Spouses And Partners

Join Eric Karpeles and Alissa Valles for a discussion of the Polish painter and writer Józef Czapski: his life, his work, and the remarkable range of poets he inspired. Karpeles and Valles are the translators of the NYRB Classics titles Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp and Memories of Starobielsk: Essays Between Art and History, respectively, both of which collect Czapski’s critical writing, authored either about or during his internment in a Soviet Prison Camp between 1939 and 1941.

Janine di Giovanni is a multi-award winning journalist and author, and CEO/Executive Director of The Reckoning Project. Janine was a war reporter for nearly three decades, from the first Palestinian intifada in the early 1990s to the siege of Sarajevo; the Rwandan genocide; the brutal wars in Sierra Leone, Somalia, Ivory Coast and Liberia to Chechnya, Afghanistan, Pakistan. She reported extensively in Iraq pre and post invasion, the Arab Spring, and finally Syria. Her field work for her most recent book took her to Gaza, Iraq, Egypt and Syria.

The Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy hosts Russia expert Tom Graham for a frank discussion on US-Russia relations. His new book, Getting Russia Right, identifies the blind spots that have prevented Washington from seeing Russia as it really is and from crafting a policy to advance American interests without provoking an aggressive Russian response. 

The presentation will provide a brief overview of the history of former Yugoslavia and focus on its violent break-up, especially on the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina. It will discuss the refugee experience and importance of family relationships, ethnic and religious identities, as well as the issues around returning home and rebuilding their community in Banja Luka.

Is it possible to be both a refugee and a citizen? For six decades, Tibetan refugees have refused citizenship in South Asia as part of their claims to Tibetan state sovereignty. Tibetans therefore live in India and Nepal as refugee non-citizens, either undocumented or under-documented for multiple generations. In the last two decades, however, as Tibetans immigrate to North America, they are now gaining citizenship via political asylum, but simultaneously maintaining their belonging to the Dalai Lama’s refugee community headed by the exile Tibetan government.