January 30, 2020
4:00 PM to 5:30 PM
The complex nature of premodern Japanese literary production, and Japanese writers’ use of a continuum of scripts and languages, ranging from pure Japanese to pure Chinese, depending upon the genre, purpose and audience of their writing, is well known, however, little attention has yet been pa…
February 13, 2020
4:00 PM to 5:30 PM
In some sense, every tale—and every poem—tells a story that’s never been told in the exact same way. But some tales and poems, under certain circumstances, cannot be told or are forbidden to be told for reasons that are sometimes not clear or are clearly political. Recently, it&rsq…
February 14, 2020
4:00 PM to 5:30 PM
Professor Richard Jaffe (Duke University) will speak about his new book Seeking Sakyamuni: South Asia in the Formation of Modern Japanese Buddhism (University of Chicago, 2019). Jaffe reveals the experiences of the first Japanese Buddhists who traveled to South Asia in search of Buddhist knowle…
February 15, 2020
10:00 AM to 1:00 PM
In Buddhism’s adaptations in the modern West, much has been made of trends in new categories of Buddhist leaders who occupy a place that is neither monastic nor fully lay, but something in-between. This workshop explores similar categories as found in historical and modern traditions in Asia a…
February 23, 2020 to February 23, 2020
4:00 PM to
Seamless revisits the Japanese American incarceration and dissolution of the American Dream during World War II, exploring the ways the past haunts the present. Written by USC professor Dorinne Kondo and published in her most recent book, Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the W…
February 27, 2020
4:00 PM to 5:30 PM
This lecture interrogates a forgotten relation between film and beef. Before digitalization, gelatin, mainly extracted out of cattle was an indispensable material for fabricating film. Beef is not only represented on film, but also forms the substantial basis of its image. Anaylyzing…
April 3, 2020
10:00 AM to 5:00 PM
While there have been many studies and conferences on colonial, wartime, and postwar Japan, there has been much less attention paid to the connections between the era of total war and military occupation during the 1940s which ultimately shaped how we remember and write about the empire, the war, an…
12:00 PM to 2:00 PM
A talk with Prof. Yurika Wakamatsu (Occidental College). Late nineteenth-century Japan saw the emergence of new conceptions of art and gender, and strikingly, the feminization of art became a vital part of the modern ideals of Japanese womanhood. Indeed, art came to be perceived as a practice approp…
April 25, 2020 to April 25, 2020
12:00 PM to
THIS EVENT HAS BEEN POSTPONED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. Please check our website for more information. Maps have long been a crucial element in historical studies: they not only help us to determine locations but also to analyze connections and conflict among people, and to understand how peopl…
