China Humanities Seminar Featuring Scott Pearce – Looking Behind the Text: The Case of Northern Wei’s ‘Yuan Pi’
Speaker: Scott Pearce, Western Washington University All textual traditions are based on their own particular sets of assumptions and preoccupations. This was the case of the Chinese classical tradition as well, which having taken full shape under the Han empire, continued to be used as the only available language of written record by the very […]
Harvard Buddhist Studies Forum Featuring Aaron Proffitt – Buddha’s Name as Mantra in Medieval Japan
Speaker: Aaron Proffitt, Assistant Professor of Japanese Studies, University at Albany-SUNY The recitation of the name of a buddha (nenbutsu) is often associated with deathbed practices and traditions commonly grouped under the rubric Pure Land Buddhism. In this talk, Professor Aaron Proffitt will consider this widely popular practice as understood by practitioners of mantra, focusing […]
Jie Li — Socialist Hot Noise: Loudspeakers and Open-Air Cinema in Mao’s China
Speaker: Li Jie, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University As a scholar of literary, film, and cultural studies, Jie Li’s research interests center on the mediation of memories in modern China. Her first book, Shanghai Homes: Palimpsests of Private Life (Columbia, 2014), excavates a century of memories embedded in two alleyway neighborhoods destined […]
David Cheng Chang – Between Worlds: China’s WWII Interpreters and Their Divergent Fates in China, Taiwan, and the United States
Speaker: David Cheng Chang, Associate Professor of Humanities; Associate Director, Global China Center, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. In this lecture, Professor Chang will talk about the use […]
Critical Issues Confronting China Lecture Series featuring Bill Bikales – From Poverty Eradication to Common Prosperity: Reflections on Recent Poverty Achievements and Implications for the Next Phase of Development
Speaker: Bill Bikales, Principal and Lead Economist, Kunlun Associates Bill is a Harvard-trained economist and Asia specialist and has worked at the most senior level of government in Mongolia on comprehensive fiscal reform and restructuring insolvent bank and power sectors, and at grass roots level in rural China on increasing poor women's uptake of maternal […]
Modern Chinese Humanities Seminar Featuring Ma Shaoling — The Stone and the Wireless: Lyrical Media and Bad Models of the Feeling Women
Speaker: Ma Shaoling, Assistant Professor of Humanities, Yale-NUS College Authors often talk about their books via the introduction or the conclusion, and sidestep what lies in the middle. The title […]
Workers and Change in China: Resistance, Repression, Responsiveness
Speakers: Manfred Elfstrom, Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of British Columbia. Yao Li, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology and Criminology and Law, University of Florida Moderator: Anthony Saich, Director, Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation; Daewoo Professor of International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School of Government Strikes, protests, and riots by Chinese workers have […]
Connecting the World-Island: What will China’s PEACE cable bring to Pakistan and East Africa?
Speakers: Motolani Agbebi, University teacher, Faculty of Management and Business, University of Tampere (Finland) Tayyab Safdar, Post-Doctoral Researcher, East Asia Centre & Department of Politics, University of Virginia Roxana Vatanparast, Affiliate, Center on Global Legal Transformation, Columbia Law School Moderators: Nargis Kassenova, Senior Fellow, Program on Central Asia, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies […]
Panel Discussion: Overcoming Challenges in the Research Environment in China
Read the summary of the event here. Panelists:Elizabeth Perry, Henry Rosovsky Professor of Government at Harvard University and Director of the Harvard-Yenching InstituteDenise Ho, Assistant Professor of 20th Century Chinese History, Yale UniversityRobert Weller, Professor of Anthropology, Boston UniversityYuen Yuen Ang, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Michigan Moderator: Michael Szonyi, Frank Wen-Hsiung […]
Modern China Lecture Series Featuring Eugenia Lean – The Ideograph and a Cantonese Pun: Linguistic Divergence and Spurious Chinese Marks in Global Capitalism
Speaker: Eugenia Lean, Professor of History and East Asian Languages and Cultures; Director, Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University By examining two early legal cases featuring the alleged counterfeiting of Xiangmao Honey Soap, this talk shows how the Chinese language and linguistic practices in Chinese commercial culture often stymied Western manufacturers and import companies’ attempts […]
Panel Discussion – Gaming with Chinese Characteristics
Speakers: Heather Inwood, Cambridge University Nakamura Akinori, Ritsumeikan University Deng Jian, Peking University Special Guest: Zhu Jiayin, Founder/Editor of Chuapp Organizers: David Der-wei Wang, Harvard University Yedong Sh-Chen, Harvard University This panel is co-sponsored by the Harvard Provostial Fund for the Arts and Humanities and the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation. It is a part of the […]
Environment in Asia Series Featuring Ying Jia Tan – War and the Reconfiguration of China’s Energy Geography
Speaker: Ying Jia Tan, Assistant Professor of History and East Asian Studies, Wesleyan University In Recharging China in War and Revolution, 1882–1955 (Cornell University Press, 2021), Ying Jia Tan argues that, even in times of peace, the Chinese economy operated as though still at war, constructing power systems that met immediate demands but sacrificed efficiency […]