A story of resilience and creativity, "Creative Force" captures the inspiring stories of everyday Ukrainians who transform their daily professions into acts of defiance against an invading force. This documentary explores the intersection of creativity and resistance in times of conflict. Film director Alex LeMay and film producer Maris Lidaka will join for a Q&A following the film screening. This event is cosponsored by the Nanovic Institute for European Studies. Originally published at kroc.nd.edu.

Jonathan Blitzer, a staff writer at The New Yorker and author of “Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here,” will speak at the University in an event hosted by the Klau Institute for Civil and Human Rights. Drawing on his work as a journalist, Blitzer will discuss how immigration became a political crisis. “Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis” is an epic, heartbreaking, and deeply reported book about the disastrous humanitarian crisis at the US-Mexico border. Blitzer tells this history through the lives of the migrants forced to risk everything and the policymakers who determine their fate. The book has received widespread praise and was named one of the best books of 2024 by the New York Times and several other publications. The event is free and open to the public. A reception with book sales and a book signing will follow the lecture. Blitzer’s lecture ties in with the Klau Institute’s Migration Initiative, which launched last year through collaboration with other experts from across the Keough School of Global Affairs and the University as a whole. This event is co-sponsored by the Institute for Latino Studies, the Institute for Social Concerns, the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, and the Gallivan Program in Journalism, Ethics, and Democracy. Originally published at klau.nd.edu.

In this talk, Cheryl Lawther, professor at Notre Dame’s School of Law and a fellow of the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice at Queen’s University Belfast, will draw on her recently published book, Constructing Victimhood: Beyond Innocence and Guilt in Transitional Justice (Oxford University Press, 2024), to expand the criminological, victimological, and transitional justice image of who we “see” as victims, what we “hear” as experiences of victimization, and who makes these determinations. In her talk, Lawther will argue that if transitional justice is to live up to its claims of being “victim-centered,” it is essential to widen its conceptual and practical boundaries to recognize the multiple and overlapping variables that construct and reproduce victimhood. Lawther will be joined by Josefina Echavarría Álvarez, professor of the practice and director of the Peace Accords Matrix, Joachim Ozonze (PhD candidate in Peace Studies and Theology) and Emma Murphy (Post-Doctoral researcher, Kroc Institute & Keough-Naughton Institute). Originally published at kroc.nd.edu.

The Center for Italian Studies is pleased to host a lecture by Professor Silvana Patriarca (Fordham University) titled:"Anticolonialism(s) as antiracism(s)?" Italian Radicals Facing 'Race' and the Colonial Question at the Turn of the Twentieth Century In the late 19th and early 20th centuries Italians fully participated in the racialization of the African populations that they and other Europeans colonized. At the same time, Italians themselves were often racialized by other Europeans (including Americans) and engaged in the racialization of southern Italians. In this context, some anthropologists and sociologists of leftist orientation such as Napoleone Colajanni questioned the idea of “pure races” and the racial hierarchies that placed Nordic peoples (including northern Italians) above southern Europeans. A number of leftist and radical thinkers and politicians — radical democrats, socialists, and anarchists — also rejected colonialism and especially the consequences that colonial wars had for the inhabitants of a country like Italy that was still poor and underdeveloped. Some anarchist geographers even claimed a right to so-called “barbarity.” To what extent did the critique of colonialism (including the internal variety) lead to an explicit rejection of anti-Black racism? Were anticolonial thinkers able to express sympathy and solidarity with the colonized people victimized by European aggressions? Analyzing the works of the thinkers and the leftist press of that period, this lecture will address these questions as part of a larger project on the history of antiracist beliefs and sensibilities in modern Italian culture. Silvana Patriarca received her laurea at the University of Turin and her Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. She has taught at Columbia University and the University of Florida, and is currently a professor in the Department of History of Fordham University. She specializes in the history of modern Italy and her research has ranged from the social history of industrialization to the intellectual and political history of statistics to the cultural history of nationalism and the construction of national identities in their intersection with gender and “race.” The author of the award-winning Numbers and Nationhood: Writing Statistics in Nineteenth-Century Italy (Cambridge University Press) and of Italian Vices: Nation and Character from the Risorgimento to the Republic (Cambridge University Press), she has co-edited (with Lucy Riall) The Risorgimento Revisited: Nationalism and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Italy (Palgrave Macmillan). She has held fellowships at the National Humanities Center (North Carolina) and at the Collegio Carlo Alberto in Turin, and visiting appointments at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Science Sociales and at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (Sorbonne) in Paris. Her most recent book, Race in Post-Fascist Italy: "War Children" and the Color of the Nation (2022), focuses on the experiences and representations of the "brown babies" born at the end of World War Two from the encounters between Black Allied soldiers and Italian women, and explores the persistence of racial thinking and racism in post-fascist and postcolonial Italy. This lecture is co-sponsored by the Notre Dame Initiative on Race and Resilience and the Nanovic Institute for European Studies.The Italian Research Seminar, a core event of the Center for Italian Studies, aims to provide a regular forum for faculty, postdoctoral scholars, graduate students, and colleagues from other universities to present and discuss their current research. The seminar is vigorously interdisciplinary, and embraces all areas of Italian literature, language, and culture, as well as perceptions of Italy, its achievements and its peoples in other national and international cultures. The seminar constitutes an important element in the effort by Notre Dame's Center for Italian Studies to promote the study of Italy and to serve as a strategic point of contact for scholarly exchange.Originally published at italianstudies.nd.edu.

Wrestling with the fallout of the war in Gaza on Jewish identity, political commentator Peter Beinart shares his personal reckoning with the moral reconstruction needed to build a future "that recognizes the infinite value of all human life." Atalia Omer, professor of religion, conflict and peace studies, will moderate. A frequent contributor to The New York Times and an MSNBC analyst, Beinart is a professor of journalism and political science at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. He is also the editor at large of Jewish Currents and writes The Beinart Notebook, a weekly newsletter. Note: Bags and backpacks will not be allowed inside the venue. A storage space will be provided on site. Originally published at kroc.nd.edu.

The roots of modern Ukraine are the rhythms and rhymes of Taras Shevchenko (1814-61). His innovative poetry has long been Ukraine’s source code, a cultural algorithm in pursuit of personal, national, and universal human freedom. Today it helps fuel widespread grassroots resistance against a Russian war of aggression and conquest that threatens all of Europe. In this lecture, Rory Finnin, professor of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Cambridge, places Shevchenko’s work in the context of a long Ukrainian anticolonial struggle against Russian imperialism. Through close readings, he examines Shevchenko’s fierce “solidarity with the subaltern” and explores coded mysteries in his painting and poetry, where freedom is depicted as buried and entombed, awaiting rescue. All are welcome to this public lecture. Lunch will be available beginning at 12:00 p.m., while supplies last. About the speakerRory Finnin (Photo by Peter Ringenberg/University of Notre Dame).Rory Finnin is professor of Ukrainian studies at the University of Cambridge. He launched the Cambridge Ukrainian Studies program in 2008. Finnin’s primary research interest is the interplay of culture and identity in Ukraine. His broader research interests include nationalism studies, solidarity studies, and cultural memory in the region of the Black Sea. Finnin is a graduate of St Ignatius High School (Cleveland), Georgetown University (B.A.), and Columbia University (Ph.D.). From 1995-97 he served as a U.S. Peace Corps volunteer in Ukraine. In 2024, he received the Laura Shannon Prize in Contemporary European Studies for his book Blood of Others: Stalin's Crimean Atrocity and the Poetics of Solidarity (University of Toronto Press, 2022).   Finnin will also be featured in the Ukrainian Studies Hub conference "Revolutions of Hope: Resilience and Recovery in Ukraine," March 6-8, 2025. He will join Archbishop Borys Gudziak during the opening keynote session.   Originally published at nanovic.nd.edu.