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Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins, associate professor of anthropology, was interviewed by Melanie Ford Lemus for American Ethnologist on “the spatial politics and practices of occupation, infrastructure as performative assemblages, shared environments, and their public constitutions.” Discussing concepts outlined in her book, Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine, Stamatopoulou-Robbins explained the usage of “siege” as a conceptual framework. “The word siege suggests overlap with occupation, partly conceptually but also in showing how there are overlapping, not always perfectly, challenges to Palestinian life that are also siege-like and made possible by occupation but that cannot be reduced to it,” Stamatopoulou-Robbins says. “I was interested in the way that, through infrastructure, [engineers] were on the one hand aiming to build the future, to make the future now, by building the state that is not yet here,” she continues, “and on the other hand deferring the future that they might want.”

Walter Russell Mead, James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and the Humanities, discusses his new book, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People. In an interview with Yair Rosenberg of the Atlantic’s Deep Shtetl newsletter, Mead unpacks misconceptions of Jewish power and the decidedly non-Jewish roots of support for the Jewish state. 

 

Robert Culp, professor of history, and ​​Lu Kou, assistant professor of Chinese, have been awarded Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation Scholar grants in support of their individual professional work. Culp was awarded a $15,000, one-year grant in support of his book project, Circuits of Meaning: Book Markets and Knowledge Production in Modern China, 1900-1965, which explores “how changing systems of book distribution in modern China shaped knowledge production and the formation of reading communities from 1900 to 1965.” Kou received a $20,000, one-year grant to support War of Words: Courtly Exchange, Rhetoric, and Political Culture in Early Medieval China, his book project that “examines the ‘discursive battles’ fought among rival states in China's early medieval period, specifically, how rhetoric—the art of verbal persuasion—constructed and contested political legitimacy in this age of multipolarity.”

Ahead of the release of his new documentary, Endangered, Ronan Farrow ’04 spoke with Stephen Colbert on the Late Show about the threats facing journalists worldwide. In the United States, journalists are facing threats of violence for their reporting, spurred by authoritarian figures framing them as the enemy of the people—a tactic that, while not new, as Farrow notes, is nonetheless troubling when it comes to the health of our democracy. “We need more and better reporting in communities around this country. We need to support our journalists,” he said. “Otherwise, we're going to have people who are in this state of rage, who are very manipulable by these political leaders, who want to deploy these authoritarian arguments.” Endangered, which follows four journalists and the dangers they face in their work, is streaming now on HBO Max.

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Between 2009 and 2011, a team of U.S. negotiators including Bard Diplomat in Residence and Ambassador Frederic C. Hof came historically close to realizing a Syrian-Israeli peace agreement by seizing on an alignment of interests in Damascus, Jerusalem and Washington. The United States Institute of Peace and Georgetown University’s Institute for the Study of Diplomacy present a discussion reflecting on Hof’s experience trying to broker Syrian-Israeli peace and what it can tell us about the possibilities and limitations of American conflict mediation.