Spring 2025 Events
April 2025
5:00pm – 6:30pm
Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering Complex, 102
805 Columbus Avenue, Boston, MA 02120
Missing Children: The International Tracing Service’s Child Search Branch After World War II
After World War II, the Allied occupation authorities found more unaccompanied children than expected in Germany, leading to the creation of the International Tracing Service’s Child Search Branch, which helped reunite children with their families. This talk details the process and shares stories of some of the children involved.
Dr. Daniel Stone is Professor of Modern History and Director of the Holocaust Research Institute at the Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author or editor of twenty-five books and over 100 scholarly articles. Dr. Stone has recently co-edited volume 1 of the Cambridge History of the Holocaust (CUP, 2025) and Britain and Holocaust Consciousness in the 1960s (Bloomsbury, forthcoming).
10:00am – 5:00pm
Alumni Center, 716 Columbus Place, 6th Floor, Boston, MA, Boston
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A symposium gathering scholars of Global South Asia to think through questions of obliterative and traumatic violence within border zones of the region including Kashmir, Punjab, and Bangladesh, among other geographies. Participants focus on South Asia and its diasporas to unsettle discourses of empire, land dispossession, and histories of erasure. Border zones remain sites of struggles over religion, caste, language, gender and sexuality, cohabitation, and accommodation. We anchor our conversation in the exciting publication of Dr. Sahana Ghosh’s new book A Thousand Tiny Cuts Mobility and Security across the Bangladesh-India Borderlands. Ghosh’s book asks: How do people who live in borderlands experience and analyze the changing life of the border? She argues that to narrate how people navigate and live with the violence and injustices of bordering is to reach beyond a victimhood/resistance binary. Attention to transnational migration, through a feminist perspective, opens up understandings of settler colonialism, complicity, and critical diaspora studies. Emphasis will be on pushing against the spatial and temporal boundaries of current scholarship on South Asia to open up the possibilities for imagining the overlapping, mobile, and shifting ways that these discourses function in larger conversations across Global Asian Studies.
We build from earlier institutional forums including “After Area Studies” that occurred at Northeastern in 2022-23 to bring together Asian Studies with Asian Diaspora Studies, and to destabilize hegemonic discourses about South Asia. We ground the conversation in a host of concerns including the multiple ways in which scholars are resisting the sweeping campaign to “Saffronize” or “Saffron-wash” India. Further, in thinking about questions of migration and diaspora, transnational and global analyses bring together diasporas and “homelands” in new ways. For example, we pay attention to new waves of migration and the complexities of these flows and settlement patterns, as well as new forms of violence, resistance, and refusal.
This event will be an open symposium, welcoming the Northeastern community, as well as scholars and community members from across the Boston area. We plan to circulate keywords and questions centered around the theme of diaspora, dispossession, and decolonization ahead of the gathering, and ask each of the panelists to reflect in relation to their scholarship.
5:30pm – 7:00pm
Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering Complex, 102
805 Columbus Avenue, Boston, MA 02120
A Poetic Revolt: The Oyneg Shabes Archive and The Art of Written Resistance
Gideon Klein’s Lost Works and The Legacy of Czech Musical Moderinsim: a performance by string trio Avery Morris (violin), Sameer Apte (cello), and Rachel Haber (viola).
The story of a heroic group who dared to document the Warsaw Ghetto’s realities, and the poetic verse that became a defining record and a critical mode of resistance. Through a digital exhibition, Max Berger unearths how the Ghetto’s underground preserved Jewish peoplehood and secured a distinctly Jewish vantage on the final chapter of Polish Jewry — a historic act of defiance.
Max Berger is Northeastern’s 2024-2025 Gideon Klein Scholar, and an undergraduate studying Business, Design, Policy, and Jewish Studies. He is the founder of Hatikvah Magazine and an independent researcher of cultural and political history.
4:00pm – 6:00pm
909 Renaissance Park
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This lecture will feature speaker Hoi-eun Kim, a social and cultural historian of modern Europe and modern East Asia, who has an ongoing interest in the interactions between Germany, Japan, and Korea in the 19th and 20th centuries. In particular, he focuses on medical doctors as transnational agents of knowledge formation and empire-building. Currently, with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities (Awards for Faculty), he is writing a book on Japanese doctors in colonial Korea (1910-1945) as researchers, teachers, and private practitioners.
The speakers series is made possible by the South Korea Initiative Fund, which is dedicated to helping establish an institutional commitment to Korean Studies at Northeastern, offering financial support to students studying or working in Korea, and educating the community about important issues regarding Korea in the world.
March 2025
12:00pm – 1:30pm
333 Curry Student Center
Dr. Joseph Berger in conversation with Noah Ben-Zion.
Dr. Joseph Berger was born in 1937 in Subotica, Yugoslavia, and spent his early childhood living with his family in Belgrade where his father was a physician. He survived deportation as a child to the Bergen Belsen concentration camp in Germany and relocated to the United States in 1947. Dr. Berger became a physician specializing in obstetrics and gynecology and lives in New York with his wife, Esther, who is also a Holocaust survivor.
Noah Ben-Zion, Dr. Berger’s grandson, is a student at Northeastern University studying history and political science and is the 2024-2025 Ruderman Scholar.
4:00pm – 5:30pm
Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering Complex, 102
805 Columbus Avenue, Boston, MA 02120
Register Here
The Honorable Rosalie Silberman Abella: Headwinds to Justice.
A conversation about fairness, democracy, and equality with Justice Rosalie Silberman Abella, the first Jewish woman appointed to the Supreme Court of Canada.
The Honorable Rosalie Silberman Abella was a judge on the Canadian Supreme Court for seventeen years and is currently the Judith Pisar Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School. Justice Abella was born in a Displaced Person’s Camp in Stuttgart, Germany in 1946 and immigrated to Canada with her family in 1950. She was the first refugee appointed to the bench in Canada. Over decades of legal practice and writing, she became one of Canada’s most celebrated jurists, and among many honors she is a Lifetime Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.
4:00pm – 6:00pm
909 Renaissance Park
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This lecture will feature speaker Bridget Martin. She is an urban geographer and political geographer researching the US-Korea alliance through the lenses of land, territory, terrain, and sovereignty. Her research traces the logics, techniques, laws, and ambiguities that made widespread American militarized land dispossessions possible during the US military occupation of southern Korea and during the Korean War, and it critically examines the more recent process of US military land returns in the context of Korea’s highly commodified real estate environment. Her teaching interests are in Human Geography, Critical Security Studies, International/Development Studies, Political Ecology, Asian/American Studies, and Korean Studies. Students interested in working with Bridget should contact her directly. Bridget’s writings have appeared in journals such as the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research and Political Geography.
The speakers series is made possible by the South Korea Initiative Fund, which is dedicated to helping establish an institutional commitment to Korean Studies at Northeastern, offering financial support to students studying or working in Korea, and educating the community about important issues regarding Korea in the world.
February 2025
12:00pm – 1:00pm
909 Renaissance Park
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Hunter Moskowitz, PhD Candidate, World History
Labor and Race in the Global Textile Industry: Concord, Monterrey, and Lowell in the Early 19th Century
Yana Mommadova, PhD Candidate, Sociology
Elite Networks and Democratic Deconsolidation
Sasha Sabherwal, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Global Asian Studies
Erasure of Caste within Sikh Diasporic Communities of the U.S. and Canada
Carmel Salhi, Associate Professor, Public Health and Health Science
Categories of Exclusion: Violent Erasure of Forced Migration and its Classificatory Systems
5:00pm – 6:30pm
Alumni Center, 716 Columbus Avenue, Boston, MA 02120
The journey of a Palestinian writer in Hebrew literature, journalism, popular culture and the challenges of telling a Palestinian story to Israeli readers and viewers.
Sayed Kashua is a screenwriter, novelist, and essayist. He is the author of four novels and one collection of essays translated into multiple languages. He is the creator and writer of the TV shows Arab Labor (Keshet TV, 2007-2013), The Writer (KAN and Keshet TV, 2015), and Madrasa (KAN, 2023). He wrote the script for the film A Borrowed Identity (Dir. Eran Riklis, 2014) and was the script consultant and story editor of the second and third seasons of the TV drama Shtisel (Netflix, YES, 2015 and 2020).
Sayed Kashua moved with his family from Jerusalem to the United States in 2014 and he is an assistant professor in the Department of Visual and Media Art at Emerson College in Boston.
4:00pm – 6:00pm
909 Renaissance Park
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This lecture will feature Dr. Kelly M. Rich, an Assistant Professor of English at Wellesley College. She is the author of States of Repair: The Promise of Welfare in the Postwar British and Anglophone Novel (Oxford University Press, 2023), and is currently at work on her second book project, Children of Conflict: Cultural Formations of Transnational Adoption. With Nicole M. Rizzuto and Susan Zieger, she co-edited the MLA-prize winning collection The Aesthetic Life of Infrastructure: Race, Affect, Environment (Northwestern University Press, 2022). Her research has appeared in Representations, ELH, Modern Fiction Studies, Contemporary Literature, and Law, Culture, and the Humanities, and has been supported by AAUW, Wellesley College, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.
The speakers series is made possible by the South Korea Initiative Fund, which is dedicated to helping establish an institutional commitment to Korean Studies at Northeastern, offering financial support to students studying or working in Korea, and educating the community about important issues regarding Korea in the world.
January 2025
6:00pm – 7:30pm
Robinson Hall 109
Zoom Link: https://northeastern.zoom.us/j/92412011896
The year 2025 marks the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz Concentration Camp and the end of National Socialism in Europe. Looking back over the past 80 years, how have the victims and perpetrators of the Holocaust and their descendants overcome the historical trauma and impact of the war? Join the German Consulate Boston and Northeastern University for a presentation and discussion with the founders of One-by-One-International and members of Action Reconciliation Service for Peace.
12:00pm – 1:00pm
909 Renaissance Park
Register Here
Philip Thai
Associate Professor of History and Asian Studies; Director of Global Asian Studies
In the Shadows of the Bamboo Curtain: Trade, Travel, and Trafficking across Greater China during the Cold War
Anjie Chan Tack
Assistant Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies
Afro-Asian World Making Behind the Veil: Indo-Caribbeans in the U.S.
Liz Bucar
Professor of Religion; Dean’s Leadership Fellow
The Religion Factor: How to Make Spirituality More Meaningful, Responsible, and Effective
