CEAS Postdoctoral Associates Lecture Series
This talk examines the box-office success, film Shin Godzilla (Shin Gojira; 2016) by the director Anno Hideaki, that reveals the affective nature of confined spaces and their relation to the recurring depiction of monstrosity shaped in the enclosed environment. The narrative conveys the dual process of Japan-ness through the representation of Godzilla and the bureaucrats who fight against Godzilla. While Godzilla brings pure destruction, he also holds God-like presence alarming the use of nuclear power. However, in this film, instead of focus being on the monster itself, a group of...
Buddhist images were materialized to illuminate what is unseen giving presence to absent celestial deities and the untraced sacred realms they inhabited. Yet, images also served as conduits to connect the human body with the Buddha, particularly through ritual practices of contemplating mandalas and in placing corporeal fragments within sculptures. This talk investigates how the preoccupation with the interconnectedness between the image and the body led to the makings of embroidered textiles of silk and human hair at the end of the 1100s, reaching a peak in popularity during the following...
Buddhism’s movement out of India and around the globe has provoked great changes in every society it has touched, and its spread ranks among the most significant developments in human history. Translation played a central role in this story, but how did Buddhist translators go about their work? This talk harnesses the only surviving set of records from a pre-modern Buddhist translation bureau to better understand Buddhist translation practices. Among the manuscripts discovered in 1900 in the Silk Road oasis of Dunhuang are lecture notes, outlines, drafts, and reference works tied to the...
Buddhism is often presumed to be a strictly pacifist religion, thus a Buddhist military chaplain would be an oxymoron. The history of Buddhism, however, is rife with examples of Buddhists fighting wars, and foundational Buddhist scriptures address “compassionate” and “skillful” forms of warring, soldiering, and leadership. Korean Buddhism is no different, and, since 1968, the South Korean Buddhist military chaplaincy has stood as another testament to this history. Buddhist leaders and chaplains in South Korea have drawn upon scriptures popular throughout the Buddhist world to justify the...
From 1862 onward, frequent wars and natural catastrophes caused millions of deaths across midwestern China. Within a century, several hundred thousand Chinese and Muslims fled to Amdo on the northeastern Tibetan Plateau. At the same time, the Qing, Republican, and Communist governments strove to counter foreign encroachments on Inner Asia. How did these refugees cross the Sino-Tibetan border and establish their communities in Tibetan territories? What were the dynamics of interaction between these ethno-culturally diverse groups as Amdo was transformed into Chinese territorial administrative...
This talk will be based on my book project, En Route to the Taj Mahal: Transformation of Architecture and Royal Identity under the Qarakhanids in Pre-Mongol Central Asia. It explores how the Islamic façade (aka pishtaq) –one of the most spectacular and persistent architectural elements of Islam – opens the window to understanding Central Asian cultural history and society. Pishtaq was a monumental high façade, lavishly decorated with Arabic inscriptions, geometric and floral patterns around a central door, the earliest and many instances of which were found in funerary structures. Emerging...
The existing literature on propaganda in authoritarian systems is largely focused on top-down propaganda strategies, such as whether propaganda persuades or intimidates, and how effective different sources of propaganda and types of propaganda content are. This research instead examines propaganda from the bottom-up perspective, looking into how the unique traits of those who are exposed to propaganda influence its effectiveness. Primarily this literature examines demographics like education levels, family backgrounds, political awareness, and whether the individual lives in an urban or rural...
Globalization and massive transnational movements have profoundly challenged people’s nation-based identities. This, in turn, has encouraged scholars to re-examine the idea of citizenship. Historians in particular have concerned themselves with how people in different times and places defined their communities and their relationships with the state. This talk presents a case study from the early Tang empire of China. At its largest extent, the Tang’s territory spanned the Korean peninsula to present-day Afghanistan, governing a large multi-ethnic population. It also attracted many foreigners...
The cultural phenomenon known as Korean Wave (Hallyu) has flourished on the Chinese mainland since the 1990s, both officially and unofficially, despite looming political conflicts and cultural boycotts. Although the term Hallyu was initially coined in the Chinese context and the phenomenon has reshaped the contours of Chinese pop culture, the Sino-Korean entanglements in screen media have received little attention in English-language scholarship. Tian Li’s research theories the (re)localization of Korean screen culture in China through the concept of what she terms screen-capitalism—a system...
The right to asylum is a hotly contested issue in the politics of rich democracies of the Global North, most of which – despite implementing various restrictive measures of deterrence – accept a significant number of asylum-seekers. A country that is part of the Global North that lies outside this pattern is South Korea, a rich Asian democracy whose compliance with international treaties on refugee protection and enactment of a domestic refugee law are at odds with the exceptionally low number of asylum-seekers it accepts. I explore this puzzling discrepancy by examining Korea’s bureaucratic...
Why are young people underrepresented in most political institutions? And does this shortage of young politicians matter for the extent to which young people’s interests are reflected in policy outcomes? Understanding the answer to these questions is especially important in advanced democracies such as Japan that confront the challenges of declining birth rates and aging populations. In these countries, politicians face soaring welfare costs and tough decisions about how to allocate scarce resources between the needs of younger working families and elderly retirees. Without the presence of...
Bureaucracy is a pillar of state building. I examine how statemakers achieve the transition from tenuous rule to consolidated rule. I argue that rulers can diversify the selection system to recruit agents who have different skill sets to solve the dual challenges of state building: coercion and compliance. While rulers appoint officials who have ideational resources to elicit compliance, they turn to officials with practical skills to respond to military challenges. I draw on archives to build an original dataset on the prefects of Qing Dynasty of Imperial China prefectural and conflict...
In the context of the unending Korean War and the continuation of national division on the Korean peninsula, it is difficult to imagine the 1950s and early 1960s beyond images of mass death, orphanhood, and poverty. Histories of the era have been dominated by military and diplomatic histories, while recent scholarship on transnational adoption have shown how both real and imagined children and women were crucial to the US-ROK relations and the US empire during the Cold War. In this talk, I centralize childhood and consumption in Cold War Korea beyond our understanding of the iconography of...
Scholars of religions have generally been more comfortable with ideas than with things… They have been particularly uncomfortable, perhaps, when people touched or rubbed or hugged or kissed things, especially when those things were themselves somewhat disconcerting—dead bodied, bits of bone or cloth, dirt or fingernails, dried blood. This uneasy itself may go a long way toward explaining why we still understand little about relics. And this lack of understanding may represent a serious gap since these bodies and bits of bone and otherwise seemingly dead matter have played a lively role in the...
This talk examines debates about the visibility and invisibility of the emperor and imperial institutions as a site for thinking about the meaning of trust (xin) in early China. I argue that these debates can be fruitfully organized around two paradigms, what I call the invisible seer paradigm and the visibly blind paradigm. These two paradigms organize many discussions, but this talk will focus on two sites: ritual and law. In both places there was a struggle to articulate the proper balance between sight and blindness revealing the ambiguity of xin in early China. Trenton Wilson is a...
The History of Koryŏ and the Essentials of Koryŏ History are two court histories on the Koryŏ dynasty (918–1392) compiled during the early decades of the Chosŏn (1392–1910). Written in the cosmopolitan language of Literary Sinitic, these two books became foundational texts for the Chosŏn elites to write and rewrite their past. Today, the two texts are centerpiece historical sources for the study of premodern Korea. In this talk, I examine the Chosŏn-era production, circulation, and reception of these two court histories. Based on my examination of over 100 Chosŏn-era copies of the History and...
As a hyper-aging society, Japan has one of the highest global life expectancies and is undergoing a demographic transition that Western nations have yet to experience. The Japanese government is encouraging robotic solutions to a labor shortage in elder care, and Japanese authorities have adopted an agenda of introducing social robots to assist with elder care. However, Japanese society increasingly experiences the phenomenon of people becoming emotionally attached to anthropomorphic machines such as social robots. The introduction of social robots into the realm of elder care may be...
Communication in China has been characterized as centralized, censoring, and, with the hyper-technologized dominance in facial recognition technologies, “techno-authoritarian.” This talk presents evidence that disappeared communications and erased messages, although ubiquitous, are often not results of censorship. Records and databases produce noir stories and dystopic narratives about Chinese media cultures. These stories are incomplete because they are skewed towards stored and “verifiable” data. In this talk, I argue that the elite use storage media to preserve knowledge, but meanwhile,...
Lab-experiment and survey based studies find that intergroup threat and group identity have significant implications on the formation of political attitudes, that those factors encourage individuals to approach information with directional motivation. On the other hand, unrealistic assumptions prevent those findings to be directly generalized to the real-world context. In this study, we use novel twitter network data during rising territorial disputes in Japan to capture real-world information communication process under intergroup threat. In our data, twitter users communicate information...
During the Second Sino-Japanese War, the leadership of the Republic of China attempted to mobilize Han citizens to the frontier for large-scale land reclamation projects that were supposed to assimilate indigenous ethnic groups and safeguard the borderlands against foreign encroachment. Proponents of this strategy drew inspiration from the imperial institution of tuntian (colonial fields) in formulating a modern vision of tunken, which I interpret as “agrarian colonization.” Tunken resonated with veins of Chinese nationalism that were agrarian and often anti-industrial in nature. This talk...
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