Events

A 2-Day Workshop at the University of Chicago

December 6, 2024 | 1:30 pm 

Franke Institute for the Humanities, 1100 East 57th Street Chicago, IL 60637

To assist us with our planning, please be sure to register for each date individually by selecting the appropriate date to ensure your registration for each day of the workshop!

The concept of embodiedness—in which bodily and mental experiences shape one another in relation to their surroundings—plays a pivotal role in discourses concerning the body. World wars and their aftermaths have galvanized artists, activists, critics, and writers in Japan and elsewhere to reconsider their attention to the body politic and to instead focus on an individual subject’s lived experience while highlighting the inadequacies and limits of verbally sharing bodily experiences with other individuals. This workshop aims to transcend conceptions of embodiedness as dwelling within one’s own body or nation to instead examine the notion of embodiedness in relation to its flow or mobility across bodily, political, and media borders. The presentations aim to develop a new methodology for translating embodied practices across media for various sensory registers and thus for translating bodily experiences into words, images, and performances.

This event is sponsored by the Center for East Asian Studies.

A 2-Day Workshop at the University of Chicago

December 7, 2024 | 10:00 am

Franke Institute for the Humanities, 1100 East 57th Street Chicago, IL 60637

To assist us with our planning, please be sure to register for each date individually by selecting the appropriate date to ensure your registration for each day of the workshop!

The concept of embodiedness—in which bodily and mental experiences shape one another in relation to their surroundings—plays a pivotal role in discourses concerning the body. World wars and their aftermaths have galvanized artists, activists, critics, and writers in Japan and elsewhere to reconsider their attention to the body politic and to instead focus on an individual subject’s lived experience while highlighting the inadequacies and limits of verbally sharing bodily experiences with other individuals. This workshop aims to transcend conceptions of embodiedness as dwelling within one’s own body or nation to instead examine the notion of embodiedness in relation to its flow or mobility across bodily, political, and media borders. The presentations aim to develop a new methodology for translating embodied practices across media for various sensory registers and thus for translating bodily experiences into words, images, and performances.

This event is sponsored by the Center for East Asian Studies.

“Manufactured Love: Engineering Attachment in Japanese Robotics”

Tuesday, December 10, 2024 | 5:00 pm

Joseph Regenstein Library, Room 122 1100 E. 57th St. Chicago, IL 60637

How do you make someone fall in love with a robot? Japanese roboticists began contemplating this question in the 1980s, when it was realized that labor shortages in the service sector had created a market for caretaking domestic robots. In this talk, Professor Frumer first describes how Japanese roboticists developed designs that elicit users’ affection, affinity, and attachment to robots. Then, she explores and problematizes the politics of framing a love of robots as natural and/or inherently Japanese. Finally, Professor Frumer discusses some of the ethical concerns that arise in relation to the design of AI-driven empathic technologies.

This event is co-sponsored with the University of Chicago Library and the Center for East Asian Studies.

Asia and Postwar Japan: Deimperialization, Civic Activism, and National Identity

Wednesday, January 22, 2025 | 12 pm CST

Seminary Co-op Bookstores, 5751 South Woodlawn Avenue Chicago, IL 60637

BOOK GIVEAWAY!

Score a FREE copy of Simon Avenell’s book, Asia and Postwar Japan: Deimperialization, Civic Activism, and National Identity!  Click HERE for more information!

War defeat and the collapse of empire in 1945 touched every aspect of postwar Japanese society, profoundly shaping how the Japanese would reconstruct national identity and reengage with the peoples of Asia. While “America” offered a vision of re-genesis after cataclysmic ruin, “Asia” exposed the trauma of perpetration and the torment of ethnic responsibility. Obscured in the shadows of a resurgent Postwar Japan lurked a postimperial specter whose haunting presence both complicated and confounded the spiritual rehabilitation of the nation. This book traces the unfolding of Japan’s postwar Asia problem through six phases of deimperialization from 1945 until the early twenty-first century. It focuses on the thought and activism of progressive activists and intellectuals as they struggled to overcome rigid preconceptions about “Asia,” as they grappled with the implications of postimperial responsibility, and as they forged new regional solidarities and Asian imaginaries.

This event is presented in partnership with the Seminary Co-op Bookstores and sponsored by the University of Chicago Center for East Asian Studies.

“Imperial Testaments: Literatures of Dislocation in Modern Japan”

Thursday, January 30, 2025 | 5:00 pm

Joseph Regenstein Library, Room 122 1100 E. 57th St. Chicago, IL 60637

THIS IS AN IN-PERSON EVENT AND WILL NOT BE LIVE STREAMING.

Although the Japanese empire theoretically disappeared off the map in 1945 following Japan’s defeat by the Allied Powers, the competing narratives of place and belonging that had been engendered by Japanese imperialism were not so easily erased. This talk looks at repatriation memoirs and fiction published in Japan from the 1940s through the 1960s in order to illuminate the process whereby Japan was reconstituted from “multiethnic empire” to “peaceful nation-state.” It focuses in particular on Fujiwara Tei’s repatriation narrative The Shooting Stars are Alive (Nagareru hoshi wa ikite iru), which was an immediate commercial success when it was published in Japan in 1949 and which has since been translated into multiple languages, including English and Korean. In tracing how Fujiwara’s book has circulated in postwar East Asia and beyond, this talk will consider some of the transnational configurations of race, ethnicity, and post(-imperial, -colonial, -war) conditions that continue to shape common understandings of national and world literatures today.

This event is co-sponsored with the University of Chicago Library and the Center for East Asian Studies.

Revolutionary Stagecraft Theater, Technology, and Politics in Modern China

Thursday, February 13, 2025 | 4 pm CST

Seminary Co-op Bookstores, 5751 South Woodlawn Avenue Chicago, IL 60637

BOOK GIVEAWAY!

Score a FREE copy of Tarryn Li-Min Chun’s book!

The first (5) University of Chicago students (currently enrolled) who register to attend the event will receive their very own copy, compliments of the Center for East Asian Studies! Please click HERE for more information. 

Revolutionary Stagecraft draws on a rich corpus of literary, historical, and technical materials to reveal a deep entanglement among technological modernization, political agendas, and the performing arts in modern China. This unique approach to Chinese theater history combines a close look at plays themselves, performance practices, technical theater details, and behind-the-scenes debates over “how to” make theater amid the political upheavals of China’s 20th century. The book begins at a pivotal moment in the 1920s—when Chinese theater artists began to import, use, and write about modern stage equipment—and ends in the 1980s when China’s scientific and technological boom began. By examining iconic plays and performances from the perspective of the stage technologies involved, Tarryn Li-Min Chun provides a fresh perspective on their composition and staging. 

This event is presented in partnership with the Seminary Co-op Bookstores and sponsored by the University of Chicago Center for East Asian Studies. 

“The Human Factor: Industrial Psychology in China, 1930s to 1990s”

Tuesday, February 18, 2025 | 5:00 pm

Joseph Regenstein Library, Room 122 1100 E. 57th St. Chicago, IL 60637

THIS IS AN IN-PERSON EVENT AND WILL NOT BE LIVE STREAMING.

In 1935, the Commercial Press in Shanghai published a modest-sized volume on a subject most of its readers likely never heard of. Titled An Overview of Industrial Psychology (工業心理學概觀), this text had been written by a young psychologist who recently returned from his doctoral studies in Britain. It was the first in Chinese on the titular subject, which promised to (amid other things) “restore the rightful place of human beings in processes of production.” What was industrial psychology, and how did those who promoted and practiced it do so across multiple political and productive regimes? In this talk, I trace the history of industrial psychology in China from the 1930s to the 1990s, focusing on how this systematic study of work and the workplace reflected shifts in the meaning and value of labor and of science over those decades.

This event is co-sponsored with the University of Chicago Library and the Center for East Asian Studies.

Chinese Euphonics: Phonological Patterns, Phonorhetoric and Literary Artistry in Early Chinese Narrative Texts

Wednesday, February 19, 2025 | 12 pm CST

Seminary Co-op Bookstores, 5751 South Woodlawn Avenue Chicago, IL 60637

BOOK GIVEAWAY!

Score a FREE copy of Jeffrey Tharsen’s book!

The first (2) University of Chicago students (currently enrolled) who register to attend the event will receive their very own copy, compliments of the Center for East Asian Studies! Please Click HERE for more information!

What did Old Chinese prose sound like? Supported by digital texts, modern technologies and historical linguistics, Chinese Euphonics is a deep dive into the types of sound patterns that occur throughout the earliest corpora of narrative texts in the Chinese canon: the Western Zhou bronze inscriptions, the Classic of Documents《尚書》and the Zuo Commentary to the Spring and Autumn Annals《春秋左傳》. Tharsen demonstrates how sound patterns in the speeches preserved in these foundational texts functioned in concert with form and meaning to create “phonorhetoric,” a tactic employed by some of the most eminent figures from Chinese antiquity to beautify and strengthen their arguments and ideas by making use of extensive phonological patterning and the power of sound.

This event is presented in partnership with the Seminary Co-op Bookstores and sponsored by the University of Chicago Center for East Asian Studies.

Remixing Wong Kar-wai: Music, Bricolage, and the Aesthetics of Oblivion

Thursday, February 27, 2025 | 5 pm CST

Franke Institute for the Humanities, 1100 East 57th Street Chicago, IL 60637

BOOK GIVEAWAY!

Score a FREE copy of Giorgio Biancorosso’s book!

The first (5) University of Chicago students (currently enrolled) who register to attend the event will receive their very own copy, compliments of the Center for East Asian Studies! Click HERE for more information!

Like his fellow filmmakers Stanley Kubrick, Quentin Tarantino, and Sofia Coppola, Wong Kar-wai crafts the soundtracks of his films by jettisoning original scores in favor of commercial recordings. In Remixing Wong Kar-wai, Giorgio Biancorosso examines the combinatorial practice at the heart of Wong’s cinema to retheorize musical borrowing, appropriation, and repurposing. Wong’s irrepressible penchant for poaching music from other films—whether old Chinese melodramas, Hollywood blockbusters, or European art films—subsumes familiar music under his own brand of cinema. As Wong combs through musical and cinematic archives and splices disparate music together, exceedingly well-known music loses its previous associations and acquires an infinite new constellation of meanings in his films.

This event is presented in partnership with the Seminary Co-op Bookstores and sponsored by the University of Chicago Center for East Asian Studies.

“The Stuff of Literary Labor: Thinking about Text (wenzi) in China, 1000-1800 CE”

May 13, 2025 | 5:00 pm

Joseph Regenstein Library, Room 122 1100 E. 57th St. Chicago, IL 60637

What do the Classics, bureaucratic memos, and vernacular fiction have in common? How can one write about writing without “taking the axe handle as a model”? What would it mean to understand literary writing as itself a material substrate, rather than a surface applied? The answers to these questions come together in an epistemic shift that begins in the Song, reaches its fullest realization in the late Ming, and echoes into the eighteenth century; a transformation that begins in everyday practice and conversations between teachers and students, and ends with the term wenzi (文字) striving to supplant wen (文) as a useful term of literary art. Central to this shift is the imagination of a general scope for textual labor, whether that labor defines itself against the material object worked, contends with cultural capital in the literary marketplace, or teases out meaning in interpretive projects.

This event is co-sponsored with the University of Chicago Library and the Center for East Asian Studies.