General Public

Why Risk an Alliance? Evidence from Japan (1901-1960)

All alliances pose some risk to their signatories – the risk of provoking the mutual adversary and the risk of being entrapped in a war between the ally and the mutual adversary. States try to secure alliance terms that minimize such risks. Given this preference, when, how, and why do states agree to risky alliance terms? I test levels of threat, ally dependency, and militarism as potential explanatory variables of variation in alliance risk by examining all six of Japan’s alliances with Western great powers.

Digital Humanities on Korean Literature: Revisiting Yŏm Sang-sŏp through Digital Literary Approaches

Our talk aims to examine a body of works by Yŏm Sang-sŏp (1897-1963), a major fiction writer and critic in South Korea, through digital and quantitative analyses. Famous for balancing between right and left-wing ideology and for his realistic writing style packed with witty punchlines, Yŏm portrayed Korean society during and after the colonial period (1910-1945).

Reading Edo: Data-driven Approaches for Japan Studies

The talk will introduce data-driven humanities projects at the Center for Open Data in the Humanities (CODH) on historical materials during the Edo period such as Edo maps http://codh.rois.ac.jp/edo-maps/ (link is external), Miwo (A mobile app for AI kuzushiji recognition) http://codh.rois.ac.jp/miwo/, Kaokore http://codh.rois.ac.jp/face/, Bukan Complete Collection http://codh.rois.ac.jp/bukan/, and edomi

Pak Sheung Cheun’s Artwork “Nightmare Wallpaper” and Hong Kong’s Despair

This talk analyzes the current political predicament of Hong Kong by examining “Nightmare Wallpaper,” an art project composed of the automatic drawings by local artist Pak Sheung Cheun when he was attending the court cases of some political activists on trial. He subsequently transformed them into wallpaper prints, a series of installation arts, and a book. This political work, which is also very private, honestly demonstrates the artist’s intense struggles along with despair felt by many in the city.

Diverse or Disciplinary: DH in Mainland China Today

Since 2009, digital humanities has developed a flourishing trend in mainland China. Recently, the development of digital humanities has become and more diverse and varied with the increase of several DH research centers, journals and courses. Digital humanities has gained more fans while provoked many internal debates and various challenging from outside.

Pen Pals in Crime: Literary Sinitic Letter Writing in Tokugawa Japan

Most letters in Tokugawa Japan were written in sōrōbun, the epistolary style of classical Japanese. Yet there were also letters composed in kanbun, or Literary Sinitic prose. This talk will focus on a set of three letters, written in Literary Sinitic prose in Genroku 11 (1698) by Muro Kyūsō (1658–1734), then a Confucian scholar in the service of the Kaga domain lord Maeda Tsunanori (1643–1724), and addressed to Aochi Norimoto (1675–1744), a samurai retainer of the same domain.

Diasporic Routes and Nappy Tales in Okinawa: Reflections on Reading and Writing the Black Pacific

The radical framework of the Black Pacific offers a unique way to make sense of the multiple afterlives brought together in the heavily militarized island of Okinawa, Japan. This talk will focus on key lessons learned while researching and writing about the entanglements of Black and Asian intimacies, colonialities, and forms of anti-Blackness in Okinawa.

Making Minorities on the Sino-Tibetan Borderlands of Early-Maoist China: United Front Gradualism, Revolutionary Impatience, and the (still) Unresolved Legacies of Empire

Minorities, like majorities, do not just exist. Minoritization instead is an inherent corollary to the process of nation-state building. This talk examines one site of state-initiated minoritization, the ethnocultural frontier region in northwest China known to Tibetan speakers as Amdo. When in 1949 the Chinese Communist Party “liberated” Amdo, its aim was not simply control over non-Han people, but the transformation of what had been loose sets of imperial subjects into bounded “minority nationalities” within a new People’s Republic of China.

Between hierarchy and patriarchy: The duality of Chinese bureaucracy in history

From the perspective of comparative institutional analysis, Zhou examines the historical origins of Chinese bureaucracy and state building in China. Zhou argues that Chinese bureaucracy took shape in response to two forces: the power of the absolute state and the differential mode of association in Confucian culture. As a result, the institutions of Chinese bureaucracy in history were characterized by the duality of hierarchy and patriarchy. This historical legacy has had a strong influence on the remaking of Chinese bureaucracy and state building in contemporary China.

Advertising Baby Boys: Racial and Gender Politics of Infant Feeding in Cold War South Korea (1950s-1960s)

In the context of the unending Korean War and the continuation of national division on the Korean peninsula, it is difficult to imagine the 1950s and early 1960s beyond images of mass death, orphanhood, and poverty. Histories of the era have been dominated by military and diplomatic histories, while recent scholarship on transnational adoption have shown how both real and imagined children and women were crucial to the US-ROK relations and the US empire during the Cold War.

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