Keller Easterling was featured on October 21st at Luce Hall on behalf of the Fox Fellowship Lecture Series. The series described it as:

 Keller Easterling is an architect, writer, professor, and director of the Master of Environmental Design program at Yale University. Her most recent book, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (Verso, 2014), examines global infrastructure networks as a medium of polity.

Architects and urbanists have joined journalists, social scientists, lawyers, economists, artists, and others in exploring rampant forms of global development. Formulaic, repeatable spaces—from networks of free zone world cities to distended urban peripheries—introduce some of most radical changes to this now hotter, wetter globalizing world. These spaces and the powers that preside over them have often become political superbugs, surviving against all odds to generate unchecked concentrations of power, extremes of inequality, and climate cataclysms. Spatial practitioners, as perplexed as any who explore these conditions, may nevertheless offer to the allied disciplines some forms with which to design—to actually manipulate that physical world.

Two seasoned diplomats sat down for a timely discussion about the situation in Syria Oct. 23 in the Jackson Institute’s Horchow Hall.

Staffan de Mistura, former Undersecretary General of the UN and Special Representative for Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and Robert Ford, Jackson Senior Fellow and former U.S. ambassador to Syria, addressed the topic, “Syria and the Crisis of World Order: Where Do We Go From Here?” to a standing-room-only crowd.

The conversation was an insider’s account of the years-long upheaval in Syria. De Mistura relayed an anecdote about a “magic moment” when a negotiated peace in Syria felt possible. All parties, including the U.S. and Russia, “had a common interest in finding a solution,” de Mistura said, and negotiations between Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and former Sec. of State John Kerry extended into the early morning hours. “When you’re negotiating after midnight, it means you’re serious,” de Mistura quipped.

The public talk was part of de Mistura’s three-day visit to Yale, during which he visited six Global Affairs classes and met with faculty and students. De Mistura was invited to take part in Jackson’s new Visiting Fellows Program being rolled out this fall. The program brings distinguished practitioners to Yale for an immersive multi-day program, highlighting their extraordinary contributions to global affairs. The Visiting Fellows enrich the Jackson and broader university community through attending classes, giving public talks, and interacting with students and faculty through a variety of engaging events.

• Learn more about the Visiting Fellows Program
• Read more about de Mistura’s time on campus

The Jackson Institute has named two graduate students as 2019-2020 Coverdell Fellows. The fellowships are awarded to Returned Peace Corps Volunteers. During their graduate studies, Coverdell Fellows complete a degree-related internship in an underserved American community, allowing them to bring home and expand upon the skills they learned as Peace Corps volunteers. At Jackson, Coverdell Fellows receive full tuition.

Liam Comer-Weaver MA ’21 (above, at left) spent two years serving as a Teaching English, Leadership, and Life Skills volunteer in western Panama’s indigenous reservation, comarca Ngäbe-Buglé. While in Panama, Comer-Weaver says he saw how policies can perpetuate inequality; he believes on-the-ground experience is crucial for policymakers. He is still exploring his own career path, but tackling inequality is a topic he’s passionate about. When he was researching graduate school programs, Jackson stood out for the flexibility of its curriculum, said Comer-Weaver, who is taking courses in law, public health and management. The interdisciplinary nature of the program is helping him “understand where to go from here,” he said.

Deanna Johnson MA ’21 (above, at right) served for two years in Latacunga, Ecuador as an English Education Volunteer, where she worked alongside Ecuadorian English teachers at public schools to improve their methodologies and increase teaching efficacy in the classroom. During Johnson’s time in Ecuador, the country experienced an influx of Venezuelan migrants. Seeing how that impacted her community furthered Johnson’s interest in migration policy and human rights, which is part of her focus area for her Jackson studies.

Both Comer-Weaver and Johnson are interning with IRIS, a New Haven-based refugee resettlement agency, as part of their Coverdell Fellowship.

Twenty Yale University students have been named Kerry Fellows for the 2019-20 academic year, including three graduate students from the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs.

Part of the Kerry Initiative led by former Secretary of State John Kerry YC ’66, the Fellows will collaborate with Sec. Kerry on leading-edge research aimed at developing real-world policy solutions.

In addition to the Jackson students, other chosen students represent Yale’s professional schools, including the schools of Medicine, Forestry and Environmental Studies, Law, Management, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

Tony Formica MA ’20 (above, at left) is focusing his graduate studies on the national security implications stemming from the interaction of social media, economic inequality, and political tribalism.

Hannah Heether MA ’20 (above, middle) is focusing her graduate studies on international security and foreign policy.

Shobhit Kumar MA ’20 (above, at right) studies United States foreign policy at Jackson, with a focus on United States-China relations.

Sushant Singh talks about the conflict between India and Pakistan over Kashmir.

Sushant Singh is a visiting scholar in the Council on South Asian Studies and the Department of Political Science. Mr. Singh is the Deputy Editor of The Indian Express newspaper in Delhi, India, where he writes about national security, international relations, higher judiciary, and investigative agencies. Among other places, he has reported about conflict from North Waziristan in Pakistan and from the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Before turning to journalism, he served in the Indian Army for 20 years, including multiple stints in Jammu and Kashmir. He also served as a United Nations Military Observer in Cote D’Ivoire, where he was awarded the UN Secretary General’s medal. He is the author of Mission Overseas: Daring Operations by the Indian Military and the co-author of Note by Note: The India Story 1947-2017.

Learn more about Sushant Singh.

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The MacMillan Report is an online interview show featuring the research of faculty in international and area studies.

Wen-Qing Ngoei presented on behalf of the Yale MacMillan Center on October 23rd. The following is the Center’s description.

Major studies of American foreign relations treat U.S. failures in Vietnam as the end of both a short-lived American empire and western imperialism in Southeast Asia. Ngoei argues that Vietnam was an exception to the region痴 overall pro-U.S. trajectory after 1945, that British neocolonialism and Southeast Asian anticommunism melded with preexisting local antipathy toward China and the Chinese diaspora to usher the region from formal colonialism to U.S. hegemony. By the 1970s, Southeast Asia痴 anticommunist nationalists had established, with U.S. support, a geostrategic arc of states that contained Vietnam and China.

Wen-Qing Ngoei is assistant professor of history at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He completed his PhD at Northwestern University and, before joining NTU, did postdoctoral stints at Northwestern and Yale University. Ngoei痴 book, Arc of Containment: Britain, the United States, and Anticommunism in Southeast Asia (Cornell, 2019), argues that British decolonization intertwined with Southeast Asian anticommunism to shape U.S. policy in the wider region. He has published in Diplomatic History (2017) and his prize-winning essay on the domino theory appears in the Journal of American-East Asian Relations (2014).

Edward Rugemer talks about Slave Law and the Politics of Resistance in the Early Atlantic World.

Edward Rugemer is an Associate Professor of African American Studies & History at Yale who studies comparative slavery and abolition and antebellum U.S. history. We talk with Professor Rugemer about his new book, Slave Law and the Politics of Resistance in the Early Atlantic World, for which he was recently awarded the MacMillan Center’s Gustav Ranis International Book Prize for Best Book.

Learn more about Edward Rugemer.

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The MacMillan Report is an online interview show featuring the research of faculty in international and area studies.

Join Yale’s global community of scholars, alumni, and international leaders March 13 – 14, 2020 in Rome, Italy to explore how global citizenship impacts our lives and shapes our leadership.

Register here!