Cornell Institute for Comparative Modernities (ICM)

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Today! Cornell Institute for Comparative Modernities (ICM) is hosting Shaoling Ma for a new conversation, “Integrated Rural Circuits: A Scalar History of Southeast Asia’s Computational Environments” in the Guerlac Room, A.D. White House at 4:45 p.m.. More details below:

ICM NEW CONVERSATIONS SERIES
SHAOLING MA (Associate Professor, Department of Asian Studies; Fellow, Society for Humanities, Cornell University)
Thursday, November 13 | 4:45 p.m. —6:15 p.m.
A.D. White House, Guerlac Room
Co-sponsored by the Society for the Humanities
Reception to follow
Free and open to the public

ABSTRACT
Postwar advances in information processing and communication networks increasingly automated calculable relations between natures, peoples, and things to the point of appearing to be the cause of their interconnections. My talk chips away at the veneers of such computational environments by expansively recentering rurality as the ground and figure, the object and agentive subject of Southeast Asia’s computing history. Far from attempting a systematic overview, I share several intertwined case studies of computer-aided rural-focused applications from the Philippines, Vietnam, and Malaysia between the late 1950s and 1980s that expose computerization’s less publicized roots in postcolonial elite land ownership, bureaucratic modernization, and race politics; the Cold War circuit of securitization and activism; pre-digital histories of self-contained interchangeability in agricultural production; and agrarian-rural labor restructuring. It is thus the concrete social relations of rural (dis)integration and circuitry that helped to scale Southeast Asia’s computational environments—and their attendant epistemologies—across local, national, regional, and transnational levels. Computational scalar techniques on the other hand often downplayed rurality’s network effect, but in doing so inadvertently ripen it for analysis.

BIO
Shaoling Ma is an interdisciplinary scholar and critical theorist of global Chinese literature, cultural history, and media. Her teaching and research interests include critical theory and late nineteenth-century to contemporary Chinese and Southeast Asian studies. Prof. Ma's first book, The Stone and the Wireless: Mediating China, 1861-1906 (Duke UP, 2021) asks what media studies can gain conceptually from the last few decades of the Manchu Qing dynasty (1644-1912), and what this politicized and semicolonial phase of Chinese history looks like when reviewed from the new and mostly foreign communicative technologies of its time such as telegraphy, telephony, phonography, and photography. The Stone and the Wireless argues that when Chinese intellectuals, writers, and revolutionaries wrote and illustrated their encounters with these devices, they inadvertently challenged existing notions of politics, tradition, and science, and thus reconfigured new sites of ideological struggle. Prof. Ma is currently working on a second book, tentatively titled Asia in Loops, a cultural history and critical theorization of how computational techniques aiding East and Southeast Asian capitalist accumulation feed on the region's larger geopolitical tensions to produce seemingly self-referential and self-regenerating loops to which culture and criticism risk capitulating.

Cornell Institute for Comparative Modernities (ICM)is co-sponsoring a conversation with writer and journalist Peter Beinart this Monday, November 10 at 5pm at the Cornell Law School Moot Court Room, on "How the War in Gaza in Affecting International Law, Academic Freedom, and Antisemitism on College Campuses."
A Conversation with Peter Beinart
Mon., Nov. 10th @ 5pm

In alignment with Cornell’s mission to foster rigorous dialogue on urgent global and societal issues, the Clarke Initiative on Law and Development in the Middle East and North Africa is proud to present a timely and thought-provoking event featuring author, professor, and political analyst Peter Beinart on Monday, November 10 at 5:00 p.m. in the Moot Court Room (MTH 390), Cornell Law School.

Light refreshments will be served. To RSVP, please use the QR code in the flyer below.
About the Event
Conversation Theme—Norms Under Pressure: How the War in Gaza Is Affecting International Law, Academic Freedom, and Antisemitism on College Campuses
In the aftermath of the October 7 attacks and the ensuing humanitarian crisis in Gaza, campuses across the country have become flashpoints for protests, political expression, and institutional response. Mr. Beinart’s latest book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning (2025), examines this moment with urgency, moral clarity, and an unwavering focus on the humanity of all parties. Join us for what promises to be a timely and impactful conversation about how we understand dissent, dignity, and the responsibilities of academic institutions in trying times.
About the Speaker
Peter Beinart is a distinguished journalist, political commentator, and educator. He currently serves as editor-at-large at Jewish Currents, contributes opinion columns to The New York Times, provides political commentary for MSNBC, and is a fellow at the Foundation for Middle East Peace. He is also a professor of journalism and political science at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. A former editor of The New Republic, his writing has appeared in The Atlantic, TIME, and The New York Review of Books, among other publications. Beinart is the author of four books: The Good Fight: Why Liberals—and Only Liberals—Can Win the War on Terror (2006), The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris (2010), The Crisis of Zionism (2012), and his latest work, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning (2025).
About the Event Sponsors
This event is sponsored by the Clarke Initiative for Law and Development in the Middle East and North Africa and co-sponsored by the Near Eastern Studies Department, the Jewish Studies Program, Einaudi Center's Southwest Asia and North Africa Program, the Institute for Comparative Modernities, the Department of Literatures in English, and Tikkun v'Or (Ithaca Reform Temple). Free and open to the public—all are welcome.

TODAY! Cornell Institute for Comparative Modernities (ICM) welcomes Atreyee Gupta to campus for a talk about her two new books, "Worlds Imagined Otherwise: Postwar & Non-Aligned." Join us at Goldwin Smith Hall G22 at 4:45pm.
Details:
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.

Atreyee Gupta is Associate Professor of Art History at UC Berkeley. Gupta’s area of expertise is Global Modernism, with a special emphasis on the aesthetic and intellectual flows that have cut across Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America from the twentieth century onwards. She is the author of Non-Aligned: Art, Decolonization, and the Third World Project in India, ca. 1930–1960(Yale University Press, forthcoming in 2025), which focuses on the artistic and intellectual resonances of the Non-Aligned Movement during the Cold War era and the interwar anti-colonial Afro-Asian networks that preceded it. With the late Okwui Enwezor, she has also edited Postwar—Towards a Global Art History, 1945–1965 (Duke University Press, forthcoming in 2025). Her current book, tentatively titled One Hundred Years in Present Tense: Art in South Asian America, ca. 1893–1993, links Third World political, artistic, and cultural currents to the long diasporic arc of South Asian art in the United States.

This Monday, Sept. 22: Cornell Institute for Comparative Modernities (ICM) welcomes Nidhi Mahajan for a talk about her new book: Moorings: Voyages of Capital Across the Indian Ocean (University of California Press, 2025).
Monday, September 22, 2025 | 4:45 p.m. —6:15 p.m.
Klarman Hall, KG42

_Moorings_ follows sailors from the Gulf of Kachchh in India as they voyage across the Indian Ocean on mechanized wooden sailing vessels known as vahans, or dhows. These voyages produce capital through moorings tht are spatial, moral, material, and conceptual. With a view from the dhow, the book examines the social worlds of Muslim seafarers who been rendered invisible even as they maneuver multiple regulatory regimes and the exigencies of life, navigatiing colonialism, neoliberalism, the rise of Hindutva, insurgency, climate change, and border regimes across the ocean. Based on historical and ethnographic research aboard ships, at ports, and in religious shrines and homes, Moorings shows how capitalism derives value from historically sedimented practices grounded in caste, gender, and transregional community-based forms of regulation.

Tonight at 6pm! Free film screening at Cornell Cinema followed by a discussion with ICM members Naminata Diabate, Natalie Melas, and ASRC colleague Olúfemí Táíwò.

Cornell Institute for Comparative Modernities (ICM) welcomes Pinar Ogrenci to campus for a screening of two recent, acclaimed films. Join us tomorrow, Monday, April 14, to see Gurbet is a Home Now (2020) and Aşît – The Avalanche (2022), followed by conversation with ICM/AAP faculty Esra Akcan and ICM/History of Art faculty Iftikhar Dadi.
More details:
MONDAY, APRIL 14: ICM SCREENING AND CONVERSATION
TWO FILMS: GURBET IS A HOME NOW (2020) Produced in collaboration with Esra Akcan and Heide Moldenhauer and based on Akcan’s book, Open Architecture, and
AŞIT – THE AVALANCHE (2022) Followed by conversation with filmmaker PINAR ÖĞRENCÍ and ESRA AKCAN (AAP, Cornell University, ICM). Moderated by IFTIKHAR DADI (History of Art, Cornell University, ICM)
Abby and Howard Milstein Auditorium
4:45 pm—7:45 pm
Free and open to the public

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)
Gurbet is a Home Now (2020) was produced in collaboration with Esra Akcan and Heide Moldenhauer and based on Akcan’s book, Open Architecture. The film centers around the personal experiences and solidarity amongst the women migrants and guest workers living in Kreuzberg. Heide Moldenhauer, one of the few female architects of the IBA project and her photographic archive from Landesarchive Berlin plays a central role in the reappraisal of a slice of Kreuzberg history that has remained in the shadows.
*The term “Gurbet,” which does not have an exact English counterpart, comes from the Arabic root “ğrb” and means being away and apart from homeland. The name “Gurbet Is a Home Now” is inspired by Aras Ören’s poetry collection Gurbet Değil Artık (Not ‘Gurbet’ Anymore), the last part of his Berlin Trilogy (1980). “Gurbet is a home now” expresses the transformation of the “place” that, for the guest worker who came to Germany with plans to return to their homeland after a while, was at first a foreign land and gradually became a home. The film won Special Jury Prize of Documentarist Film Festival in 2021.

Aşît ('The Avalanche') (2022) is a film inspired by Stefan Zweig’s final novella The Royal Game, (Schachnovelle, 1941) a psychological thriller in which chess becomes a survival mechanism in the face of fascism. The film is set in Öğrenci’s father’s hometown, Müküs, an untouched spot within a mountainous region in southern Van, on Turkey’s border with Iran, an area now home to an urban population of mainly Kurdish speaking communities. Müküs is known as Bahçesaray for the Turkish, Moks for the Armenian and Müküs or Miksi for the Kurdish.
Aşît’ refers both to the threat of avalanche that disconnects Müküs from the rest of the world and to 'Meds Yegher’ (The Big Disaster or, The Great Catastrophe) in 1915.

BIOGRAPHIES
Pınar Öğrenci is an artist and award-winning filmmaker based in Berlin. Displacement, migration, survival, and resistance are cornerstones of Pınar Öğrenci’s films and installations. Driving her works are difficult, everyday struggles: the stories she hears, observes, experiences, collects, and documents from different geographies. In earlier works, Öğrenci followed the rarely-spoken stories of migrating communities around the Mediterranean, the Aegean, and in Berlin. She has a background in architecture, which informs her poetic and experiential video-based work and installations that accumulate traces of ‘material culture’ related to forced displacement. Her works are decolonial and feminist readings from the intersections of social, political and anthropological research, everyday practices, and human stories that follow agents of forced migration. Her works have been exhibited widely at museums, art institutions, and festivals, including documenta fifteen 2022 in Kassel, Berlinische Galerie (2023), 12th Gwangju Biennial (2018), 6th Athens Biennial (2018), Sharjah Biennial13 (2017), Survival Kit (2019), Tensta Konsthall Stockholm (2018), Württembergischer Kunstverein (WKV) Stuttgart (2017), MAXXI Museum, Rome ( 2016), SALT Galata, Istanbul (2015-6). Her first solo exhibition abroad was realized at Kunst Haus-Hundertwasser Museum in Vienna, “A Gentle Breeze Passed Over Us” in 2017.

Esra Akcan is Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Architecture and board member at the Institute for Comparative Modernities. Akcan's research on modern and contemporary architecture and urbanism foregrounds the intertwined histories of Europe, West Asia, and Northeast Africa and offers new ways to understand architecture's role in global, social, and environmental justice. She has written extensively on critical and postcolonial theory, racism, immigration, reparations and transitional justice, architectural photography, translation, neoliberalism, and global history. She is the author of Architecture in Translation: Germany, Turkey and the Modern House (Duke University Press, 2012); Turkey: Modern Architectures in History (Reaktion/Chicago University Press, 2012, with Sibel Bozdoğan); Open Architecture: Migration, Citizenship and the Urban Renewal of Berlin-Kreuzberg by IBA-1984/87 (Birkhäuser/De Gruyter Academic Press, 2018); Abolish Human Bans: Intertwined Histories of Architecture (CCA, 2022), and co-editor of Art and Architecture of Migration and Discrimination (Routledge, 2023, with Iftikhar Dadi) Her book Architecture and Right-to-Heal: Resettler Nationalism in the Aftermath of Conflicts and Disasters is upcoming from Duke University Press in 2025.

Iftikhar Dadi is the John H. Burris Professor in History of Art and resident director of the Institute for Comparative Modernities. He teaches and researches modern and contemporary art from a global and transnational perspective, with emphasis on questions of methodology and intellectual history. His writings have focused on modernism and contemporary art of South and West Asia and their diasporas. Another research interest examines the film, media, and popular cultures of South Asia, seeking to understand how emergent publics forge new avenues for civic participation. Publications include Lahore Cinema: Between Realism and Fable (University of Washington Press, 2022), a pioneering scholarly examination of mid-century cinema from Lahore; and Modernism and the Art of Muslim South Asia (2010), which has been widely reviewed in academic and art journals and received the 2010 Book Prize from the American Institute of Pakistan Studies. Informed by postcolonial theory and globalization studies, the work traces the emergence of modernism by selected artists from South Asia over the course of the twentieth century. More broadly, it offers a way of writing histories of nonwestern modern art by situating modernism as transnational rather than located primarily within a national art history. Other publications include the edited volumes: The Lahore Biennale Reader 01 (2022); Anwar Jalal Shemza(2015); Art and Architecture of Migration and Discrimination: Pakistan, Turkey and their European Diasporas (co-edited with Esra Akcan, 2023); the co-edited catalog Lines of Control (2012); and the co-edited reader Unpacking Europe (2001). His essays have appeared in numerous journals, edited volumes, and online platforms. He has received grants from the Andy Warhol Foundation, the Getty Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Cornell Institute for Comparative Modernities (ICM) is honored to host Samera Esmeir's lecture today, postponed from last fall, and now with a new title: “Meanwhile, in Palestine: On Destructible Life.” Please see more details below. We look forward to seeing you there.

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 26: ICM LECTURE
SAMERA ESMEIR
Associate Professor, Department of Rhetoric, University of California, Berkeley
“Meanwhile, in Palestine: On Destructible Life”
Kaufmann Auditorium, Goldwin Smith Hall G64
4:45 p.m. — 6:15 p.m.
Reception to follow
Co-sponsored by South West Asia and North Africa Program, Einaudi Center for International Studies

ABSTRACT
Meanwhile, Palestine: A Life in Question is a manuscript that considers the current episode of the ongoing colonial-international war of obliteration against the Palestinians. It reflects on different forms of political attunement to destruction, what it means to remain in the present tense and touch a life in question, and the dangers of such a touch. This life in question is not only violated and assaulted but confronted daily—when the earth turns and the sun rises—with its potential end. As this life must unfold without contemplating the future, it highlights the limitations of modern progressive politics and the ethical considerations of loss that only emerge after destruction. By staying with the present of destruction and destructibility, we might recognize that in Palestine, there is an injunction to lose before there is loss.

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.

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.

During the past few years, she had been the Chair of the Department of Humanities and Professor of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at The Africa Institute in Sharjah.

Elizabeth Giorgis was very active as a scholar of African art and a mentor to many others. Her award-winning book, Modernist Art in Ethiopia (2019), on Ethiopian modern art is a major pioneering study, and it is among her many other writings and contributions in recent years.

A recent co-edited book (with Dagmawi Woubshet and Surafel W. Abebe) is Ethiopia: Modern Nation–Ancient Roots (2024). Her recent research focused on gender in Ethiopia. She had also curated several significant exhibitions of African art in Ethiopia and Sharjah.

Elizabeth Giorgis was a faculty member in MAHASSA (Modern Art Histories in and across Africa, South and Southeast Asia) led by Iftikhar Dadi, which was supported by a Getty Foundation grant and held in Hong Kong in August 2019 and Dhaka, Bangladesh, in February 2020. And during 2012-13 she was a visiting fellow at the Institute for Comparative Modernities at Cornell University.

Elizabeth Giorgis's legacy is one of intellectual brilliance, ethical scholarship, and profound generosity.

For more on her accomplishments, see
https://www.theafricainstitute.org/institute-team/elizabeth-w-giorgis/