Modern China Lecture
Modern China Lecture: Varieties of Chinese Utopianism, 1900-1940
Speaker: Peter Zarrow, University of Connecticut Utopianism was a major motif in early twentieth century Chinese political thought. Utopianism was not only widespread, it became constitutive of political thought. Utopianism did so in the form of the utopian impulse rather than full-fledged utopianism. The “utopian impulse” is revealed in the context of generally non-utopian ideas. While not […]
The First World War and the Idea of “China”
CGIS Knafel, K050 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA, United StatesThis lecture will focus on the meaning of the First World War to China and China's role in the Great War. It will pay special attention to the issue how the Great War and its aftermath provided a momentum for the Chinese and the world to think about the ideas of China and Chineseness. Most importantly, this talk will explain why and how the Chinese seized the Great […]
Modern China Lecture Series: Collecting and Using Diaries and the Writing of PRC History
CGIS Knafel K262 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA, United StatesSpeaker: Fan Shitao, Beijing Normal University
Doubts about the Chinese current of “doubting antiquity” and its critics
CGIS Knafel K262 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA, United StatesSpeaker: Rudolf G. Wagner Fairbank Center Associate at Harvard University, and Cluster Asia and Europe Associate at Heidelberg University, Germany. This is a study of the background, impact, and cost of the “doubting antiquity,” or yigu, current associated with the Gushi bian collection that followed a strong political agenda of undoing the authority of the orthodox view […]
Modern China Lecture Series: The Significance of the Frontier in Twentieth Century Chinese History
CGIS Knafel K262 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA, United StatesSpeaker: Shellen Wu, University of Tennessee, Knoxville The 1890s set off an unprecedented rush for the last remaining unclaimed lands around the world. Developments in the preceding century saw the social sciences and disciplines like geography and agronomy connecting Europe, the Americas, and Asia. The educated elite from around the world increasingly spoke a common […]
Modern China Lecture: Governing the Souls of Chinese Modernity
Speaker: Andrew Kipnis, Professor of Anthropology in the College of Asia and the Pacific at The Australian National University Philippe Descola argues that human societies can be categorized by the ways […]
Modern China Lecture Series: Ryōdōraku (良導絡) in New China: Sino-Japanese Medical Exchange in the 1950s and the Role of Machines in East Asian Medical Modernity
CGIS Knafel K262 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA, United StatesSpeaker: Ruth Rogaski, Vanderbilt University In December of 1957, a medical delegation from the People’s Republic of China visited Japan as part of a decade-long series of semi-official cultural exchanges between the two former enemies. The delegation brought back a “Nakatani Ryōdōraku electrodermometer”—a scientific apparatus which, according to its inventor, Nakatani Yoshio, could be used […]
Can Computation Change the Study of Chinese Culture and History?
Speaker: Richard Jean So, University of Chicago The emergence of large corpora of digitized cultural and historical texts and new methods in text mining and analysis have made possible a new form of computational analysis for the humanities and China Studies. The question and challenge is whether these new methods and "data" will enrich our study […]