On Monday afternoons during the academic year, IIS hosts a colloquium centered around contemporary research in International Relations. At the majority of MIRTH seminars, an external speaker presents and receives feedback on new research, bringing a steady stream of fresh ideas to campus and providing an opportunity for graduate students across cohorts, departments, and other nearby universities to engage with research-in-progress. For students and faculty with research interests in International Relations, the workshop represents the intellectual heart of the community. It also provides an important forum for PhD students to practice their job talks while they are on the academic job market and provides a venue for faculty and advanced graduate students to share work with one another. External speakers and faculty are encouraged to present early work rather than research that is published or nearly so. Feedback tends to be both plentiful and constructive. MIRTH also hosts professional development workshops for graduate students over the course of the semester, and participating graduate students rotate as formal discussants for external speakers.
Berkeley has long held an speaker series in International Relations, with visiting speakers presenting a few times a semester in 223 Moses Hall since at least the early 1970s, an endeavor that was organized jointly with Stanford Political Science. In the mid-1980s, after Bay Area traffic got worse, Professor Vinnie Aggarwal changed the IR colloquium to a Berkeley-only affair, which he ran jointly with Professor Steve Weber. In Spring 2009, Professor Ron Hassner took it over, and turned it into a weekly seminar series. It was named by one of the PhD student participants, Jay Purcell, as "Monday International Relations THing," but other faculty coordinators have since referred to it as "Monday International Relations THeory" and the full name of the workshop continues to provoke spirited debate.
Individuals wishing to sign up for the MIRTH mailing list and receive notifications of upcoming talks should contact the PhD student coordinator. Past rosters of speakers are listed below.
2022-2023 Faculty coordinator: Ryan Brutger
2022-2023 PhD student coordinator: Julia Raven
Although a long list of faculty across campus participate from time to time, the regular faculty participants include: Vinnie Aggarwal, Ryan Brutger, Ron Hassner, Susan Hyde, Marika Landau-Wells, Aila Matanock, and Michaela Mattes.