BRINGING THE WORLD TO W&M

Each year the Reves Center hosts a variety of events and lectures. Videos of many of the talks are archived at the Reves Youtube channel, youtube/wmrevescenter.

2023 McSwain-Walker Lecture

The annual McSwain-Walker lecture brings renowned scholars, artists, analysts and other notable public figures to William & Mary to speak on topics related to how other countries and cultures interact with the United States, and how the United States interacts with them.

Jessica Nabongo: "Intentional Travel: How Education, Empathy and Confidence will Help You Create the Life You Want to Live"

Jessica Nabongo is a writer, photographer, entrepreneur, travel expert, influencer and public speaker.

She completed her journey as the first Black woman on record to travel to all 195 U.N.recognized countries of the world in October of 2019. A first-generation American, Nabongo was born and raised in Detroit by Ugandan parents. She attended St. John’s University in New York where she earned a degree in English Literature, later completing a graduate degree in Development Studies at the London School of Economics. She uses her blog, “The Catch Me If You Can,” to share her travel adventures and build a global community. She is also the founder of the lifestyle brand The Catch.

In the National Geographic travelogue, “The Catch Me If You Can: One Woman’s Journey to Every Country in the World,” Nabongo describes her journey around the world, highlighting 100 countries with fascinating stories of adventure, culture, travel musts and human connections.

Nabongo is committed to increasing cultural awareness and encourages people to think positively about other countries and the world at large, so that we do not miss out on opportunities to have amazing experiences with our neighbors.

“I hope what other Black people see from my story is that you should feel comfortable traveling anywhere you want to go. My journey is about showing everyone, not just Black women and men, that your dreams are achievable.”

2023 George Tayloe Ross Lecture on International Peace

The annual George Tayloe Ross Address on International Peace was established to promote peace by exploring and investigating topics of current interest that affect relations among nations, ranging from international political matters to environmental questions..

Monica Ruiz: "The Importance of Multistakeholder Digital Diplomacy"

Monica M. Ruiz is Senior Government Affairs Manager, Digital Diplomacy. She focuses on efforts to promote stability in cyberspace and advance trust, security and human rights in this domain. Prior to joining Microsoft, Monica was the Program Fellow for the Cyber Initiative and Special Projects at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Earlier in her career, she was the first recipient of the U.S. Boren Fellowship to travel to Estonia where her research focused on cybersecurity policy and strategy. Born in Ecuador and raised in Miami, she holds a bachelor’s degree from Florida International University and a master’s degree from The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.

7 th Annual Diversity & Inclusion Symposium

Mona Minkara: "Uncapping Your Potential - The Power of Diversity"

Dr. Mona Minkara, a blind assistant professor of Bioengineering at Northeastern University, advocate, and travel vlogger, lives by the maxim that vision is more than sight. As a computational chemist, Mona’s research explores pulmonary surfactants, which is a substance composed of lipids and proteins on the air/ liquid interface of the lungs. Mona’s journey to science was unconventional. Raised in the Boston area with her two siblings by Lebanese immigrant parents, Mona was diagnosed with macular degeneration and conerod dystrophy at age seven. After pushing through the public school system, Mona ultimately obtained her undergraduate degree at Wellesley College, her doctoral degree in chemistry at the University of Florida, and held a postdoctoral position at the University of Minnesota for four years before coming home to Boston as a faculty member at Northeastern University.

At Northeastern, Mona’s COMBINE (Computational Modeling for BioInterface Engineering) Laboratory utilizes computational chemistry to study interactions that occur at biological interfaces. As a professor, Mona is deeply passionate about making scientific materials accessible to blind and low-vision individuals, especially students. Mona is involved with a number of organizations and committees, including the Chemists with Disabilities division of the American Chemical Society, Writing Science in Braille, and her own initiative, Blind Stem Curriculum. To further her goal of bringing awareness to low-vision independent travelers and thinkers, Mona documents her adventures globe-trotting the world using public transportation in her travel-vlogging YouTube series, "Planes, Trains, and Canes."

Partnership with the Charles Center & Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting

Lectures and visits to campus by working journalists are funded by the Sharp Seminar, an initiative at the Charles Center established with a generous gift from Anne and Barry Sharp. The Reves Center cosponsored talks with an international focus.

James Whitlow Delano: "Telling the Story of the Global Climate Crisis"

Photographer and documentary storyteller James Whitlow Delano has made Tokyo his home for over two decades while pursuing his passion for the environment, human rights, and indigenous cultures. Delano is a grantee at the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, and his award-winning work has been featured in numerous publications including National Geographic, The New York Times Magazine, Time, The New Yorker, and Foreign Policy.

Happyland

Prolific writer and survivor of the Holocaust recounts story of escape and survival

BY IAN HARMAN '26 Originally appeared in THE FLAT HAT

Sophie Neiman: "'They Don't Want Our Work To Continue': Activists In Uganda's Contentious Oil Region"

Independent reporter and photojournalist, covering politics, conflict and human rights in east and central Africa, Nieman is currently based in Kampala, Uganda, and has reported from Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo She frequently writes for World Politics Review and her work has appeared in African Arguments, The Christian Science Monitor, Mail & Guardian, The New Humanitarian, The New York Review of Books and the Thomson Reuters Foundation, among others. Neiman holds a master’s degree in African Studies from the University of Cambridge and is a grantee of the Pulitzer Center.

Friday, March 3, the Reves Center at William & Mary hosted Erika Fabian, an 83 year-old Hungarianborn author, actress and singer, to discuss her experience surviving the Holocaust and the communist regime under Joseph Stalin in a talk titled “Surviving Hitler and Stalin: One Woman’s Account.” This event took place as part of the Ampersand International Arts Festival.

“She models in this way much that William & Mary is and aspires to be,” executive director of the Reves Center Dr. Teresa Longo said. “Her CV is beyond impressive. She has worked as an educator at UCLA, the Actors Lab in San Francisco and the University of Mexico in Mexico City. She has been an actress, a singer and a mime. She is a speaker at the Holocaust Museum, L.A.”

Fabian has also spent a large portion of her life producing books and articles about her experiences. As the Reves Center’s first Artist in Residence, Fabian sought to tell attendants about her story of struggle, escape and survival in 20th-century Hungary.

Giorgianna Heiko ’25 attended Fabian’s talk and shared the impact her story had on her.

“Erika Fabian’s detailed account of her traumatic childhood during WWII, during the reign of Nazi terror made the holocaust feel more real to me than ever,” Heiko said in an email to The Flat Hat. “I felt a sense of my own mortality. How lucky I am as a Jew today and to not have to experience such atrocity."

Fabian began her story in chronological order, starting with her earliest memories from World War II era Hungary. She recalled first being forced to move apartments at the age of 4 after Adolf Hitler’s invasion of Hungary. Fabian spent much of her childhood having to hide her Jewish-Hungarian identity in order to survive.

“We had to move from the big, beautiful apartment where we lived to another place, a much smaller apartment, which had a big yellow star on it,” Fabian said.

After Fabian’s family was evicted from their apartment, she, her mother and her 7-year-old sister sought refuge in safe houses throughout the city of Budapest. Fabian’s father was recruited into forced labor by the Hungarian regime and detained in a prison camp, where he was held until his death shortly after. Fabian spent much of her youth in hiding, moving between safe houses and hospitals to avoid Nazi persecution.

“Some people, when they grow up, they forget their childhood memories. I have a good recollection of the terrible things that happened to me,” Fabian said.

Fabian told attendants of the time she and her sister, Judith, were rescued by a Jewish man who was disguised as a Nazi officer. Fabian and Judith had been placed in a ward alongside other children from the Red Cross Hospital, but with the help of their mother, Piroska, they were able to escape.

“The Nazi officer who came to get us was actually a Jewish doctor dressed as a Nazi officer,” Fabian said.

Fabian also repeatedly emphasized the strength of her mother and sister throughout her story. Specifically, she recounted how she found comfort in her sister’s words when they were forcibly taken from the hospital by Schutzstaffel or Protection Squad Officers. Fabian also reiterated the tremendous lengths her mother went to in order to ensure the safety of her children.

Fabian and her mother and sister spent the remainder of World War II disguised as Christians in Hungary with false papers. She noted that during this time, roughly 80% of her family died while being held in concentration camps.

After World War II ended, Stalin’s regime swiftly began in Hungary. As Fabian grew up, she continued to experience the unspeakable hardships of living under an authoritarian regime. Religious persecution, poor living conditions and constant suspicion surrounded her later childhood and adolescence.

“I was writing about this in my current book, which is called ‘Liars’ Paradise,’ because everybody in Hungary was lying to everybody about everything,” Fabian said. “Living under communism, you could never tell the truth of how you really felt.”

At the height of communist rule, Fabian and her family then began their quest to escape Hungary and flee westward. After her mother met a human smuggler in Hungary, the family managed to escape to Slovakia in hopes of crossing over into Austria. The journey to Slovakia was not easy. Fabian recalled many of the most frightening incidents in her experience.

“This is a very vivid memory,” which was written in Hungarian, said: “I, and my two daughters, Erika and Judith, are in Bratislava. We need your help. Would you help us?”

Since Piroska did not have Frank’s address, she addressed the card to “Ferenc Shatz, Journalist, Prague.”

Shatz recognized Piroska’s name and tracked down the location, realizing

Fabian said. “We saw Hungarian soldiers walk halfway down the bridge, Slovak soldiers halfway down the other half of the bridge, and we were sitting just under them, practically under them, on the banks of the river.”

While crossing into Austria from Slovakia alongside other individuals in an attempt to escape communist rule, Fabian and her mother and sister were arrested and taken into custody. While her mother and sister were held in the Bratislava Central Prison, Fabian was taken to a separate juvenile institution due to her young age.

During this period of incarceration, Fabian and her mother and sister were forced to lie about where they were going and who had helped them, and were interrogated for hours on end with blindfolds and numerous intimidation tactics.

Despite the circumstances, the strength of the family kept them motivated. After over six months in jail, Fabian’s mother managed to send for help to Fabian’s uncle, Frank Shatz, in Prague. The card, that the women were being held in Bratislava’s Central Prison.

Shatz was a well-known journalist in the Czech Republic, and upon receiving word from Fabian’s mother, came to rescue Fabian and her sister from Bratislava, Slovakia. He took the girls back to Prague, where they attended school while their mother stayed behind in prison. Shatz was able to secure food rations for Piroska but was unable to free her.

One year after their escape, they were requisitioned by Hungary to be returned there. Fabian and her sister returned to Bratislava Cenral Prison alongside their mother.

They went back to Hungary in January 1954 but having spent a year in captivity in Czechoslovakia, were released without further sentencing and they resumed their lives in Hungary.

The Hungarian revolution broke out on October 23, 1956.

“Within two weeks, my mother, my sister and I were in the car of a Russian General’s driver and soldier, pretending to be going to a wedding at the border,” Fabian said.

The family was dropped off at a safe location on the Austrian border. After sneaking to the border through a snowstorm and wading through a field of mud, the Fabian family made it to Vienna, where they stayed for approximately a month.

After communicating with family members in the United States, they decided to leave Europe. On Christmas eve of 1956, the Fabians flew to Camp Kilmer, New Jersey and started their new life in America.

“What stuck out most was perhaps how many times she escaped death,” Heiko said about the talk. “It made me consider all the other people who died in the holocaust, like Erica’s father, and how they may have escaped death once, twice, even three times, but perhaps it was the fourth time that is the reason they are not here to tell their stories like Erica Fabian. It also stuck out to me how aware she and her sister were of the situation. They were just two kids who knew their lives, because of their Jewish Ancestry, were at stake.”

Fabian’s story is unique view of two tragedies that affected millions. Fabian has faced tremendous losses, including the loss of her sister and mother to suicide shortly after their arrival in America.

Fabian continues to tell her story beyond the Reves Center through her work as an author. Fabian’s soonto-be released current book, “Liars’ Paradise,” is an autobiographical novel centering on love and survival during Nazi occupation and Hungarian communist dictatorship.

After twenty-six books, decades of photojournalism and an extensive resume outlining her experience in academia, Fabian continues to inform the world of the story of her struggle and her success.

Ninety-seven-year-old Shatz sat in the front-row at this event, listening closely to Fabian’s talk. Shatz came to the United States in 1958 with his wife, Jaroslava. He began writing for the Virginia Gazette as an international affairs columnist and was instrumental in the creation of the Reves Center. Shatz and Fabian were reunited in 2018 for the first time in nearly 60 years.

“Our work involves bringing an entirely different international dimension to every important thing that William & Mary does,” said Dr. Longo.

BY KATE HOVING

Silvia Tandeciarz, ViceDean for Social Sciences & Interdisciplinary Studies and Chancellor

Professor

of Hispanic Studies,

has been taking William & Mary students to La Plata, Argentina, on summer and semester study abroad and internship programs for more than 20 years. The program focuses on human rights, and to Tandeciarz, a native Argentinian, the programs are very much relevant to current and future generations.

“Argentina’s last dictatorship and the transitional justice process that followed was instrumental not only in shaping Argentina’s contemporary sociopolitical landscape but also in signaling to the world the kind of accountability that could be possible in post-conflict settings.

Argentina’s “Dirty War,” its 30,0000 disappeared, and its stolen children (said to have inspired Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale) are well known across the world, and so are the human rights movements that followed.”

The longevity, quality and successful outcomes of the programs she credits to the longstanding partnership William & Mary has with the Comisión Provincial por la Memoria (CPM), an NGO that focuses on issues of human rights.

“The Memory Commission (CPM) was founded to promote democracy and human rights in the wake of

Argentina’s last, brutal dictatorship (1976-1983), and its president is 1980 Nobel Peace Laureate Adolfo Perez Esquivel,” Tandeciarz explains. “In developing our study abroad program, we intentionally built it around interdisciplinary approaches to human rights. Because of the CPM’s internationally recognized profile, their affiliation with the National University of La Plata, and their deep and long-standing engagement with human rights work in the field (visa-vis both the past and the present), our students are given exceptional access to sites, organizations, scholars, activists and human rights professionals and gain first-hand experience working alongside practitioners in a focused, issuesdriven program. It’s really very special and transformative for our students.”

The strong connection with CPM has enabled the flexibility to make variations and enhancements of the programs over the years, and the most recent adjustment has been to create a two-week winter program, which began in January 2022.

Adapting The La Plata Experience For Winter Term

William & Mary’s longer winter term has enabled the Reves Center to design and offer study abroad programs that are shorter in length and less costly than summer or semester programs. Winter programs appeal to students who might not otherwise consider study abroad, such as those in STEM majors or with low foreign language proficiency.

But these same aspects—shorter duration and varied student backgrounds—require some substantial adjustments to curriculum, living arrangements and expectations.

“I’d say that if the semester program is the equivalent of a feature lengthfilm, the winter program is a song or a poem,” Tandeciarz says. “Most of the key components are there; but they are put together in a way that helps students make sense of a very intense experience with the guidance and help of the faculty director. When students go to Argentina for the semester program, they are immersing themselves in a foreign language and culture, living with host families, and making decisions based on their own interests, how and where to invest their time and attention: they choose which courses to pursue at the National University, how to structure their free time, what internship area they want to dive into. The semester program requires strong (intermediate) Spanish language skills because the students are fully immersed in Spanish language instruction and engage in internships related to human rights.”

In the winter program students are housed together in a hotel. They have fewer opportunities to develop and deepen their own relationships with locals, simply by virtue of time limits and the intensity of the program schedule; and they have less free time, generally. Making the experience equally meaningful just requires a little more ingenuity.

Take the level of language ability, for instance. “In conversation with the CPM, we brainstormed ways to make the kind of experience offered in the semester program available to more students,” Tandeciarz recounts. “The key was to be able to offer simultaneous interpretation for all activities. The CPM was able to identify an amazing team of interpreters and purchased the necessary equipment to make this short, intensive program possible. Faculty leadership means that all debriefs, reflections, and impromptu lectures can happen in English.”

Accommodating less fluency in country does not take away from required preparation. Students engage in pre-departure sessions to acquire a basic understanding of Argentine culture and the recent Argentine history that shapes today’s human rights landscape.

“They arrive in Argentina and hit the ground running: they learn more about the work of the CPM, visit sites of memory, engage in hands-on workshops, and meet with individuals and groups to talk about past and ongoing abuses as well as strategies of resistance.”

And despite the shorter time frame, students meet and talk with a wide range of Argentinians. “They speak with survivors of the dictatorship, Mothers and Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo seeking their missing children and grandchildren, veterans of the Malvinas/Falklands war, current victims of state violence, and a very broad spectrum of activist groups organizing for rights.”

On The Ground For The Second Winter Program

In January 2023, Tandeciarz led the second cohort of the new winter program, and Teresa Longo joined her as co-director. Longo is Associate Provost for International Affairs, Executive Director of the Reves Center as well as a professor of Hispanic Studies. Although she has been involved in behind-the-scenes administrative work for the program in her various roles over the years, it was Longo’s first time as co-director of the program and her first time in Argentina.

Twenty William & Mary students participated, representing a wide variety of majors and ages: students preparing to graduate, writing honor’s theses, and studying for the LSAT, and students just beginning and defining their academic journeys. A few were international students. To Longo, their perspective was crucial. “When we were in group discussions, we talked about Argentina but also about the U.S. and the countries the students came from, so the conversations had a truly global dimension.”

She describes the entire experience as “very hands-on” learning. “People with expertise talked and students listened before any conversations. They heard from faculty with Ph.D.’s and from people who had been detained during dictatorships--it was lived and scholarly experience combined.” And another benefit of a long-term collaboration: “We wouldn’t have this kind of access and experiences without this partnership with CPM.”

Longo has managed study abroad programs before, so she had a sense of what was in store for the students as well as the directors. “I expected the experience to be intense because it’s on the ground human rights work. I expected there to be hard work, and hands-on learning, because that’s the nature of intense learning in study abroad. I expected the students to be challenged and transformed,” Longo explains.

What she hadn’t expected was some of the content and the quality of the discussions.

“I was surprised by the very first formal session we had at the CPM on race and racism. Given the fundamentally different way the professionals at CPM addressed the issues--class figures as a central component in every discussion of racism in Argentina--I was surprised by how well the students responded to that narrative.,” Longo says.

Longo and Tandeciarz found the students were not only open minded about examining issues such as racism with this different approach, but they also didn’t shy away from the difficulty and intensity of the discussions. “One day at about 7pm, we let the students know we’d be in the hotel lobby in case anyone wanted to do a debrief, and almost all of them came and were there until midnight. Everyone was totally into it,” Longo recalls.

The Role Of Arts And Creativity

An added feature of the 2023 winter program was to incorporate the arts in a final student project rather than a term paper. Whether visiting museums, seeing street murals or hearing prisoners recite their poetry, Longo says, “Our guiding question throughout our encounters was, ‘What is the relationship between human rights and the arts?’”

For the culminating work, Longo and Tandeciarz were hoping to inspire more than pictures of places they had visited or people they had met.

“We made it clear that it was important to look at art everywhere as a creative solution to geopolitical problems,” Longo explains. “To find answers for big problems like how to promote human rights, you have to be a creative thinker. We didn’t expect them to become artists, but we made them do a creative project in order to bring out that skill, that way of thinking.”

The assignment was designed to give students plenty of latitude. Students were asked to demonstrate what they learned in Argentina about human rights and the work of art in the world and to express what they learned through a creative piece.

The resulting projects were as unique as the students and were displayed at a reception in the Reves Center in the spring.

Students exceeded all expectations, with projects running the gamut from creating wearable fashion and threedimensional building blocks to poetry and paintings. Each work was unique with regard to medium, focus, size and the story it told.

Tandeciarz remembers how moved she was when she saw the students’ final projects all together for the first time at the Reves reception. The depth of engagement and the care they put into their pieces were evident, as was the inspiration they took from all the forms of artistic expression addressed to human rights that they encountered in Argentina. But even more important was their ability, through creative work, to bring their insights home. To communicate what they learned from the experience, they had had to process it, reflect on it from their own place in the world, and turn it into something tangible and new, something to share with others that also expressed their own journey. The results were inspiring and affirming— this is what it’s all about, why we do what we do.

Human Rights In Conversation And In The Mirror

Longo sees the experience as an opportunity to learn not just about the human rights abuses, but about a country’s responses to the abuses.

“You might think going to study a country that has lived under dictatorship and come out of it, that the constant conversation would be on abuses, but actually the conversation is on the responses to transform the situation. That’s what’s happening in

La Plata.” And she continues, not only is the conversation happening, but it’s also not hidden. “This conversation is very public. Street signs say, ‘A human rights violation happened in this building.’ You can’t not see it.”

And you can’t look away from yourself.

Longo was struck by the number of mirrors she saw. “CPM and the museums have a lot of mirrors. The invitation is to see yourself in this history. No one is outside of it.”