General Public

Professor Briggs is an expert on U.S. and international child welfare policy and on transnational and transracial adoption. Briggs’ most recent book, Taking Children: A History of American Terror (University of California Press, 2020), examines the 400-year-old history of the United States’ use of taking children from marginalized communities—from the taking of Black and Native children during America’s founding to the Donald Trump’s policy of family separation for Central American migrants and asylum seekers at the U.S./Mexico border—as a violent tool for political ends.

On November 9, 2022, please join the Fortunoff Archive, the Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies Program, the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, and the Baltic Studies Program for The Shoah in Lithuania: A Different Approach; New Insights, presented by Dr. Christoph Dieckmann (Vienna Wiesenthal Institute). Timothy Snyder (Richard C. Levin Professor of History and faculty advisor to the Fortunoff Archive) will introduce the program and Bradley Woodworth (Baltic Studies Program Manager) will provide comments.
About 420,000 people were murdered during the German occupation of Lithuania 1941-1944. Almost half of the victims were Jews, close to 200,000 from Lithuania in the borders of 1941 and 5,800 Jews from Germany, Austria and France. About 170,000 Soviet Prisoners of War were shot and starved, mostly during the first nine months of occupation. Dieckmann takes a new look at the relation between warfare, occupation policy and mass crimes. Working with hardly-known German and Lithuanian sources, the context of decisions for mass crimes and the Shoah might become both more complicated and clearer.
Dr. Christoph Dieckmann is the William Rosenberg Senior Scholar at the Fortunoff Video Archive. He taught Modern European History at Keele University, United Kingdom, researched Yiddish historiography of the Russian Civil War at the Fritz Bauer Institut in Frankfurt am Main, and has worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bern on the project “Sounds of anti-Jewish Persecution.” At present he is teaching – mostly via Zoom – at Haifa University in the Weiss-Livnat International Program of Holocaust Studies. His study Deutsche Besatzungspolitik in Litauen 1941-1944 [German Occupation Policy in Lithuania 1941-1944] was published in 2011 and was awarded the Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research in 2012. He co-edited the Deskcalendar Heinrich Himmlers 1941/42 (Hamburg 1999), and has published on ghettos (2009) and the impact of German warfare on mass crimes (2015). His latest publications include 2021’s How Did It Happen? Understanding the Holocaust Lithuanian with author Ruta Vanagaite, based on a series of talks with Dieckmann on the common history of Germany and Lithuania in Europe during the Shoah. In spring 2022, Dieckmann and Arkadi Zeltser edited Distrust, Animosity, Solidarity, a book by Yad Vashem Publications on the relation of Jews and Non-Jews during the Shoah in the Soviet Union.

The EU Studies Program welcomes Secretary-General Klaus Welle, of the European Parliament to Yale University to present on “Europe and the War in Ukraine: Russia’s Intent and Impacts on the EU System and Transatlantic Relations”
In person: Luce Hall, Rm 202, 34 Hillhouse Ave.
Virtual Registration/Zoom Link: https://bit.ly/YaleEUNov1
Klaus Welle, Secretary General of the European Parliament, will talk about the politics of Russia’s war on Ukraine - looking why President Putin launched the war, what he hopes to achieve both in Europe and in shifting the wider geopolitical balance, how the war is changing the policies and institutions of the European Union, and what the implications are for the future of Transatlantic relations. After opening remarks, he will be happy to take questions on the Ukraine war and other aspects of contemporary European politics.
Klaus Welle has been Secretary General of the European Parliament, a key administrative post in the European Union political system in Brussels , since 2009. He previously served as chief of staff to the President of the European Parliament, as Director General for EU Internal Policies in the Parliament’s administration, and as Secretary General successively of the (center-right) European People’s Party (EPP) transnational political party and of the EPP political group in the European Parliament. Mr Welle started his career as a banker and then became head of European and foreign policy at the headquarters of the CDU party in Germany, working closely with then Chancellor Helmut Kohl. He is also a visiting professor in European politics at KU Leuven University in Belgium.
This lecture is generously supported by: George Herbert Walker, Jr. Lecture Fund in International Studies at the Yale MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies. Co-Sponsored by the Yale MacMillan Center’s Program on EU Studies and the European Studies Council

The European Studies Council at the Yale MacMillan Center presents Reading Ukraine: New Ukrainian Books Presentation Series.
In Conversation with Stanislav Aseyev, author, and Professor Timothy Snyder on ‘The Torture Camp on Paradise Street’
In person: Luce Hall, Room 202, 34 Hillhouse Ave.
Virtual Registration/Zoom Link: https://bit.ly/YaleUkraineBooks11-02
Co-Sponsored by: International Security Studies | Russian, East European & Eurasian Studies Program | Ukrainian House | Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures | Yale Translation Initiative
In ‘The Torture Camp on Paradise Street,’ Ukrainian journalist and writer Stanislav Aseyev details his experience as a prisoner from 2015 to 2017 in a modern-day concentration camp overseen by the Federal Security Bureau of the Russian Federation (FSB) in the Russian-controlled city of Donetsk. This memoir recounts an endless ordeal of psychological and physical abuse, including torture and rape, inflicted upon the author and his fellow inmates over the course of nearly three years of illegal incarceration spent largely in the prison called Izoliatsiia (Isolation). Aseyev also reflects on how a human can survive such atrocities and reenter the world to share his story.

Since February 2022, numerous cases of illegal detainment and extreme mistreatment have been reported in the Ukrainian towns and villages occupied by Russian forces during the full-scale invasion. These and other war crimes committed by Russian troops speak to the genocidal nature of Russia’s war on Ukraine and reveal the horrors wreaked upon Ukrainians forced to live in Russian-occupied zones. It is important to remember, however, that the torture and killing of Ukrainians by Russian security and military forces began long before 2022. Rendered deftly into English, Aseyev’s compelling account offers a critical insight into the operations of Russian forces in the occupied territories of Ukraine.
Bio: Stanislav Aseyev is a Donetsk-born Ukrainian writer and journalist. In addition to two books recounting his experience under Russian occupation in eastern Ukraine, he is the author of a collection of poetry, a play, and a novel. Under the pen name Stanislav Vasin, he published short reports in the Ukrainian press on the outbreak of Russian-sponsored military hostilities in Donbas. Arrested and unlawfully imprisoned by separatist militia forces for “extremism” and “spying,” Aseyev was held captive and subjected to intermittent torture. In 2021, he was awarded the prestigious Taras Shevchenko National Prize for In Isolation.

Dimitris Xygalatas
Department of Anthropology and Department of Psychological Sciences, University of Connecticut
Around the world, people engage in ritual activities that involve obvious expenditures of effort, energy and resources without equally obvious payoffs. Anthropologists have long proposed that such costly behaviors persist because they convey certain benefits to their practitioners and their communities. But how can we study these ostensible benefits, given the contextually sensitive nature of such cultural practices? This talk will present an interdisciplinary research program that combines laboratory and field methods to explore the puzzle of extreme rituals in real-life settings, specifically focusing on recent empirical evidence on the signaling functions of extreme ritual practices.