Archives & Recordings – Page 27 – Sigur Center for Asian Studies

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03/28/18: Early Photography of the Silk Road: A Discussion with Visiting Scholar Maeve Nolan

March 26, 2018July 21, 2021Archives & Recordings, Visiting Scholar RoundtablesLeave a Comment

Audio Recording Part 1

Audio Recording Part 2

Audio Recording Part 3

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Part of the Sigur Center’s Visiting Scholar Roundtable Series

Wednesday, March 28, 2018
12:00 PM – 1:30 PM
Chung-wen Shih Conference Room
The Elliott School of International Affairs
1957 E Street, NW, Suite 503
Washington, DC 20052

Early photography of the Silk Road is a sub-genre of early photography. These photographs have contributed significantly to the Western world’s vision of the Silk Road and Asia but they have yet to be studied in depth. This talk explains what early Silk Road photography looks like, its origins, who produced it and why.

This event is on the record and open to the media.

About the speaker:

Maeve Nolan is a second year PhD Art History and Archeology student at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. She is currently a visiting scholar with George Washington University’s Sigur Center whilst she conducts her research at the National Geographic Society. The title of her PhD is:

“Early Silk Road photography: A case study of how and why Dr. Maynard Owen Williams, Litt. D. (1888-1963) photographed the Silk Road during the Citroen-Haardt Trans-Asiatic Expedition (1931-1932)”

Her PhD examines early photography of the Silk Road through a close analysis of the work of one of the last of the early Silk Road photographers, Maynard Owen Williams (1888-1963). She has chosen Williams’ photographs of the Citroen-Haardt Trans-Asiatic Expedition (1931-1932), which re-traced the route of Marco Polo, as a case study. These photographs present some of the most technically proficient, romantic, painterly and widely distributed examples of early Silk Road photography and appeared alongside articles Williams wrote for the influential American publication, the National Geographic Magazine.

Through her research, she intends to shed light on this overlooked photographic genre and help to deepen understanding of its impact on the Western world’s relationship with and understanding of Asia and the Silk Road.

historical painting of Japanese surrender to the Americans

03/28/18: Traversing the Warrior Fantasy–Martial Culture and The Meiji Restoration

March 26, 2018July 21, 2021Archives & RecordingsLeave a Comment

Audio Recording Part 1

Audio Recording Part 2

Friday, March 23, 2018

Time: 2pm-4pm

Location: National Churchill Library and Center (Gelman Libaray 101a)

This event is co-sponsored by the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures and the Sigur Center for Asian Studies.

Speaker: Michael Wert, Associate Professor of East Asian History, Marquette University

Abstract: The Meiji Restoration is typically analyzed in terms of international and domestic politics, intellectual trends, and changes in the commercial economy. This talk adds to that conventional narrative by exploring the role of warrior identity and the widening gap between warrior ideals and warrior realities in the nineteenth century. For samurai and elite commoners alike, martial culture in the form of swordsmanship became a vehicle for acting out the fantasy of the ideal warrior at a time when warrior authority was at its nadir. Rather than see culture as simply a site of resistance, it was the very act of over-identifying with warrior fantasy and ideology that undermined the Tokugawa regime.

Speaker Bio: Professor Michael Wert is an associate professor of East Asian history at Marquette University, with a focus on early modern and modern Japan. His first book Meiji Restoration Losers: Memory and Tokugawa Supporters in Modern Japan engages memory theory by asking how memory can help answer broader historical questions. Specifically, it traces the “memory landscapes” of the Meiji Restoration from 1868 to the present through the lens of those on the losing side. His second project continues to center around the Meiji Restoration, using theoretical tools to investigate the role of martial fantasy, culture, and violence in the early modern period. Professor Wert is a graduate of GW (B.A. East Asian Studies, 1997).

old western style buildings with Chinese shop signs

Three Waves of Jewish Migration to China: 1845-1941

March 21, 2018May 18, 2021Archives & Recordings1 Comment

Event Schedule

2:00pm – 2:30pm – Registration

2:30pm – 4:00pm – Lecture and Q&A

4:00pm – 4:30pm – Refreshments & networking

Room: Lindner Commons (Rm 602)

Address: Elliott School of International Affairs – 1957 E St NW, Washington, DC

DESCRIPTION

Three waves of Jewish migrants went to China, mainly to Shanghai. First in 1845 from the Middle East for trade; the second group, refugees from Russia during the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and ensuing Civil War; the third group in the mid-1930s of refugees fleeing from virulent antisemitism in Nazi Germany to China, one of the rare countries in the world where entry visas were not required. The lives of these three groups are described before/ during/after the Japanese occupation (Pearl Harbor-August 1945). By 1948, their exodus to various countries. In partnership with the Sigur Center for Asian Studies, GW Judaic Studies Program and the GW History Department and the GW Confucius Institute, we are proud to have Dr. Liliane Willens lead a special lecture and Q&A on Three Waves of Jewish Migration to China: 1845-1941.

A retired professor from Boston College and MIT, Dr. Liliane Willens is a current Washington, D.C. resident with a vibrant history growing up in Shanghai, China. Dr. Willens was born of Russian parentage in the former French Concession of Shanghai. She, her parents, and sisters all lived in China during Japanese occupation and World War II, and emigrated a couple years after the founding of the People’s Republic of China. Dr. Willens is the author of the book, Stateless in Shanghai

group of Burmese children looking forlornly at the camera

03/27/18: Film Screening and Discussion of Left for Dead: Myanmar’s Muslim Minority

March 21, 2018July 21, 2021Archives & RecordingsLeave a Comment

Audio Recording Part 1

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Audio Recording Part 3

Tuesday, March 27, 2018
2:00 PM – 4:00 PM

The George Washington University
Elliott School of International Affairs
1957 E Street NW
Lindner Family Commons, Room 602
Washington, DC 20052

Gallery 102 is proud to present “As The World Watches.” This exhibition presents a select collection of responses to the humanitarian crisis affecting communities in Myanmar (formerly Burma). Like many other countries in our modern era, Myanmar is experiencing an increasingly fractured society and a growing radical movement within their politics. In keeping with some of history’s worst examples of conflict, the rapidly escalating violence in Myanmar is centered around religious and ethnic divisions. Recent riots have caused massive upheaval in the country, bringing long past due attention to the host of human rights issues affecting the Rohingya people. In the wake of this flood, the world has begun to turn its focus on the true cost and scope of a modern genocide. The aim of As The World Watches is to raise awareness of Myanmar’s long history of displaced peoples, and examine how the concept of “Other” has led to the systematic and ongoing annihilation of entire communities. Change can only begin with knowledge.

As part of this series, Gallery 102 and the Sigur Center for Asian Studies will present a film screening of “Left for Dead: Myanmar’s Muslim Minority.” The film shows what VICE News uncovered about its investigation into the violence and discrimination faced by the country’s Muslim minority. Following the screening will be a panel discussion on the film and the broader social, political, and historical context of the situation.

Discussants:

Layla Saad, Gallery 102 Curator & Co-Chair
Dr. Christina Fink, Professor of Practice of International Affairs, GW
Matthew Wells, Senior Crisis Advisor, Amnesty International
Robert Marro, Burma Task Force

About the film:
In recent years, democratic reforms have swept through Myanmar, a country that for decades was ruled by a military junta. As the reforms took hold, however, things were growing progressively worse for the Rohingya, a heavily persecuted ethnic Muslim minority concentrated in the country’s western state of Rakhine.

The 2012 gang rape and murder of a Buddhist woman by three Muslim men ignited violent riots in which hundreds were killed as Rakhine Buddhists and Rohingya attacked each other. In the following months, tens of thousands of Rohingya were rounded up and forced to live in squalid camps; Human Rights Watch deemed the attacks crimes against humanity that amounted to ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya. Thousands of Rohingya have since attempted to leave the country, fueling the region’s intricate and brutal human trafficking network.

Janet Steele, pictured in professional attire

04/11/18: Book Launch: Mediating Islam: Cosmopolitan Journalisms in Muslim Southeast Asia A Discussion with Dr. Janet Steele

March 7, 2018July 20, 2021Archives & Recordings, New Books in Asian StudiesLeave a Comment

Audio Recording Part 1

Audio Recording Part 2

Wednesday, April 11, 2018

12:00 PM – 2:00 PM

The Elliott School of International Affairs

1957 E Street, NW, Lindner Family Commons, Room 602

Washington, DC 20052

book cover of mediating islam

Broadening an overly narrow definition of Islamic journalism, Janet Steele examines day-to-day reporting practices of Muslim professionals, from conservative scripturalists to pluralist cosmopolitans, at five exemplary news organizations in Malaysia and Indonesia. At Sabili, established as an underground publication, journalists are ed for their ability at dakwah, or Islamic propagation. At Tempo, a news magazine banned during the Soeharto regime and considered progressive, many see their work as a manifestation of worship, but the publication itself is not considered Islamic. At Harakah, reporters support an Islamic political party, while at Republika they practice a “journalism of the Prophet” and see Islam as a market niche. Other news organizations, too, such as Malaysiakini, employ Muslim journalists. Steele, a longtime scholar of the region, explores how these publications observe universal principles of journalism through an Islamic idiom.

This event is on the record and open to the media.

About the speaker:

Dr. Janet Steele is an associate professor of journalism at the George Washington University and the director of the Institute for Public Diplomacy and Global Communication. She received her Ph.D. in History from the Johns Hopkins University and focus on how culture is communicated through the mass media.

Dr. Steele is a frequent visitor to Southeast Asia where she lectures on topics ranging from the role of the press in a democratic society to specialized courses on narrative journalism. Her book, “Wars Within: The Story of Tempo, an Independent Magazine in Soeharto’s Indonesia,” focuses on “Tempo” magazine and its relationship to the politics and culture of New Order Indonesia. Awarded two Fulbright teaching and research grants, she has served as a State Department speaker-specialist in Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Brunei, the Philippines, East Timor, Taiwan, Burma, Sudan, Egypt, India and Bangladesh. The author of numerous articles on journalism theory and practice, her most recent book, “Email Dari Amerika,” (Email from America), is a collection of newspaper columns written in Indonesian and originally published in the newspaper Surya. Her most recent book is Mediating Islam, Cosmopolitan Journalisms in Muslim Southeast Asia.

Co-sponsored by the Sigur Center for Asian Studies and the Elliott School of International Affairs

03/26/18: Taiwan Lecture: Archiving Taiwanese Literature in Translation: A Discussion with Dr. Jonathan Stalling

March 7, 2018July 21, 2021Archives & RecordingsLeave a Comment

Audio Recording Part 1

Audio Recording Part 2

Audio Recording Part 3

Monday, March 26, 2018
12:45 PM – 2:00 PM
Gelman Library, Room 702
2130 H St. NW
Washington, DC 20052

Flier for archiving taiwanese literature in translation

You are invited to join us for a discussion with Dr. Jonathan Stalling on the topic of “Archiving Taiwanese Literature in Translation.” Dr. Stalling will cover topics including:

* The literary archive as it relates to Sinophone literature
* Taiwanese literature in translation
* Archival efforts in Taiwan
* Chinese Literature Translation Archive at the University of Oklahoma
* Circulation of Sinophone literature outside the Sinosphere

And much more! Please come and join the discussion. This event is on the record and open to the media.

About the speaker:

Dr. Jonathan Stalling is Professor of English specializing in East-West Poetics at the University of Oklahoma, where he is a founding editor of Chinese Literature Today magazine and book series and the Curator of the Chinese Literature Translation Archive at the University of Oklahoma Library. He is also the Deputy Director of the Center for the Study of China’s Literature Abroad at Beijing Normal University and was the 2015 Poet in Residence at Beijing University. Dr. Stalling is the author of six books of literary scholarship, translation and poetry and his opera 吟歌丽诗 was staged at Yunnan University in 2010.

This event is co-sponsored by GW’s Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures, the Sigur Center for Asian Studies, and the Taiwan Academy.

03/22/18: The Art of Chieftaincy in the Writings of Pashtun Tribal Rulers: A Discussion with Dr. Mikhail Pelevin

March 7, 2018July 21, 2021Archives & RecordingsLeave a Comment

Audio Recording Part 1

Audio Recording Part 2

Audio Recording Part 3

Thursday, March 22, 2018
1:00 PM – 2:30 PM
The Elliott School of International Affairs
1957 E Street, NW, Lindner Family Commons, Room 602
Washington, DC 20052

farm pictured with clear blue skies and mountains in the back

Among early modern Pashto writings the works of the Khattak tribal rulers are of particular importance as primary internal sources on the sociopolitical history and culture of Pashtuns in the period preceding the Afghan state building processes of the 18th century. The views of Pashtun military-administrative elite on governance are expounded most clearly in a range of texts, both in prose and verse, pertaining to the universal literary genre of “Mirrors for Princes” (Nasihat al-Muluk). Rooted in the medieval Persian classics, Pashto “Mirrors” nevertheless reflect in the foreground local ethnocultural peculiarities by shifting the very subject from statesmanship to chieftaincy, declaring regulations of the unwritten Code of Honor, and dealing with real politics through the examination of individual cases related to tribal conflicts.

The paper offers a survey of the nasihat al-muluk writings by Khushhal Khan Khattak (d. 1689) and Afzal Khan Khattak (d. circa 1740) including still poorly studied documents from the latter’s historiographical compilation “The Ornamented History” (Tarikh-i Murassaʿ). The texts under discussion prove that the outlook and behavioral patterns of Pashtun chieftains in pre-modern times stemmed from a combination, partly eclectic and contradictory, of Islamic precepts, feudal ideologies of the Mughal administrative system, and rules imposed by the Pashtun customary law (Pashtunwali).

This event is on the record and open to the media.

About the speaker:

Dr. Mikhail Pelevin is Professor of Iranian Philology at St. Petersburg State University (Russian Federation). His main area of research is the early modern Pashto literature conceptualized as the most distinct and expressive element of social culture and ethnic self-identification of Pashtuns in the transition period from the late Middle Ages to modern times. Among his publications in Russian are books Khushhal Khan Khatak (1613-1689): the Beginning of the Afghan National Poetry (2001), Afghan Poetry in the First Half and the Middle of the Seventeenth century (2005), Afghan Literature of the Late Middle Ages (2010); a new book The Khattaks’ Chronicle: the Corpus and Functions of the Text is coming soon. Few recent articles are available in English, e.g.: “The Beginnings of Pashto Narrative Prose” (2017), “Persian Letters of a Pashtun Tribal Ruler on Judicial Settlement of a Political Conflict”, 1724 (2017), Daily Arithmetic of Pashtun Tribal Rulers: Numbers in The Khataks’ Chronicle (2016), “Ethnic consciousness of Pashtun Tribal Rulers in Pre-modern Times” (2015). M. Pelevin teaches courses on Persian, Pashto, the history of Persian and Pashto literatures. His other academic interests include Iranian dialectology and Muslim law.

headshots of Jeffrey Wasserstrom (right) and Maura Cunningham (left)

03/20/18: China in the 21st Century: Why History Still Matters: A Discussion with Dr. Jeffrey Wasserstrom and Dr. Maura Cunningham

March 7, 2018July 21, 2021Archives & Recordings, New Books in Asian StudiesLeave a Comment

Audio Recording Part 1

Audio Recording Part 2

Audio Recording Part 3

Tuesday, March 20, 2018
2:00 PM – 4:00 PM
The Elliott School of International Affairs
1957 E Street, NW, Lindner Family Commons, Room 602
Washington, DC 20052

book cover of china in the twenty-first century

In this two-person illustrate talks, based on the fully revised and updated third edition of their coauthored book, China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know, Jeffrey Wasserstrom and Maura Cunningham will explore issues associated with China’s meteoric rise, the distinctive and in many ways worrisome stamp Xi Jinping is putting on the country, and the local and global implications of recent events on the mainland and in Hong Kong. One theme they will stress is that even as China alters the current geopolitical order and has cities that often seem futuristic, paying attention to the past and how stories about history are used and misused inside and outside of the PRC has in some ways never been more important.

This event is on the record and open to the media.

About the speakers:

Jeffrey Wasserstrom is Chancellor’s Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine; Editor of the Journal of Asian Studies; a member of Dissent Magazine‘s editorial board; and an academic editor of the China Channel of the Los Angeles Review of Books. He has contributed commentaries and reviews to the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, and various other newspapers and to magazines. His other books include, as editor, The Oxford Illustrated History of Modern China (2016). He received his PhD from UC Berkeley.

Maura Cunningham is an Associate at the University of Michigan’s Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies and edits the #Asianow blog of the Association for Asian Studies. She has written on modern Chinese history for the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Ms., World Policy Journal, and Time. A past editor of China Beat, she is an advising editor to the China Channel of the Los Angeles Review of Books. She received her PhD from UC Irvine.

03/14/18: Marketcraft: How Governments Make Markets Work in the US and Japan: A Discussion with Dr. Steven Vogel

March 7, 2018July 21, 2021Archives & RecordingsLeave a Comment

Audio Recording Part 1

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Wednesday, March 14, 2018
12:30 PM – 1:45 PM
The Elliott School of International Affairs
1957 E Street, NW, Lindner Family Commons, Room 602
Washington, DC 20052

Headshot of Steven Vogel dressed in professional clothing with grey background

From financial regulation to anti-trust enforcement to governance of the internet, policymakers in Washington and Japan are increasingly failing at the job of effective market regulation. In a provocative new book, Dr. Steven Vogel argues that the reason governments so often get this wrong is that they are stuck in a stale and misleading debate over government regulation versus market freedom. In fact, he argues, markets must by their nature be regulated, and the real debate is over how best to regulate in the public interest. In era of globalization and new, disruptive market platforms Vogel’s thoughtful pro-governance arguments have never been more relevant.

This event is on the record and open to the media.

About the speaker:

Dr. Steven Vogel is the Il Han new professor of Asian studies and a professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley. He specializes in the political economy of advanced industrialized nations, especially Japan and the United States. Vogel’s new book is entitled Marketcraft: How Governments Make Markets Work and builds on three decades of scholarship. He is also the author of Japan Remodeled: How Government and Industry Are Reforming Japanese Capitalism, and his first book, Freer Markets, More Rules: Regulatory Reform in Advanced Industrial Countries, won the Masayoshi Ohira Memorial Prize. He has a B.A. from Princeton University and a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley.

This event is co-sponsored by the Institute for International Economic Policy and the Sigur Center for Asian Studies. In cooperation with Asia Policy Point.

02/28/18: Exporting Censorship in the Digital Age: Lessons in Chinese Sharp Power A Discussion with Dr. Glenn Tiffert

February 14, 2018July 21, 2021Archives & RecordingsLeave a Comment

Audio Recording Part 1

Audio Recording Part 2

Wednesday, February 28, 2018
1:00 PM – 2:30 PM
The Elliott School of International Affairs
1957 E Street, NW, Room 505
Washington, DC 20052

The Chinese Communist Party is pursuing a distinctively Leninist path to soft power. It depicts public opinion as a battlefield upon which a highly disciplined political struggle must be waged and won. This talk documents one aspect of that struggle: how the Party is leveraging its economic muscle and the technologies of the information age to sanitize the historical record and globalize its own competing narratives. The talk also illustrates the vulnerabilities introduced by our deepening digital dependence and the challenges we confront in safeguarding the integrity of our knowledge base.

About the speaker:

Glenn Tiffert, a Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution, earned his Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Berkeley. He has taught at Berkeley, Harvard, University of Michigan and UCLA, and currently serves on the Projects and Proposals Committee of the American Society for Legal History. Glenn’s research interests center on 20th century China, particularly its experience of revolution. At the vanguard among scholars of modern Chinese legal history, he has published works in English and Chinese on the construction of the modern Chinese court system and judiciary, the drafting of the 1954 PRC Constitution, the legacies of Nationalist judicial modernization to the PRC, and the hidden genealogy of current PRC legal policy. Glenn is also pioneering the integration of computational methods drawn from data science into the study of Chinese history. Using China as an illustrative case, his latest research empirically documents the alarming synergies between digitization, intellectual property law, censorship, and authoritarianism, and exposes how emerging technologies could spur Orwellian manipulation of the historical record and memory on a global scale.