Past Events

This talk considers how limpidity, qing, a key concept in the political culture of early medieval China, was appropriated by elite writers as an aesthetic ideal and an important way of self-fashioning in the last decades of the fifth century.

Join us for a hands-on workshop exploring nerikiri, a traditional Japanese confectionery.

This lecture examines twenty-four newly uncovered English essays by C. T. Hsia during his Yale years.

This lecture seeks to explore the shifting definitions of the borderland as a geopolitical space, a territorial gateway, a contact zone, a liminal terrain, a “state of exception,” and a venue of imagined non-communities.

One of the techniques that plays out strongly in the early classical Chinese literary tradition is the recurrent play of substitutions, wherein various figures are endlessly substituted for other figures in tellings and re-tellings of stories and anecdotes. This talk will explore this technique, discuss why it became so important in the tradition, and consider its larger implications.

In Chinese history the Great Wall has been regarded primarily as a political boundary, a military frontier, and an economic divide between agriculturalists and pastoralists.

In his talk, Ambassador Mikio Mori will share his perspectives on how the Japan-U.S. relationship has changed, grown, and deepened since his first appointment in New York in the 1980s, at the height of Japan-bashing and trade friction, to his third and present assignment as Consul General.

Political Moods develops a comparative analysis across the Cold War divide, analyzing how films in both North and South Korea convey political and moral ideas through the sentimentality of the melodramatic mode.

Professor Paul Kroll's lecture will discuss imagery as a medium, largely focusing on the vocabulary of how one says those things that are considered impossible or nearly impossible to say adequately in words, with numerous examples from literary and religious texts.

This international workshop explores medieval Chinese commemorative inscriptions from the seventh through the thirteenth centuries, in particular, the interactions between materiality and textuality.

15th Annual Chinese Medieval Studies Workshop

This workshop brings together librarians, archivists, and scholars from Cornell University, Rutgers University, and the adjacent Archives of the Reformed Church in America to introduce the unique contents and contexts of their collections, focusing specifically on the materials from Meiji Japan that shed light on the late nineteenth- early twentieth-century networks that spanned across the Pacific.