Edward H. Hume Memorial Lecture
The Council on East Asian Studies is pleased to present the 63rd Edward H. Hume Memorial Lecture in Chinese Studies. A reception will follow the lecture in the Luce Common Room (2nd Floor). China’s governments and many of its political theorists have championed a “pedagogical state” to create ideal subjects or citizens. Confucian faith in education and Maoist belief in “self-reform” are well known, but how has this worked in practice and what does the history of cultivating the people tell us about Chinese statecraft, past and present? This lecture explores this history through the examples...
The Council on East Asian Studies is pleased to present the 62nd Edward H. Hume Memorial Lecture in Chinese Studies. The lecture will take place from 4:30pm to 6:00pm with a reception to follow in the Luce Common Room (2nd Floor) One approach to Chinese history is to “look at China from the periphery” (从周边看中国) and to consider it an “interconnected cultural history” (交错的文化史). These notions refer to the practice of observing and studying Chinese traditions and culture through written materials preserved in various cultural areas around China and in the West. This facilitates a closer look at...
The Council is pleased to present the 61st Edward H. Hume Memorial Lecture in Chinese Studies. Lecture will take place from 4:00PM to 5:30PM in Henry R. Luce Hall Auditorium, followed by a reception in Luce Common Room from 5:30PM to 6:30PM. The postwar period saw China debate many issues that still have immense importance for understanding the China of today. Those years contain the period of the Chinese civil war of 1946-50, but also much more than that. It was also the time when China moved into a new phase of internationalization, and became embroiled in some of the biggest global...
The Council is pleased to present the 60th Edward H. Hume Memorial Lecture in Chinese Studies. Lecture will take place from 4:30 PM to 5:30 PM in the Amphitheater Room 101 at Henry R. Luce Hall, followed by a reception in Luce Common Room from 5:30 PM to 6:15 PM. This lecture explores the life of an elite woman, raised in Beijing and educated at a missionary school during the May Fourth era. Daughter of a Beiyang reformer, wife of a Nationalist official educated at MIT, mother of an underground Communist revolutionary, she herself left no direct trace in the public record. She emerges...
The Council is pleased to present the 59th Edward H. Hume Memorial Lecture in Chinese Studies. Lecture will take place from 4:00 PM to 5:30 PM in the Amphitheater at the Greenberg Conference Center, followed by a reception in the Upper Lobby from 5:30 PM to 6:30 PM. Many see a rising China as a security threat to the United States and its friends and allies because it seeks to drive the United States out of East Asia, dominate that region, and challenge the United States globally in a new Cold War. These concerns are overblown. But the good news ends there. The difficult challenges...
The Council is pleased to present the 58th Edward H. Hume Memorial Lecture. The existence of a Chinese cultural tradition for a long time provided (still provides?) the raison d’être of Sinology. So foundational is the concept of tradition that it is rarely examined closely. Sinologists are so busy interpreting tradition that we forget to ask how it operates. Does it have its own diachronic logic? Is it just one thing, or several? Interculturally, does tradition keep the Other out, or has it developed by incorporating the Other? The Chinese painting tradition is as good a place as any...
The Council is pleased to present the 57th Edward H. Hume Memorial Lecture Since the early 2000s, the Chinese government has launched a series of “anti-desertification” campaigns in the arid northwest. Based on her field research in the pastoral area of western Inner Mongolia and agricultural area in central Gansu province, Hsing will talk about herders and farmers’ aspirations and strategies of living with conservation programs such as ecological relocation, grazing and farming reduction, and state subsidies in China’s rapidly changing rural economy. You-tien Hsing’s research...
The Council is pleased to present the 54th Annual Edward H. Hume Memorial Lecture. Please RSVP to eastasian.studies@yale.edu by January 30th China’s ambition to achieve great power status faces daunting challenges. At home, regime security and territorial...
The Council is pleased to present the 55th Edward H. Hume Memorial Lecture. This talk will introduce the lyrical in epic time as an exemplary case of modern Chinese literary thought. While the lyrical may seem like an unusual form for representing China’s social and political crises in the twentieth century, Wang contends that the trauma of national cataclysm and mass movement intensified Chinese lyricism in extraordinary ways. He describes the engagements undertaken by two intellectuals, Shen Congwen (1902-1988) and Feng Zhi (1905-1993), through the 1949 crisis, and ponders the consequences...
The Council is pleased to present the 56th Edward H. Hume Memorial Lecture. The “High Tang” is seen as the apex of classical Chinese poetry. But understand an era, we need to free it from the aging weight of its reputation. I will show that the received understanding of the High Tang (indeed the very term) was entirely the creation of the early thirteenth century, half a millennium after the fact. Then I will go back and look at the community that defines the “High Tang,” producing a system of values and a version of empire different from and in opposition to the imperial center and the...
<div style=”text-align:justify;”>The Council is pleased to present the 53rd Annual Edward H. Hume Memorial Lecture. Charity halls established in major Chinese metropolises in the post-Taiping era had the common mission of restoring political and social order in a period of continuous human and natural disasters. They all shared some common new features that distinguished them from traditional charities: first, local merchant groups, with their national and global networks, replaced the traditional gentry as leaders in the movement. This new leadership also brought about new forms of...
The Council is pleased to present the 52nd Annual Edward H. Hume Memorial Lecture. This talk examines key elements of an emerging Chinese regime of production in Zambia, Africa’s leading copper producer and the site of the first of five Chinese-owned special economic zones to be built on the continent. Drawing on comparative field data on Chinese and non-Chinese firms in construction and copper mining, two pivotal industries for Chinese and African developments, Professor Lee will discuss the strategies of accumulation and legitimation by Chinese capital, and explore the constraints imposed...
The Council is pleased to present the 51st Annual Edward H. Hume Memorial Lecture.Languages continually enrich themselves with concepts they import from other languages. While not a modern phenomenon, the denser and faster communications during the 19th and 20th centuries have resulted in a large-scale homogenization of the modern languages of the world around a core of globalized concepts with their modern order and hierarchy. The common features of these concepts are hidden below the linguistic surface of the different languages and most speakers are unaware of them. Concepts are abstract...
The Council is pleased to present the 50th Annual Edward H. Hume Memorial Lecture. Chinese connoisseurs of the seventeenth century liked to imagine a perfect alignment between fine art and elegant sensibility. To their great frustration, the art market, which would sell anything to anyone with money, embraced no such ideal. The ambitious connoisseur had to learn how to work the market to his benefit, especially as his demand was drawing forgeries into circulation. The diary of a Ming connoisseur shows us a canny consumer of cultural commodities at work, struggling to re-align commercial...
The Council is pleased to present the 49th Annual Edward H. Hume Memorial Lecture. How has the commercialization of the mass media and growth of the Internet changed Chinese politics? Although China is far from having a free press, the competition for audiences motivates journalists to push the limits of censorship. As a result, the Chinese public has access to much more information about domestic and international news than it did previously, and public opinion has become an important factor in the policymaking process. The narrowing of the information gap between politicians and the...
The Council is pleased to present the 48th Annual Edward H. Hume Memorial Lecture. Temple paintings and visualization practices in Chinese Buddhism offer different visions of the pure land, a paradise graced by a Buddha and devoid of the suffering of normal life. This lecture examines the way the afterlife was conceived and enacted in a different source: liturgies for funerals, memorial services, healing ceremonies, and other rites in eighth-tenth century Dunhuang (northwest China). The lecture proposes a performative analysis of several hundred manuscript prayers written by local Buddhist...
The Council is pleased to present the 47th Annual Edward H. Hume Memorial Lecture. Benjamin Elman is Professor of East Asian Studies and History at Princeton University, with East Asian Studies as his primary department. His teaching and research fields include Chinese intellectual and cultural history, 1000-1900; the history of science in China, 1600-1930; the history of education in late imperial China; and Sino-Japanese cultural history, 1600-1850. He received his Ph.D. in Oriental Studies from the University of Pennsylvania (1980) and came to Princeton in 2002 from the University of...
The Council is pleased to present the 46th Annual Edward H. Hume Memorial Lecture. The international order in Asia is shifting as a result of China’s increasingly active diplomacy, economic centrality, and military might. Some observers believe that China is challenging and replacing the United States as the region’s major power and key actor. These observers also argue that the U.S. and China are set on a collision course for regional dominance. Other analysts believe that Washington and Beijing can constructively cooperate together to manage regional issues, and that their relationship...
The Council is pleased to present the 45th Annual Edward H. Hume Memorial Lecture. Kenneth Pomeranz is Chancellor’s Professor of History and Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures at University of California - Irvine, former Chair of the History Department, and Director of the University of California Multi-Campus Research Group in World History. His publications include The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (winner, Fairbank prize, American Historical Association; co-winner, World History Association Book Prize); The World That Trade...
