Transregional

This conference will bring together scholars of South, Southeast, and East Asia for a discussion framed by the concept of a “wood age.” We will consider both the centrality of wood to material life in the premodern world and the changes brought by the industrialization of the forest. Using perspectives from social and cultural history; archeology and paleoecology; and the histories of art, architecture, science, and medicine, this conference will address the wide range of ways that people interacted with woodlands. These dialogues will help move forest history beyond the early focus on...

Interested in East Asian Studies courses? Come explore course offerings for the 2018-2019 academic year and meet the CEAS faculty, post-docs, and visiting scholars teaching exciting new courses this year. Both undergraduate and graduate students are welcome to attend this event. Snacks will be provided.  Please RSVP to eastasian.stu...

This course offers a visual history of the art objects and other material goods that people set in motion, physically and imaginatively, across the Silk Roads regions of Eurasia from antiquity through the beginnings of the medieval era. It ranges across a variety of cultural productions and sites encompassing the agrarian and nomadic zones of Eurasia from the Bronze Age through the 7th-century rise of the first Caliphates in the west and the efflorescence of the Sui-Tang cosmopolis in the east.

One Sky is an attempt to deliver a message that we live under and share one sky no matter how different our individual beliefs may be or what political borders have been created. Musicians of Korea, Japan, China, Iran and the USA will collaborate to create a new piece in pursuit of world peace. The performance will be followed by a Q&A dialogue between audience and performers about their musical experiences.  One Sky is organized by the Wesleyan University Music Department, the College of East Asian Studies, and Yale University Council on East Asia Studies. Supported by the Allbritton...

Directed by Jung Henin & Laurent Boileau (GKIDS, 2012, 74 min. DCP) This remarkable animated documentary traces the unconventional upbringing of the filmmaker Jung Henin, one of thousands of Korean children adopted by Western families after the end of the Korean War. It is the story of a boy stranded between two cultures. Sepia-toned animated vignettes – some humorous and some poetic – track Jung from the day he first meets his new blond siblings, through elementary school, and into his teenage years, when his emerging sense of identity begins to create fissures at home and ignite the...

When the twenty-nine leaders of the newly post-colonial states gathered in the West Javanese city of Bandung in April 1955, the global media coverage helped to turn the Bandung Conference into one of the most iconic moments of the post-colonial history. ‘Great Men’ of history such as Nehru, Zhou Enlai and Sukarno elegantly ‘danced’ on the world stage to the delights of popular audiences worldwide. But, where were the women? When we consider the history of international diplomacy, there is a dearth of women as agents of diplomacy. This study probes deeper into how and why women have been...

Lunarfest is a day-long event offering arts and cultural programs for adults and children of all ages in celebration of the Lunar New Year, kicking off with the Lion Dance down Whitney Avenue! This year, the theme of the festival is “People-to-People.”  People-to-People reflects a spirit of cross-cultural dialogue, specifically between the American and Chinese cultures. People-to-People also underscores the commonality of all people. Regardless of an individual’s culture, there are innate aspects of the human experience that connect us all around the world–humor, food, art, music,...

This talk is based on the newly released book Dream Trippers: Global Daoism and the Predicament of Modern Spirituality (University of Chicago Press), a multi-sited ethnographic study of transnational encounters between American spiritual tourists and practitioners and the Chinese monks and hermits of the sacred Daoist peak of Huashan. In this talk, the co-authors will reflect on how their ethnography unexpectedly and unavoidably became an intervention in the religious field they were studying, leading them to question the insider/outsider distinction in the study of religion. They will...

Lunch will be served. The Xiongnu have been of considerable scholarly interest since their first description by Sima Qian in his Shiji from the early first century BCE, and are best known as the nemesis of the “Middle Country” during the Han Dynasty, described by their Han contemporaries as brutal horse riding barbarians that live by the drawing of the bow. This lecture will explore the character of the Xiongnu from a four-field anthropological approach (Culture, Language, Archaeology and Bioanthropological), examining what each field has to offer to the discussion to date, and what we can...