CEAS Lecture Series

Co-sponsored with The University of Chicago Library, this series was established in 2016 and provides students, faculty, and members of the community an opportunity to interact with academics who are at the forefront of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean studies in the United States and abroad.  Determined by the three faculty committees for China, Japan, and Korea housed within the Center, the CEAS Lecture Series invites distinguished scholars to present a topic that focuses on their latest research and draws upon their expertise and knowledge in their field.  

To view a listing of upcoming and past speakers, please click on the relevant links below.

Andre Schmid (University of Toronto)
Associate Professor of East Asian Studies
Title: "North Korea's Mundane Revolution, 1953-1965"
Thursday, October 17, 2024, 5 pm CT
Click here to register.

Yulia Frumer (Johns Hopkins University)
Bo Jung and Soon Young Kim Professorship of East Asian Science, Associate Professor and Chair
Title: "Manufactured Love: Engineering Attachment in Japanese Robotics"
Tuesday, December 10, 2024, 5 pm CT
Click here to register.

Christina Yi (University of British Columbia)
Associate Professor in Modern Japanese Literature
Title: "Imperial Testaments: Literatures of Dislocation in Modern Japan"
Thursday, January 30, 2025, 5 pm CT
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Victor Seow (Harvard University)
John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences
Title: "The Human Factor: Industrial Psychology in China, 1930s to 1990s"
Tuesday, February 18, 2025, 5 pm CT
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Alexander Des Forges (University of Massachusetts, Boston)
Professor of Chinese
Title: "The Stuff of Literary Labor: Thinking about Text (wenzi) in China, 1000-1800 CE"
Tuesday, May 13, 2025, 5 pm CT
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Peter K. Bol (Harvard University)
Charles H. Carswell Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations
Title: "Histories of Learning, 8th-18th Century"
Please note that the speaker did not authorize the recording of their lecture.

Will Bridges (University of Rochester)
Arthur Satz Professor of the Humanities and Associate Professor of Modern Languages and Cultures; and Core Faculty member of the Frederick Douglass Institute for African and African-American Studies
Title: "Epistemology of the Violets, or Do Black Lives Still Matter for Asian Studies?"
Please note that the speaker did not authorize the recording of their lecture.

Janet Chen (Princeton University)
Professor of History and East Asian Studies
Title: "The Sounds of Mandarin"
Click here to view the lecture on YouTube.

Nicholas Harkness (Harvard University)
Modern Korean Economy and Society Professor of Anthropology
Title: "The Transpacific Matter of Sound; or, The Religious Media of Korean War Debris"
Please note that the speaker did not authorize the recording of their lecture.

Samuel E. Perry (Brown University)
Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and East Asian Studies
Title: "Toward a Queer Marxism: The Evolving Perversities of Gay Japan"
Click here to view the lecture on YouTube.

Ben Uchiyama (University of Southern California)
Associate Professor of History
Title: "The Serial Killer: Making Sense of War and Defeat in Occupied Japan (1945-1952)"
Please note that the speaker did not authorize the recording of their lecture.

Darren Byler (Simon Fraser University)
Assistant Professor of International Studies
Title: "The Camp as Classroom: Discipline, Technology and Agency in Uyghur Internment in Northwest China"
Please note that the speaker did not authorize the recording of their lecture.
Also co-sponsored with the Pozen Family Center for Human Rights as part of its 25th-anniversary celebration, and the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations

Laura Moretti (University of Cambridge)
University Associate Professor in Pre-Modern Japanese Studies
Title: "When Reading Morphs into Play Early Modern Japan and Ludic Literature"
Click here to view the lecture on YouTube.

J. Keith Vincent (Boston University)
Associate Professor of Japanese & Comparative Literature and Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Convener of Japanese
Title: "Haiku and the 'Desire to Write': on Masaoka Shiki and Marcel Proust"
Click here to view the lecture on YouTube.

Robert Weller (Boston University)
Professor of Anthropology
Title: "Chairman Mao and the Ferocious General: Value Pluralism, Value Play, and Ritual Subjunctives in Chinese Religion"
Click here to view the lecture on YouTube.

Gerald Figal (Vanderbilt University)
Professor of History and Asian Studies
Title: “The Business of Photography in Occupied Okinawa”
Part of the "Rethinking 'Reversion': Okinawa, Japan, and the U.S. Fifty Years Later Anniversary Series"
Click here to view the lecture on YouTube.

Andrew F. Jones (University of California, Berkeley)
Louis B. Agassiz Professor in Chinese
Title: "Hei Ying's Pagan Love Song"
Please note that the speaker did not authorize the recording of their lecture.

Laurel Kendall (American Museum of Natural History)
Curator of Asian Ethnology and Division Chair, Division of Anthropology
Professor, Richard Gilder Graduate School
Title: "Comparing Gods and Things – Looking at and Beyond Korea"
Click here to view the lecture on YouTube.

Wendy Matsumura (University of California, San Diego)
Associate Professor of History
Title: "Neocolonialism and Struggle in Okinawa from Wartime Mobilization to Reversion"
Part of the "Rethinking 'Reversion': Okinawa, Japan, and the U.S. Fifty Years Later Anniversary Series"
Click here to view the lecture on YouTube.

Mae Ngai (Columbia University)
Lung Family Professor of Asian American Studies and Professor of History
Co-Director, Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race
Title: "The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics"
Click here to view the lecture on YouTube.

Don J. Wyatt (Middlebury College)
John M. McCardell, Jr. Distinguished Professor
Title: "Who-or What-Were the First Blacks of China?"
Click here to view the lecture on YouTube.

Adam Clulow (The University of Texas at Austin)
Associate Professor
Title: "The Great Asian Deerskin Boom: Trade, War and the Early Modern Japanese Consumer"
Please note that the speaker did not authorize the recording of their lecture.

Ian Johnson
Writer/Independent Scholar
Title: "Writing a New History of China: How Chinese Intellectuals Are Trying to Fill in Blank Spaces in Contemporary Chinese History "
Click here to view the lecture on YouTube.

Ian J. Miller (Harvard University)
Professor of History
Title: "Against Transition: Meiji Tokyo and the Revolution of the Anthropocene"
Please note that the speaker did not authorize the recording of their lecture.

Brett de Bary (Cornell University)
Professor
Title: "Tawada Yōko and Social Thought:  Deconstruction, Destruction, Assimilation"

Sun Joo Kim (Harvard University)
Harvard-Yenching Professor of Korean History
Title: "My Own Flesh and Blood: Stratified Parental Compassion and Law in Korean Slavery"
*Lecture followed by a conversation with the Department of History's Susan Burns

Boduerae Kwon (Korea University)
Professor of Korean Literature
Title: "Self-determination' and 'Representation' in the March 1st Movement: An Experiment in Simultaneity and Immediacy in 1919 Colonial Korea"
*Lecture followed by a conversation with Hosam Aboul-Ela (Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Houston and Co-editor of the "Theory in the World" series)

Nak-chung Paik (Seoul National University)
Professor Emeritus of English, and Co-President Emeritus, Korea Peace Forum
Title: "The Korean Peninsula in Flux: South Korea's 'Candlelight Revolution' and its Impact"
*Lecture followed by a conversation with the Department of History's Bruce Cumings

Ruth Rogaski (Vanderbilt University)
Associate Professor of History
Title:  “Qi of Heaven, Qi of the Void: Atmosphere, Air, and the Sacred in late Qing Translated Science"

Vyjayanthi Ratnam Selinger (Bowdoin College) 
Associate Professor of Asian Studies
Title: "War Without Blood? The Curious Itinerary of a Taboo Fluid in Medieval Japan"

Dr. Reiko Tomii (PoNJA-GenKon)
Independent Scholar & Co-Director
Title: "Wilderness as Method, Contemporaneity as Method"

Richard Calichman (City College of New York, CUNY)
Professor of Japanese Studies
Title: "Remembering Kafka: Between Murakami Haruki and Komori Yōichi"

Carter Eckert (Harvard University)
Yoon Se Young Professor of Korean History
Title: "Military, Manchukuo, and Modernization: Park Chung Hee and Modern Korea"

David L. Howell (Harvard University)
Professor of Japanese History
Title:  “How Green Was My Night Soil: Thinking with Excrement about Nineteenth-Century Japan”

Christine Mollier (French National Center for Scientific Research)
Director of Research
Title: "Talismans to pacify the tomb: archeological evidence from Central China and Dunhuang"

Theodore Jun Yoo (Yonsei University)
Associate Professor of Korean Language and Literature
Title: "You Only Live Twice: Dr. Muhammad Kkansu (a.k.a Jeong Su-Il) and the Question of the Diasporic 'Other' in the Two Koreas"

Charles K. Armstrong (Columbia University)
The Korea Foundation Professor of Korean Studies in the Social Sciences
Title: "Industrialization and its Consequences in Transborder Northeast Asia"

Daniel Botsman (Yale University)
Professor of History
Title: "From Sacred Cow to Kobe Beef: Japan's Bovine Revolution"

Aaron Gerow (Yale University)
Professor of Film Studies and East Asian Languages & Literatures
Title:  “On Terada Torahiko and the Physics of Film"

Wai-Yee Lee (Harvard University)
Professor of Chinese Literature
Title: "In Quest of the Genuine"

Matthew Sommer (Stanford University)
Professor of Chinese History
Title: "Gender Passing and Official Panic in Qing Dynasty China"