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.

Eric Karpeles is a painter, writer, and translator. His comprehensive guide, Paintings in Proust, considers the intersection of literary and visual aesthetics in the work of the great French novelist. He has written about the paintings of the poet Elizabeth Bishop and about the end of life as seen through the works of Emily Dickinson, Gustav Mahler, and Mark Rothko. He is also the author of Almost Nothing: The 20th-Century Art and Life of Józef Czapski from New York Review Books.

Alissa Valles is a poet, translator and scholar of Polish and Russian literature who has worked for the BBC Russian Service, Institute of War Documentation in Amsterdam and Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, and teaches at Boston University and Mt Tamalpais College. Most recently she published the poetry collections Anastylosis (with A. Ayerbe and C. Leproust, Whitechapel Art Gallery), Hospitium and a selection of Zuzanna Ginczanka’s poetry, Firebird (NYRB). Forthcoming in 2024 are Oho by Miron Białoszewski (with C. Cavanagh, NYRB) and a Selected Poems of Zbigniew Herbert (with J.M. Coetzee, Penguin Modern Classics). She has been the recipient of awards for poetry and translation from the Poetry Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Modern Language Association.

Sponsors:
Yale Translation Initiative (MacMillan)
Whitney Humanities Center
European Studies Council (MacMillan)
Russian, East European, & Eurasian Studies (MacMillan)
The Department of Slavic Languages and Literature

Low levels of social trust are widely seen as an impediment to economic development and social cohesion. Trust is measured mainly via surveys: metrics are used extensively in cross-national studies and percolate back to inform societal debates. However, the way in which trust is empirically approached is subject to two problems: measurement bias and the relation between attitudes and behavior. We address both problems focusing on Greece, currently ranked as one of Europe’s least trusting societies. We do so by using four methods: survey questionnaires, ethnography, trust games, and a field experimental exercise. Our combined findings strongly suggest both measurement bias and a discrepancy between attitudes and behavior. We explain this discrepancy and explore the drivers of trusting behavior. Our findings carry important implications about how we measure, study, and theorize interpersonal trust as well as the practice of assigning a unique trust score to entire societies.

Effrosyni Charitopoulou is a political sociologist. She investigates the dynamics of intergroup relations, focusing in particular on local and refugee interactions. She focuses on modern Greece, using both contemporary and historical case studies, but also on other European countries. Her ongoing book project, Encounters on the Migrant Trail, investigates the ways in which host communities in Greece interacted with asylum seekers in the context of the Syrian refugee crisis. She is also working on projects relating to the legacies of refugee integration as well as state exclusion policies on identity, trust, and social cohesion. She holds a DPhil in Sociology from Nuffield College at Oxford. Her doctoral studies were funded by Nuffield College, the A. S. Onassis Foundation, and the A. G. Leventis Foundation. She is currently a Hannah Seeger Davis Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton.

Dr. Anna Kruglova is Lecturer of Terrorism Studies at the School of Arts and Media at the University of Salford and an Associate Fellow at the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism. Anna has a PhD in International studies from Queen’s University Belfast. She also holds an MA in International Conflict Studies from King’s College London and MSc in Security Studies from UCL.

Her research interests are focusing on terrorist propaganda, and she is particularly interested in exploring the role of Internet, media, and social media in the recruitment process and radicalisation. Currently, Anna’s interests also expanded to the far right (especially in Russia and post-Soviet space) and the role of disinformation and misinformation in international relations.

Organized by the Program on Peace and Development at Yale University, MADE (Mass Atrocities in the Digital Era), and the Department of Social Justice Education at the University of Toronto

with panelists
Arman Tatoyan, Ph.D. (Law), Professor, Chair of the Master of Arts in Human Rights and Social Justice (HRSJ) Program, American University of Armenia
Armen Marsoobian, Ph.D., Professor and Chair, Department of Philosophy, Southern Connecticut State University
Karnig Kerkonian, J.D., founding partner, Kerkonian Dajani LLP; Armenian delegation to the ICJ
Tamar Hayrikyan, J.D., Clinical Supervisor, University Network for Human Rights

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. In 2020, the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded her their highest non fiction prize, the Blake Dodd. Janine served as a Senior Fellow and Professor at Yale University’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs from 2018-2022 where she taught two human rights courses which looked at eight different conflicts in depth: Bosnia, Rwanda, Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Yemen, Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. She also taught a course at Yale in Reporting War for Humanitarians. In 2016, CNN made a short video about her life and work when the International Women’s’ Media Foundation gave her their prestigious Courage in Journalism Prize.

For her most recent project, Janine founded and directs The Reckoning Project, a transitional justice organization that trains researchers in Ukraine to collect testimonies that can be used in court. Through her work as a conflict journalist, Janine has experienced firsthand the frustration when testimonies collected directly from victims are inadmissible in courts. So, in partnership with Peter Pomerantsev, she’s created a team of legal experts and journalists to bridge the gap between journalism and justice.

With the second anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, it is worth taking stock of the status of various efforts to pursue justice for international crimes. Di Giovanni, whose organization The Reckoning Project supports testimony collection and preservation, will address the success, challenges, and opportunities in this realm

With support of the Program on Peace and Development, the Genocide Studies Program and the Schell Center for International Human Rights