Modern China Lecture
Modern China Lecture Series Featuring Linh Vu – The Politics of Martyr Commemoration in Modern China and Contemporary Taiwan
CGIS Knafel K262 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA, United StatesSpeaker: Linh Vu, Assistant Professor, Arizona State University This talk focuses on (1) the politics of martyr commemoration in Republican China (1911–1949) and (2) the governance of the posthumous identities of the Nationalist Chinese dead in contemporary Taiwan. The Chinese Republic laid the foundation for the modern nation-state through the governance of these millions of war dead. […]
Gal Gvili and Adhira Mangalagiri – Imagination and Disconnection: New Literary Studies of China-India
CGIS Knafel K262 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA, United StatesSpeakers: Gal Gvili, McGill University; Author, Imagining India in Modern ChinaLiterary Decolonization and the Imperial Unconscious, 1895–1962Adhira Mangalagiri, Queen Mary University of London; Author, The China-India Literary Relation in the Twentieth Century Moderator: Karen Thornber, Harry Tuchman Levin Professor in Literature and Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University Chair: Arunabh Ghosh, Associate […]
Gal Gvili and Adhira Mangalagiri – Imagination and Disconnection: New Literary Studies of China-India
CGIS Knafel K262 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA, United StatesSpeakers:Gal Gvili, McGill University; Author, Imagining India in Modern China: Literary Decolonization and the Imperial Unconscious, 1895–1962Adhira Mangalagiri, Queen Mary London; Author, States of Discontent: The China-India Literary Relation in the Twentieth CenturyModerator: Karen Thornber, Harry Tuchman Levin Professor in Literature and Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard UniversityChair: Arunabh Ghosh, Associate Professor […]
Modern China Lecture Series Featuring Jennifer Altehenger – When Folding Chairs Became Bestsellers: The Revolutionary Roots of China’s Furniture Exports
CGIS Knafel K262 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA, United StatesSpeaker: Jennifer Altehenger, Jessica Rawson Fellow in Modern Asian History, Associate Professor of Chinese History, Merton College, Oxford The People’s Republic of China is one of the world’s leading furniture producers, and international media frequently report on its furniture exports. Descriptions of how goods from China came to furnish homes and workplaces across the world […]
Modern China Lecture Series featuring Shellen Wu – Writing Global History from an Asian Perspective
CGIS South Room S354 1730 Cambridge St, Cambridge, MA, United StatesSpeaker: Shellen X. Wu, Associate Professor and L.H. Gipson Chair in Transnational History, Lehigh University Global history has drawn criticism for its lack of diversity among its practicing ranks and the flattening effect of its materialist focus. I would like to propose a middle way: a global history that encompasses individual agency; an intellectual history […]
Modern China Lecture Series featuring Kelly Hammond — Chinese Ethnopolitcs and State-Building: The Case of Muslim General Bai Chongxi
CGIS Knafel K262 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA, United StatesSpeaker: Kelly Hammond, Associate Professor of East Asian History, Department of History, University of Arkansas Bai Chongxi’s life spanned the Late Qing, the founding of the Chinese Republic and its fracturing into the so-called “Warlord Era,” the Nanjing Decade, the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Chinese Civil War, and the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. He is […]
Modern China Lecture Series featuring Fa-Ti Fan – Disaster Governance and Political Participation in China: From the Mao Era to the Present
CGIS Knafel K262 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA, United StatesSpeaker: Fa-Ti Fan, Professor of History, Binghamton University, State University of New York This talk discusses the modes of disaster governance and crisis management in China from the early Mao to the post-Covid era. We will start with the 1960s-70s when China was going through severe political crises, natural disasters, and geopolitical challenges. We will […]
Modern China Lecture Series featuring Christopher Courtney – Heat and the Urban Environment of Modern China
CGIS Knafel K262 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA, United StatesSpeaker: Christopher Courtney, Associate Professor of Modern Chinese History, Durham University Throughout history, people living in Chinese cities have often had to contend with extreme heat. Although this is natural feature of the climate, it has been exacerbated by anthropogenic processes, which have transformed cities into urban heat islands. Drawing upon a variety of sources, […]
Modern China Lecture featuring Uluğ Kuzuoğlu – Codes of Modernity: Chinese Scripts in the Global Information Age
CGIS South, Room S050 1730 Cambridge St, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United StatesSpeaker: Uluğ Kuzuoğlu, Assistant Professor of History, Washington University in St. Louis In the late nineteenth century, Chinese reformers and revolutionaries believed that there was something fundamentally wrong with the Chinese writing system. The Chinese characters, they argued, were too cumbersome to learn, blocking the channels of communication, obstructing mass literacy, and impeding scientific progress. […]
Modern China Lecture Series featuring Rebecca Nedostup – “War Being” in Mid Twentieth Century China and Taiwan
CGIS Knafel K262 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA, United StatesSpeaker: Rebecca Nedostup, Associate Professor of History, Associate Professor of East Asian Studies, Brown UniversityTwo decades of intense hot and cold war in China and Taiwan between the 1930s and 1950s produced not only significant economic, political, and environmental changes, but notable consequences for the epistemological structuring of everyday experience. Using examples of shifting conceptions […]
Modern China Lecture Series featuring Janet Chen – Medium or Message? The Politics of Language in Broadcasting in Taiwan, 1945-1975
CGIS Knafel K262 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA, United StatesSpeaker: Janet Y. Chen, Professor of Chinese History; Director, East Asian Studies Program, Princeton University At the end of 1975, the KMT government in Taiwan passed the Radio and Television Law, designating Mandarin as the “primary language of broadcasting” and mandating the reduction of dialect. This legislation, which took effect in January 1976, was the […]
Modern China Lecture Series featuring Selda Altan — Chinese Workers of the World: Colonialism, Chinese Labor, and the Yunnan–Indochina Railway
CGIS Knafel K262 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA, United StatesSpeaker: Selda Altan, Assistant Professor of History, Randolph College This talk explores labor conflicts during the construction of the French railway between China and Vietnam (1898–1910) as an episode in the emergence of Chinese workers as a global working class. Drawing on Chinese, French, and English sources, the discussion reveals how inter-colonial competition for cheap […]