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The College of Arts & Sciences
ICM Lecture Series Fall 2026 JOHN TAIN (Carnegie Museum of Art) Of Mountains and Seas: Lahore Biennale and the Global in the Present Wednesday, September 30, 2026 Goldwin Smith Hall, G22 | 4:45 p.m. – 6:15 p.m. The Institute for Comparative Modernities is pleased to welcome curator John Tain to campus for a talk about…
ICM Lecture Series Fall 2026 CAROLYN FORNOFF (Associate Professor of Latin American Studies, Department of Romance Studies, Cornell University) “Agro-Toxic Horror? Agro-Toxic Farce!” Monday, September 28, 2026 Goldwin Smith Hall, G22 | 4:45p.m. – 6:15pm. Free and open to the public Abstract The unregulated use of pesticides in Latin America has long been linked with…
ICM NEW BOOKS SERIES FALL 2026 WUNPINI FATIMATA MOHAMMED (Assistant Professor, Department of Communication, Cornell University) Wednesday, September 23, 2026 Goldwin Smith Hall, G22 | 4:45 p.m. – 6:15 p.m. Wednesday, September 23, 2026 Goldwin Smith Hall, G22 | 4:45 p.m. – 6:15 p.m. ICM is delighted to host Wunpini Fatimata Mohammed for a talk…
PRITA MEIER (Associate Professor, Department of Art History & Institute of Fine Arts, New York University)
ICM NEW CONVERSATIONS SERIESSPRING 2026C.J. WAN-LING WEE (Professor of English, School of Humanities, Nanyang Technical University, Singapore)
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…
THE POST-AGRARIAN QUESTIONTuesday, March 24, 2026 (note new date)Klarman Hall, KG424:45 P.M. –6:15 P.M.
NASSER ABOURAHME (Assistant Professor, Middle Eastern and North African Studies, Bowdoin College)In the Open Time of Dispossession: Camp, Colony, PalestineWednesday, March 11, 2026Goldwin Smith Hall, Kaufmann Auditorium G644:45 P.M—6:15 P.M.
SAMANTHA N. SHEPPARD (Associate Professor, Department of Performing and Media Arts, Cornell University)
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…
The Institute for Comparative Modernities is delighted to host colleague Juliana Hu Pegues for a lecture on her current research, "Colonialism is Gorges: The Confluence of Racial Capitalism and Settler Feminism."
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…
ICM Board and Cornell AAP faculty member Esra Akcan's monumental new book, Architecture and the Right to Heal: Resettler Nationalism in the Aftermath of Conflict and Disaster (Duke University Press) is officially released on November 11, 2025.
SHAOLING MA (Cornell University)Integrated Rural Circuits: A Scalar History of Southeast Asia's Computational Environments
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.
Non-Aligned: Art, Decolonization, and the Third World Project in India + Postwar Revisited: A Global Art History
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 (University of California Press, 2025).
Join us for a free screening of the biopic Fanon (2025) 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.
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…
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 | Reception to follow
Alumnus Elizabeth Giorgis, PhD ’10, passed away in Sharjah, UAE, on March 16, 2025.
A screening of two films followed by conversation with filmmaker PINAR ÖĞRENCİ and ESRA AKCAN (Cornell University). Moderated by IFTIKHAR DADI (Cornell University)
MICHELL CHRESFIELD (Assistant Professor, Africana Studies & Research Center)“Crafting Recognition: Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Native Identity”
The conference, in Lahore, Pakistan, featured more than thirty guest scholars, curators, artists, and other practitioners and twenty-seven emerging scholars.
Similar to dissection in modern medicine, the colonization of Egypt and India endowed the late nineteenth-century Iranian observers of Russian and British encroachment with a “death-bearing” vision of Iran as a sovereign motherland. By anthropomorphizing Iran as a dying mother, they provided compelling “illness scripts” for a curative modernity intent on restoring and rejuvenating Iran’s…