia featuring award-winning translators of texts from the Global South, panel discussions on Reparations for Colonization/Carbonization, and a two-day conference on the topic of Racial Capitalism across the globe.

Cover art for 'Dissent' Summer 2022 edition

Aziz Rana, "Left Internationalism in the Heart of Empire"

The summer 2022 issue of Dissent magazine features ICM board member and Cornell Law faculty Aziz Rana’s article “Left Internationalism in the Heart of Empire,” followed by responses by Patrick Iber, Adom Getachew, Stephen Wertheim, Aslı Bâli, Susie Linfield, Ramzi Kassem, and Darryl Li. 

Esra Akcan headshot

Esra Akcan Named New ICM Resident Director

The Institute for Comparative Modernities is pleased to announce that board member Esra Akcan will be the new Resident Director, replacing outgoing ICM Resident Director Iftikhar Dadi, who will remain on the ICM board. The new appointment will begin July 1, 2022.   Professor Akcan joined the ICM board at the beginning of 2020, when she was...

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