• 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 in which they utilize broad assumptions about interiority and physicality, where interiority refers to something similar to what Edward Tyler and James Frazer meant by

  • History in Images, History in Words: In Search of Facts in Documentary Filmmaking

    Boston University Photonics Center 8 St. Mary's Street, 9th Floor, Boston, MA, United States

    Speaker: Carma Hinton, Robinson Professor of Visual Culture and Chinese Studies, George Mason University Comments by: Gerald Peary, Suffolk University Sponsored by the BU’s Pardee School of Global Studies Center for the Study of Asia, Center for the Humanities, BU Arts Initiative, the Institute for the Study of Muslim Societies & Civilizations, the Department of World Languages & Literatures, and

  • The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao

    CGIS South S020, Belfer Case Study Room 1730 Cambridge St., Cambridge, MA, United States

    Speaker: Ian Johnson is a Pulitzer-Prize winning writer focusing on society, religion, and history. He works out of Beijing and Berlin, where he also teaches and advises academic journals and think tanks. Johnson has spent over half of the past thirty years in the Greater China region, first as a student in Beijing from 1984 to 1985,

  • Environment in Asia Seminar: “Layer upon Layer: Experience, Ecology, Engineering, Heritage, and (most of all) History in the Making of China’s Agricultural Terraces”

    CGIS Knafel K262 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA, United States

    Speaker: Sigrid Schmalzer, University of Massachusetts Amherst Professor Schmalzer's research focuses on social, cultural, and political aspects of the history of science in modern China. Her first book, The People's Peking Man: Popular Science and Human Identity in Twentieth-Century China, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2008 and won the Sharlin Memorial Award from

  • 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 States

    Speaker: 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

  • The February 28th Incident: Imperial Legacies and War Aftermath in Taiwan, 1947

    CGIS Knafel K262 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA, United States

    Speaker: Victor Louzon, Postdoctoral Scholar at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University The February 28th Incident, as the 1947 Taiwanese rebellion against Guomindang rule and its bloody suppression are known, is perhaps the most notorious episode in modern Taiwanese history. This talk offers new insights on this event, exploring the dynamics of decolonization and demobilization

  • China’s Banking Transformation: The Untold Story

    CGIS Knafel K262 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA, United States

    Speaker: James Stent, Independent Director and Chairman of the Audit Committee of XacBank of Mongolia. Pundits have been predicting the impending collapse of the Chinese banking system. The collapse has not happened. What have these pundits been missing? Why have their predictions not materialized? James Stent, author of China’s Banking Transformation: the Untold Story (Oxford

  • “Behemoth”: Film Screening and Discussion with Director Zhao Liang

    Brattle Theater 40 Brattle St, Cambridge, MA, United States

    Beginning with a mining explosion in Mongolia and ending in a ghost city west of Beijing, documentarian Zhao Liang’s new film Behemoth details, in one breathtaking sequence after another, the social and environmental devastation driven by the totality of humankind’s desire and greed. After the screening, Director Liang will attend via Skype for a discussion with