Happy Lunar New Year! We are excited to share our upcoming events for the spring. We have a packed semester with four large-scale events for the community, five talks and book chats, a conference that will bring to Berkeley over two-dozen faculty from around the world, our spring workshop for undergraduate thesis research, and our graduate student & visiting scholar seminar series. 

Today we kick off the semester with a special event to celebrate the publication of the Y.R. Chao (Chao Yuen Ren 赵元任) diaries co-hosted by the C.V. Starr East Asian Library. Speakers include Director of the East Asian Library Peter Zhou; Berkeley faculty Andrew Jones, Robert Ashmore and James Matisoff; Y.R. Chao’s granddaughter Canta Pian; Fudan linguist Zhongmin Chen (陈忠敏); and Peter Li, professor emeritus of Chinese at Rutgers University. Please see here for more details. RSVP is required.

Rana Mitter of Harvard University will give this year’s Elvera Kwang Siam Lim Memorial Lecture on Friday, February 28 at 4pm. His talk explores the ways ideology and internationalism interacted in the minds of Nationalist and Communist policymakers in the Chinese postwar, and examines continuing implications for US-China relations in the 21st century. Please register via this link.

On Thursday March 6, Kaiser Kuo will host his Sinica Podcast with speakers Jessica Chen Weiss from Johns Hopkins University and Ryan Hass from the Brookings Institution, who will discuss China-U.S. relations post-election. This event will be held in the David Brower Center at 5pm, followed by a reception for the audience. Please see here for more details and to RSVP.

Wu Ming-yi  (吴明益) will speak on Tuesday, April 29. The first writer from Taiwan to be nominated for the Man Booker prize (2018), Wu Ming-yi is a well-known environmental activist. His The Man With the Compound Eyes was named one of the best books of the last century by Time-Out Beijing in 2015. 

We have some exciting book chats and presentations of research in progress this spring. On Thursday, February 6, Carlos Rojas from Duke University will present "Language, Power, and Speculative Futures: Reflections on Chinese Babels." Jesse Rodenbiker from Rutgers University will discuss his new book, Ecological States: Ecological States: Politics of Science and Nature in Urbanizing China on February 20. Thursday, March 20, Yu-chih Lai (赖毓芝), a Qing court art historian from Academia Sinica, Taiwan, will speak. Ming-sho Ho (何明修) from National Taiwan University will give a book chat on April 3 about his latest book, which explores Hong Kong’s 2019–2020 pro-democracy movement, and Anna Yu Wang from Princeton University will present her work on the reception of Sinitic opera on April 10. 

Berkeley faculty member Mark Csikszentmihalyi has organized an international conference entitled “Reconsidering the History of the Analects and Other ‘Confucius Said’ Texts in Light of Recent Discoveries of Unearthed Manuscripts,” to be held at CCS from April 25 to April 28. This conference brings together scholars from Asia, Europe, and the U.S. to introduce the new Warring States manuscripts collecting Confucius’ sayings and their archaeological context of recovery.

This semester, we will continue to host the seminar series in which graduate students and visiting scholars present their work informally. Berkeley students who are interested in attending, please contact ccs@berkeley.edu. The second cohort of the CCS Undergraduate Thesis Workshop in Chinese Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences will be meeting monthly to discuss their research projects, and will present their papers in a mini-conference in early May. CCS, in collaboration with the IEAS Core and its affiliated centers, has developed a new undergraduate research award program for the Institute of East Asian Studies. Application details can be found here.

CCS co-sponsored events include the hybrid book event: Staying True with Hua Hsu on February 7, a talk by Professor Emeritus Zhang Jishun (张济顺) on The Lane Revolution and Its Legacy: Revisiting Shanghai Neighborhood Committees in the Mao Zedong Era on January 28, and a visit by the queer activist and author Li Kotomi (李琴峰) on March 10-11.

We look forward to seeing you at these events. All best wishes for the spring semester from the Center for Chinese Studies!

Yours,

Sophie Volpp

Chair, Center for Chinese Studies

Professor, East Asian Languages and Cultures