Author Jan Carson will read from and discuss her new short story collection, Quickly, While They Still Have Horses (Scribner, July 2024).Book Description:  A surreal and darkly comic collection of stories that offer a fresh and irreverent look at life in contemporary Northern Ireland from “one of the most exciting and original Northern Irish writers of her generation” (The Sunday Times, London). Humorous and horrifying, tender and absurd, the stories in Quickly, While They Still Have Horses offer a fresh, irreverent look at life in post-conflict Northern Ireland. From first loves to strained relationships, the thrills and terrors of growing up to the dangers and challenges of parenthood, Carson infuses all her stories with empathy, dark wit, and a surreal edge. In “A Certain Degree of Ownership,” a distracted couple on a beach fail to notice their baby crawl perilously toward the sea. In “Grand So,” the ghost of a car’s previous owner haunts the backseat. In “Troubling the Water,” a rumor of miraculous healing creates chaos at a public swimming pool. Carson never fails to shock and delight as kids go missing in jungle gyms, a baby washes up on a riverbank in a biscuit tin, and a bloody hand appears (and reappears) in a refrigerator. Every so often, these stories travel into alternate versions of our world where pillars of fire are a new treatment for mental illness and animals deemed nonessential are going extinct by legislative orders. While the legacy of the Troubles is never far from Carson’s mind, it is only a backdrop to the worlds she’s woven in these stories, driven by characters who feel real enough to touch. This stunning collection marks the arrival of a “bracingly fresh, darkly funny, [and] unwaveringly compassionate” (The Irish News) writer to North American readers.Speaker Biography Jan Carson is a writer and community arts facilitator based in Belfast. She has published three novels, three short story collections and two micro-fiction collections. Her novel The Fire Starters won the EU Prize for Literature for Ireland 2019. Jan’s latest novel, The Raptures was published by Doubleday in early 2022 and was subsequently shortlisted for the An Post Irish Novel of the Year and Kerry Group Novel of the Year. Her short story collection Quickly, While They Still Have Horses was recently published by Scribner in July 2024. This event is co-sponsored by the Creative Writing Program.   Originally published at irishstudies.nd.edu.

Finnish American composer Ilari Kaila and Prof. Patrick Yim perform and discuss Kaila's Solitude for solo violin and other works. Notre Dame Professor David Bird will moderate a discussion with Yim and Kaila. Originally published at music.nd.edu.

Join the Robinson Community Learning Center and the Ansari Institute for Global Engagement with Religion in a service activity intended to honor the legacy of those who lost their lives and those who responded heroically to the events of September 11, 2001. Together we will build four cedar flower boxes as a gift to the homeowners of the new Habitat for Humanity homes constructed in the Near Northwest Neighborhood as part of the inauguration events celebrating the inauguration of the Rev. Robert A. Dowd, CSC as the University of Notre Dame's 18th President. In addition to commemorating the events of September 11, we know that shared opportunities to collectively engage in service and share meals together nutures dialogue, cooperation, and civic engagement. We hope this event will continue to build upon the multi-cultural, multi-lingual, multi-generational, and multi-faith community already established at the Robinson Community Learning Center through its preschool and English classes and carry that forth into the broader community. Bringing out the best in America, this event wil embody the motto on the Great Seal of the United States of America, E Pluribus Unum, "out of many, one." A light meal will be provided. RSVP here. This event is sponsored by the Robinson Community Learning Center, the Ansari Institute for Global Engagement with Religion, the United Religious Community, and the University of Notre Dame's Department of Art, Art History, and Design through a grant from the AmeriCorps State program overseen by Serve Indiana. Originally published at ansari.nd.edu.

The Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and the Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies, in partnership with its Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA) Working Group, as part of the Keough School of Global Affairs, proudly offer a four-part lecture series over the 2024-25 academic year. The series focuses on U.S. imperialism and U.S. military and humanitarian involvement in the Middle East, and in particular Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan. Graduate students serve as discussants after each lecture, prior to Q&A with the audience. The series conducts a critical evaluation of U.S. policy in the Middle East and calls for a reassessment of the nature and function of a U.S. presence, and the implications posed for peacebuilding practitioners and contemporary global affairs scholarship. Though the US-led “war on terror” has been ongoing for over two decades, it is a war that has been waged largely in the shadows—in the concealed spaces of black sites, extraordinary renditions, covert drone programs, secret global surveillance, and through expanding terrorism laws and security databases. This talk tracks a little-known but ever-expanding dimension of US counterterrorism warfare, one that travels in and through a growing body of US counterterrorism law and sanctions regimes that tether to foreign aid flows and monetary transactions around the world. Drawing on over a decade of ethnographic fieldwork in Palestine, this talk traces how US counterterrorism law bundles and embeds in humanitarian and development aid flows inbound to the West Bank and Gaza Strip, transporting, in turn, Washington’s counterterrorism regime into the intimate spaces and interstices of Palestinian everyday life—in a greenhouse in Gaza, in a library in Bethlehem, in the collection of personal information and mapping of land plots, in the halls of municipal councils, and in local elections. Tracing the transnational operation of US law, this talk demonstrates how US empire operates as a topological formation that projects security and war power through opaque arrangements and blended genres of rule—in this case contracted relationships of aid—that render Washington’s counterterrorism regime intimately embedded in the lifeworlds of those afar. More broadly, it suggests that a close analysis of the topological workings of the US security state in Palestine tells us something significant about the shape-shifting nature of imperial formations, their realignments and reformulations, their haunted sites, and their obscured but intimate forms. Speakers:Lisa Bhungalia is a political geographer researching late-modern war, law, empire, and transnational linkages between the US and Southwest Asian and North African region and an Assistant Professor of Geography and International Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her first book, Elastic Empire: Refashioning War through Aid in Palestine, published by Stanford University Press in December 2023, examines the entanglements of aid, law, and war in Palestine with attention to policing and surveillance regimes produced through the embedding of counterterrorism laws and infrastructures into civilian aid flows. She is also developing new research on the social lives of terrorism databases. Her research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, National Science Foundation, and Palestinian American Research Center, among other bodies, and her published work has appeared in Politics and Space, Political Geography, Geopolitics, Small Wars & Insurgencies, Society and Space, Environment and Planning A, Middle East Report, and Jadaliyya, among other venues.Student respondent: Francesca Freeman, Peace Studies and HistoryFaculty respondent: Perin Gürel, Associate Professor American StudiesOriginally published at kroc.nd.edu.

Alexandra Razskazoff, the 2022 Met Opera Laffont Competition Grand Finals winner, and Dror Baitel, Notre Dame Opera music director, join forces in a vibrant program spanning Baroque to the 20th century, including works by Handel, Strauss, and Britten. This concert is free and open to the public.  To watch a livestream. Originally published at music.nd.edu.

Javier Zamora is a Salvadoran poet and activist. In his debut New York Times bestselling memoir, Solito, Javier retells his nine-week odyssey across Guatemala, Mexico, and eventually through the Sonoran Desert. Zamora was a 2018-2019 Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University and holds fellowships from CantoMundo, Colgate University (Olive B. O’Connor), MacDowell, Macondo, the National Endowment for the Arts, Poetry Foundation (Ruth Lilly), Stanford University (Stegner), and Yaddo. He is the recipient of a 2017 Lannan Literary Fellowship, the 2017 Narrative Prize, and the 2016 Barnes & Noble Writer for Writers Award for his work in the Undocupoets Campaign. Co-sponsors: Creative Writing Program, Department of American Studies, Institute for Latino Studies -- Join the Center for Social Concerns on Friday afternoons of home football weekends for MVP Fridays: lectures by national leaders, journalists, and writers on questions of meaning, values, and purpose.Learn more