All Ages

Mary Elise Sarotte is the inaugural holder of the Marie-Josée and Henry R. Kravis Distinguished Professorship of Historical Studies at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). Sarotte earned her AB in History and Science at Harvard and her PhD in History at Yale University. She is the author or editor of six books, including most recently ‘Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate’, along with ‘The Collapse: The Accidental Opening of the Berlin Wall’ and ‘1989: The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe’, both of which were selected as Financial Times Books of the Year, among other distinctions and awards. Following graduate school, Sarotte served as a White House Fellow, then joined the faculty of the University of Cambridge, where she received tenure before accepting an offer to return to the United States and teach at the University of Southern California. Sarotte is a former Humboldt Scholar, a former member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, an associate at Harvard University’s Center for European Studies, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Dr. Sarotte will deliver three lectures this year related to her book ‘Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate’. This event will be followed by a small reception.
The Stimson Lecture Series is held in honor of Henry L. Stimson, Yale College 1889, an attorney and statesman whose government service culminated with his tenure as secretary of war during World War II. Since 1998, the MacMillan Center and the Yale University Press have collaborated to bring distinguished diplomats and foreign policy experts to the Center to lecture on their books that are published by the Yale Press.

Please join us to celebrate the opening of “Subjects and Objects: Slavic Collections at Yale, 1896–2022,” which is on view in the Hanke Exhibition Gallery, Sterling Memorial Library.
Curators Anna Arays and Liliya Dashevski will discuss their exhibition and will be available for questions and conversation over light refreshments afterward.
No registration is necessary.
Note: Please see the library’s COVID updates to current public health protocols: https://library.yale.edu/news/covid-library-updates

The start of Russian aggression against Ukraine in 2014 led to the temporary occupation of the Crimea peninsula and parts of Donetsk and Luhansk region. With the beginning of Russian aggression more than 2 million people have left the uncontrolled territories of Ukraine and were forced to move both to other parts of Ukraine and beyond its borders. According to the Ministry of Social Policy, after 2015 and before the full-scale Russian invasion began on 24 February 2022, the number of registered internally displaced persons (IDPs) was relatively stable at around 1.5 million. Residents of war-torn territories have also been fleeing the country since 2014. As of December 2015, in the countries that have common borders with Ukraine, such as Russia, Belarus, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Moldova, there were 388,690 Ukrainians seeking refuge, and 730,100 Ukrainians seeking other forms of legal stay in the aforementioned countries. The estimated population of the occupied territories of Donetsk and Luhansk regions is 3.7 million. These are mostly people who formally remain the citizens of Ukraine.

At this stage of the war started in 2014, Ukraine was deprived of control over part of its state borders, facing the problem of the so-called ‘lines of demarcation’ occurring instead in the Donetsk and Luhansk areas and Crimea. Having turned the internal territories into the actual border areas, these demarcation lines changed the everyday life of the average citizens of Ukraine. All of this became a new reality for ordinary people who were involved to varying degrees in this conflict.

Professor Mikheieva will talk about how the Russian aggression of 2014 has changed people’s daily lives in Ukraine, what challenges Ukrainian society has encountered, and what problems people who were forced to leave their homes have faced. The study of the everyday experience of IDPs is based on a series of semi-structured in-depth interviews conducted by Professor Mikheieva between 2014 and 2018 (over 300 interviews). She will also focus on the specifics of current forced migration inside and outside of Ukraine caused by Russia’s full-fledged aggression against Ukraine in 2022.

Professor Oksana Mikheieva is a DAAD Professor at the European University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder), Germany. She is also Professor of Sociology at the Ukrainian Catholic University (Lviv). In the spring semesters of 2020 and 2022 she was visiting lecturer at the Jagiellonian University (Krakow, Poland).  She has also participated in more than 20 sociological research projects, in 10 of which she was a principal investigator. Mikheieva has over twenty years of research and teaching experience. She researches a wide range of areas, including the historical aspects of deviant and delinquent behavior, urban studies, paramilitary motivations, forced displacement, migration. In 2016 she was a Visiting Professor in Ukraine European Dialogue at the Institute for Human Science (Vienna), and in 2015 she was Eugene and Daymel Shklar Research Fellow Harvard University, Ukrainian Research Institute.

Samuel Moyn will discuss his new book “Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War”
Yale Law School and History Department Professor Samuel Moyn’s new book asks a troubling but urgent question: What if efforts to make war more ethical—-to ban torture and limit civilian casualties—-have only shored up the military enterprise and made it sturdier? Professor Moyn will be in discussion with Bruce Ackerman, Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science.

Dr. Elizabeth H. Prodromou is a faculty member at The Fletcher School at Tufts University, where directs the Initiative on Religion, Law, and Diplomacy. She is non-resident Senior Fellow and Co-Chair of the Working Group on Christians and Religious Pluralism in the Middle East, at the Center for Religious Freedom at the Hudson Institute, and was non-resident Senior Fellow in National Security and the Middle East, at the Center for American Progress. She is a Co-President of Religions for Peace. Prodromou served as Vice Chair and Commissioner on the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (2004-2012) and was a member of the U.S. Secretary of State’s Religion & Foreign Policy Working Group (2011-2015).
Her research interests focus on geopolitics and religion, with particular focus on the Middle East, the Eastern Mediterranean, and Southeastern Europe. Her current research projects concentrate on cultural heritage and institutional religious freedom in Turkey and comparative context, as well as Eastern Orthodox Christianity and global public engagement. She is the faculty director for Fletcher’s executive education program for faith-based leadership. The author of multiple edited volumes and many publications in scholarly and policy journals, Prodromou is a frequent commentator and contributor in US and international media.
She holds a Ph.D. and an S.M. in political science from MIT, an M.A.L.D. in international relations from Fletcher, and a B.A. in history and international relations from Tufts University.