Events

Nirupama Rao – The Fractured Himalaya

Speaker: Nirupama Rao, Former Foreign Secretary of India and Ambassador to the United States and China Chair: Sugata Bose, Gardiner Professor of Oceanic History and Affairs Part of the Borders in Modern Asia Seminar Series Co-sponsored by the Harvard University Asia Center, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, and the Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute […]

China Humanities Seminar featuring Yuhang Li – Engineering Religious Bliss at the Qing Court: Jile shijie in the Beihai Park

Speaker: Yuhang Li, University of Wisconsin-Madison   In 1770, with the purpose of presenting an unusual surprising gift to his mother Empress Dowager Chongqing (1692-1777) for her eightieth birthday, Emperor Qianlong (1711-1799) ordered the imperial architectural department to construct a Buddhist compound named jile shijie or blissful land on the northern shore of imperial Beihai Park next […]

POSTPONED: Critical Issues Confronting China Series featuring Xingxing Wang – Chinese Policy Toward North Korea

Regrettably, this event has been postponed and will be rescheduled for a future date. Speaker: Xingxing Wang, Professor& Director, Research Center for Strategy of Korean Peninsula, School of International Relations and Public Affairs, Shanghai International Studies UniversityModerator: William Overholt, Senior Research Fellow, Harvard Kennedy School Over the last decade, Dr. Wang has conducted research at the […]

Victoria Chen – Coastal Formosan, Nuclear Austronesian, and beyond: How do Formosan languages Inform Theories of Austronesian Expansion?

Presented via Zoom

The Indigenous languages of Taiwan feature two patterns of morphological discrepancy. First, only some possess a symmetrical morphological paradigm associated with a phenomenon known as ‘noun-verb homophony'. Second, only a handful of the languages allow the Proto-Austronesian stative affix ma- to be used in a transitive clause. This talk addresses how these two foci of variation inform our understanding of the Austronesian diaspora and further explains how new comparative data on these phenomena offers a simpler answer to two ongoing debates in the field.

Cancan Liao – The Interpretations of “Heaven”: Encounter, Conflict and Accommodation between Chinese Literati and European Jesuits in late Ming China

Presented via Zoom

Speakers Late Ming and Early Qing was a period during which China underwent a transformation both on intellectual thoughts and society life, influenced with Western natural science (more precisely, natural philosophy) and Catholicism transmitted by European Jesuits. In the course of cultural exchange, the interpretations of “heaven” were manifested in different intellectual levels, including philosophy, […]

Critical Issues Confronting China series featuring John Haigh

Speaker: John Haigh, Co-Director, Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government; Lecturer in Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy SchoolModerator: William Overholt, Senior Research Fellow, Harvard Kennedy School John Haigh is Co-Director of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government and Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. He teaches a seminar on business and government interactions […]

Wendy Leutert – The Reform & Global Expansion of Chinese State-Owned Enterprises

Speaker: Wendy Leutert, Assistant Professor, East Asian Languages and Cultures, Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies, Indiana University Bloomington. Discussant: Meg Rithmire, F. Warren MacFarlan Associate Professor in Business, Government, and International Economy, Harvard Business School. Hosted by the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government, Harvard Kennedy School Presented via Zoom Register at: […]

Chinese Religions Seminar featuring Vincent Goossaert – Social Networks of the Gods in Late Imperial Spirit-Writing Altars

Presented via Zoom

Speaker: Vincent Goossaert, Professor of Daoism and Chinese Religions, École Pratique des Hautes Études Chinese social life is saturated with interactions with entities other than living humans - ancestors, suffering souls, gods, animal spirits... A wide repertoire of ritual techniques regulates these interactions; some of them, aim at limiting those with dangerous entities, but this […]