Hamilton College Media Relations/Press Releases

Clinton, N.Y. – Four Hamilton College professors will debate the global refugee crisis in a panel discussion on Tuesday, Nov. 17, at 7 p.m., in the Red Pit, Kirner-Johnson Building, on the Hamilton campus. Participants will include Erol Balkan, professor of economics; Alan Cafruny, Henry Platt Bristol Professor of International Relations; Heather Merrill, professor of Africana studies; and Judit Temesvary, assistant professor of economics. The panel is sponsored by the Government Department and is free and open to the public.

Erol Balkan, a native of Turkey, joined the Hamilton faculty in 1987. His areas of expertise are the formation of middle classes in developing countries, effects of short-term capital flows on the Turkish economy and economic development, international finance and political economy of the Middle East. He is currently working on a manuscript titled The Neoliberal Landscape and the Rise of Islamic Capitaland for a documentary film about the Euphrates river that focuses on water issues and related political, economic and cultural problems in the region.

Alan Cafruny, a widely regarded scholar of international relations, European politics, and the European Union, is an expert on the political economy of the European Union and U.S. foreign policy including U.S.-European and U.S.-Russian relations. He has published numerous books and articles, most recently From the Golden Age to the Ordoliberal Iron Cage: The Political Economy of the European Union (co-authored with Magnus Ryner), forthcoming 2016. He is a past board president of the Mohawk Valley Resource Center for Refugees.

Heather Merrill is a critical human geographer whose theoretical work is grounded in ethnography of African Diaspora in Italy.  Her areas of expertise are critical human geography; race, place, and belonging in Italy, black Europe, and the U.S.; gender and intersectionality; African Diasporic politics and identity in Italy; blackness and anti-blackness.

Judit Temesvary, a native of Hungary, teaches courses on macroeconomics, and financial institutions and financial crises. She has a special interest in commercial banks, banks’ global lending activities and their effects on national economies, how national and global bank regulations can influence the macroeconomic effects of banks, and how and why banks’ lending rates differ by currency and across countries.