Faculty

PRFDHR Seminar: Activism from Exile: How Activists Abroad Influence Politics Back Home, Professor Elizabeth Nugent

How do activists in exile mobilize citizens back home, and how do regimes respond when they do? In an on-going book project titled Exiles: How Activist Abroad Influence Politics Back Home, Professor Elizabeth Nugent investigates politics in exile, whether and how activists persist in activism once they are forcibly dislocated from their homeland, by drawing on insights from research on the biographical effects of activism, psycho-behavioral effects of trauma and emotion, and forced migration.

PRFDHR Seminar: When does Migration Law Discriminate against Women?, Dr. Catherine Briddick

It is possible to identify gendered disadvantage at almost every point in a migrant woman’s journey, physical and legal, from country of origin to country of destination, from admission to naturalization. Rules which explicitly distribute migration opportunities differently on the grounds of sex/gender, such as prohibitions on certain women’s emigration, may produce such disadvantage. Women may also, however, be disadvantaged by facially gender-neutral rules.

PRFDHR Seminar: Prevalence, Predictors and Treatment of Mental Health Problems in Syrian Refugee Children, Professor Michael Pluess

Millions of children across the world are affected by war and displacement. As well as having experienced traumatic war-related events, many refugee children end up living in adverse conditions with little access to basic resources. It is well established that children exposed to war and displacement are at increased risk for the development of mental health problems, including post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, depression, and behavioural problems.

The Kurds in the Middle East: Does America Need a New Strategy for Iraq, Syria, and the Kurds?

The Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, in partnership with the nonprofit organization Justice for Kurds, will host a four-part virtual discussion series on “The Kurds in the Middle East.”
Panel discussions will feature an impressive array of American, European, and Middle Eastern practitioners, including senior Kurdish representatives from Iraq and Syria.

The Kurds in the Middle East: Kurdish Perspectives from the Region

The Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, in partnership with the nonprofit organization Justice for Kurds, will host a four-part virtual discussion series on “The Kurds in the Middle East.”
Panel discussions will feature an impressive array of American, European, and Middle Eastern practitioners, including senior Kurdish representatives from Iraq and Syria.

Columbus & Islam

Christopher Columbus lived the vast majority of his life in a Mediterranean world in which the Ottoman and Mamluk Empires dominated the eastern part of the sea and were in constant economic, political, and confrontational interaction with the Christian states of Europe. This talk considers the importance of Islam in shaping Columbus’s life and voyages. In doing so, it thinks critically about the role of Islam in the Spanish decision to send him across the ocean and in the early history of the Spanish Caribbean.

InterAsia online lecture: Professor Manan Ahmed

In this talk, drawn from my book *The Loss of Hindustan*, I sketch an intellectual
geography for understanding the history of Firishta, written in early seventeenth century
Deccan. The world of the Deccan is both connected to the Indian Ocean circuits,
sketched in Arabic merchant accounts and histories, as well to the network of city-states,
represented by the Persian histories produced in Uch or Delhi. The immediate milieu of
Firishta under the ʿAdil Shahi was a polyphonic Hindustan where the exchange of

InterAsia Online Lecture: Professor Shankar Nair (Religious Studies, Univ. of Virginia)

In the year 1597 CE, the South Asian Mughal court commissioned a team of Muslim and Hindu scholars to
translate a popular (Hindu) Sanskrit treatise – known as the Laghu-Yoga-Vāsiṣṭha – into the Persian language. This talk seeks to reconstruct the intellectual processes that underlie this collaborative translation, examining the translators’ decisions regarding the Persian rendition of a single Sanskrit word: saṃkalpa, a term with denotations as varied as “imagination,” “mental construction,” “desire,” “will,” and

PRFDHR Seminar: The Causes and Consequences of Ethnic Violence in Myanmar, Dr. Paula López Peña

The Rohingya crisis is one of the world’s worst ongoing human-rights atrocities, but its causes are contested and its consequences are poorly understood. Dr. López Peña and her co-authors marshal a variety of existing and original data to shed light on its drivers, characteristics, and human cost. First, in contrast with the government’s preferred narrative, they show that violence against civilians in Myanmar clearly responds to economic motives: it increases during times when international rice prices are high, in places suitable for rice cultivation.

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