Graham James Chamness, Ph.D. candidate in East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University and Fairbank Center Graduate Student Associate, examines Confucian ideas of friendship in China’s pre-modern past.
History
Ian MacCormack explains how replicas of Tibet’s world-famous Potala Palace exemplify Buddhist understandings of what it means to be an “original” or a “copy,” and how one of these copies nearly became the Harvard-Yenching Institute.
Ruodi Duan — Ph.D. candidate in Harvard’s History Department — explains how Chinese depictions of African American internationalism and social movements help us better understand racial nationalism in the Cold War.
Keisha A. Brown, Assistant Professor of History at Tennessee State University, describes how traveling in China inspired her to research how blackness was historically perceived in modern China.
Heng Du — Ph.D. Candidate in Chinese Literature and Fairbank Center Graduate Student Associate —describes how Twitter #hashtags emulate the narrative setting of philosophical texts during China’s Warring States period.
Nathan Vedal, Ph.D. candidate in East Asian Languages and Civilizations and Fairbank Center Graduate Student Associate, explains how a Hollywood blockbuster about earth’s first contact with aliens echoes Neo-Confucian debates in the Ming Dynasty.
Xin Wen, Ph.D. candidate in the Committee on Inner Asian and Altaic Studies, describes manuscripts discovered in the Dunhuang caves that tell us about one man’s personal experience of the fall of the Tang Dynasty.
Guangchen Chen, Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature and 2016–17 Fairbank Center Graduate Student Associate, describes an event that signaled the start of the Cultural Revolution’s horrors and led to a suicide.
David Porter, Ph.D. Candidate and Fairbank Center Graduate Student Associate, describes Zhao Quan’s unsuccessful attempts to earn money from banner status in the Qing Dynasty.
New York Times reporter and RSEA student, Helen Gao, interviews Former Fairbank Center Director Roderick MacFarquhar for the NYT’s Sinosphere.