Speaker: Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, New York University

Taking a small comment by the young Mao Zedong in his “Classroom Notes” as its point of departure, this talk revisits the very early days after the fall of the last dynasty. It ties them to events in post-revolutionary France and the late Han period. It ends and begins with a comment on the relationship between Mao Zedong Thought, Mao Studies, and Chinese History.

Zvi Ben-Dor Benite teaches in the Department of History and the Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University. He studied pre-modern and modern Chinese History in Jerusalem, in China, and later at UCLA. His research centers on the interaction between religions in world history and cultural and intellectual exchanges across vast space and deep time. He is the author of The Dao of Muhammad: A Cultural History of Muslims in Late Imperial China (Harvard, 2005); The Ten Lost Tribes: A World History (Oxford, 2009); and co-editor and translator of Modern Middle Eastern Jewish Thought: Writings on Identity, Culture, and Politics (Brandeis, 2013); and an edited volume on Sovereignty (Columbia University Press 2017).