Skip to content
Volcker Lecture Deirdre Nansen McCloskey

Prospective Student Visits


Prospective undergraduate first-year and transfer students who have not yet applied to Syracuse University have a range of options for in-person and virtual visits, sample classes, admission interviews and more.

In addition to virtual events, prospective graduate students should contact the admission team for your program to schedule an in-person visit or to attend a class.

Can’t get to campus?

Our virtual tour is the next best thing. Immerse yourself in a 360-degree view of campus as you take a tour led by Syracuse University alumni. Or, register to attend a virtual admission event.

Take a Virtual Tour

Connect with an Alumni Ambassador


Learn about the Maxwell School from the people who know it best! Alumni Ambassadors are passionate champions of the Maxwell School who are using their Maxwell education to make real and lasting change in the world. Alumni from every degree program working in a range of organizations and industries are available to answer your questions. Connect with one today.


Public Events at Maxwell

Attend a public event, in person or virtually, and get a taste of what Maxwell School has to offer. With hundreds events each year—including prominent public speakers, lectures, workshops, foreign language conversation tables, research presentations and more—there are so many ways to engage in the intellectual and social life on campus.

We continue to follow the advice of local public health officials in regards to in-person events. Please check Syracuse University’s Stay Safe website for the latest safety protocols before coming to campus or other in-person venues.

The Troubles and Beyond. The Impact of a Museum Exhibit on a Post-Conflict Society

Eggers Hall, 341

Add to: Outlook, ICal, Google Calendar

The Moynihan Institute, and the program for Comparative Politics / International Relations is pleased to host Laia Balcells, Provost's Distinguished Associate Professor of Government at Georgetown University. Her co-author Elsa Voytas, assistant professor of political science at IE University's School of Global and Public Affairs in Madrid, Spain; and a visiting scholar at Dartmouth College, will unfortunately not be in attendance.

Can museums influence the way visitors think about past violence and modern-day politics? Although the impacts of symbolic transitional justice (TJ) policies such as museums have largely been overlooked, we hypothesize that they can shape perceptions of groups involved in violence; and preferences toward public policies to address the past. In cases where museums recount multi-sided violence, reconstructing the conflict can be a difficult and complex undertaking—if museums are a reminder of past discord or are perceived as biased, they might reinforce prior beliefs and heighten societal divisions. In May 2022, we conducted a field experiment at the Ulster Museum in Belfast, Northern Ireland, where sectarian violence during the Troubles (1968-1998) periodically erupted between largely Catholic republicans and predominantly Protestant unionists. We randomly assigned a sample of university students to visit one of two exhibits in the same museum: a treatment exhibit (Troubles and Beyond, recounting the Troubles-era violence) or a placebo exhibit (Elements, a natural science exhibit about the periodic elements). We measure visitors’ attitudinal shifts and gauge persistence of the effects for the following six months through follow-up surveys. We complement the results from the field experiment with a survey experiment embedded in a regionally-representative survey in Northern Ireland. Our results suggest that while symbolic TJ policies have little effect on attitudes in post-civil war settings, they might polarize some social groups along the master cleavage of the conflict.

Laia Balcells is a Provost's Distinguished Associate Professor in the Department of Government at Georgetown University. She was an assistant professor of political science at Duke University (2012-2017), and a Niehaus Visiting Associate Research Scholar at the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University (2015-16). Her research and teaching are at the intersection of comparative politics and international relations. She focuses on issues of security, peace and conflict, with a special interest in civil wars, terrorism, nationalism and ethnic conflict, and transitional justice after conflict. Her first book, "Rivalry and Revenge: the Politics of Violence during Civil War," was published in 2017 by Cambridge University Press (Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics).


Category

Social Science and Public Policy

Type

Talks

Region

Campus

Open to

Public

Organizer

MAX-Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs

Contact

Moynihan Events Department
315.443.9248

gtsaouss@syr.edu

Accessibility

Contact Moynihan Events Department to request accommodations