The Fall 2024 semester was an exciting and productive time at the Mortara Center! I had the pleasure of joining the team as Mortara’s Events Coordinator last summer after graduating from Georgetown’s College of Arts & Sciences with a degree in Political Economy and French. It’s been exciting to transition from student to staff, building on my Georgetown experience while contributing to the Mortara Center’s mission. Alongside my responsibilities at Mortara, I also serve as the Special Assistant to the Lab for Globalization and Shared Prosperity.
Working closely with Pauline Courteille, the Assistant Director, and under the leadership of Erik Voeten, the center’s Director, I had the privilege of coordinating 14 successful events between September and December. The semester began with the revival of our beloved Book Giveaway, which drew a remarkable number of undergraduate students to the Mortara Center and set an enthusiastic tone for the year.
Throughout the semester, we proudly hosted several book launches for new publications by SFS faculty members, including Welcoming the Stranger, by Ori Z. Soltes and Rachel Stern; Handbook of Aid and Development, edited by Raj M. Desai, Shantayanan Devarajan, and Jennifer L. Tobin; The Outbreak Atlas by MacKenzie S. Moore and Rebecca Katz; Working Women in Jordan by Fida J. Adely; and For Women and Girls Only: Reshaping Jewish Orthodoxy Through the Arts in the Digital Age by Jessica Roda.
November marked a significant milestone with the culmination of months of planning for the prestigious annual Lepgold Book Prize. This year’s award went to Dr. Rochelle Terman from the University of Chicago for her work, The Geopolitics of Shaming: When Human Rights Pressure Works—and When It Backfires.
In addition to the many book-centric events, we launched the first installment of Mortara’s “In the News” series for the 2024-2025 academic year. This discussion brought together scholars from a variety of area studies within the School of Foreign Service to examine the implications of the 2024 US presidential election. The semester also included the continuation of our Political Economy Seminars, the Mortara Research Seminar, and regular research meetings of the GPEP fellows. Together, these gatherings foster the interdisciplinary community of research for which our center is renowned.
Some of my most rewarding experiences came from our community-building activities. These included a fall social gathering in October, a pizza night and discussion with Erik Voeten and the Undergraduate Research Fellows in November, and an end-of-semester lunch in December.
As I reflect on the fall, I look forward to another semester filled with diverse and engaging events this spring. Thank you to all who participated and contributed to making the Fall 2024 semester such a success!
