Guided Search: Foreign Policy/Diplomacy, Business/Entrepreneurs

Sarah B. Snyder is a historian of U.S. foreign relations who specializes in the history of the Cold War, human rights activism, and U.S. human rights policy. She is the author of From Selma to Moscow: How Human Rights Activists Transformed U.S. Foreign Policy (Columbia University Press, 2018), which explains how transnational connections and 1960s-era social movements inspired Americans to advocate for a new approach to human rights.

This talk examines temporality and transience as an urban condition in the cities of Dubai and Abu Dhabi. While these are presented as the main driving force behind the spectacular structures that dominate their cityscapes, there is a resistance among its citizens — locals and expatriates alike. Refusing to succumb to the label of transients they are seeking ways to establish a sense of connection to the cities they live in, setting down roots and for a brief moment of time counter the force of the ‘Temporary City.’  

David C. Engerman is a scholar of twentieth-century international history. Building on his dual training in American and Russian/Soviet history at the University of California-Berkeley (where he received his Ph.D. in 1998), he wrote two books on the place of Russia and the USSR in American intellectual and political life: Modernization from the Other Shore: American Intellectuals and the Romance of Russian Development (Harvard UP, 2003) and Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America’s Soviet Experts (Oxford UP, 2009).