ICM Fall 2026 Visiting Scholar Event
Wednesday, November 18, 2026
Toboggan Lodge | 38 Forest Home Drive
4:45 p.m. – 6:15 p.m.
STAVROULA MICHAEL
"Waters of Modernity: Colonial Infrastructures and Contested Ecologies in Cyprus"
The Institute for Comparative Modernities is delighted to host our Fulbright visiting scholar, Stavroula Michael, for a talk about her current research project.
Abstract
This talk examines how water infrastructures transformed the landscapes and social worlds of colonial and postcolonial Cyprus. Focusing on dams, irrigation schemes, boreholes, public fountains, and anti-malaria works, it traces how water became a medium through which colonial authorities pursued development, public health, and territorial control, while local communities negotiated, appropriated, and at times contested these interventions. Rather than treating infrastructure as a purely technical response to scarcity, the talk approaches it as a material and political process that reorganized relations among people, land, labor, and environment. Drawing on archival, visual, and spatial material, it also considers how gendered labor, ecological change, and competing ideas of modernization became embedded within hydraulic landscapes. By following these infrastructures across the colonial and postcolonial divide, the talk asks how water can reveal the uneven and contested histories of modernity in Cyprus, while situating the island within the wider political, ecological, and infrastructural histories of the contested Eastern Mediterranean.
Bio
Stavroula Michael is an architectural historian and current Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Comparative Modernities at Cornell University. Her research explores how water infrastructures shape landscapes and everyday life, with particular attention to colonial and postcolonial Cyprus and its connections to the Eastern Mediterranean. Working across architectural history, political ecology, and visual and material culture, she examines relationships between environmental transformation, power, and gendered labor. She has taught courses in history, theory, visual culture and design across architecture and graphic design programs at universities in Cyprus and China. She is currently developing her doctoral research into a monograph on the history of water infrastructures and conflict in colonial and postcolonial Cyprus.
