Sunday, January 7
This symposium aims to contribute to the international and interdisciplinary discussion on the relationship between food and subsistence diversity, and biological diversity (diversity of ecosystems, species, and individual organisms).
Wednesday, January 31
This talk demonstrates how throughout the 1950s and early 1970s in Cambodia, scholarship focused on precolonial chronicles remained a dominant stream of collective historical imagination, alongside the colonial model of historiography. While chronicle scholarship emerged as a series of myths that encompassed very little sense of historical truth, the chronicle’s hegemonic role can be examined through its involvement in the composition of official textbooks, its significance to and influence on people’s collective values and beliefs, and finally its existence as an attractive source material for the production of popular and royal court cultural elements.
Thursday, February 1
Friday, February 2
Leong Clancy Fellowship Annual Lecture 2024, by Berkeley PhD student Gus Holley (4pm), followed by a musical performance (5:30pm)
The film tells the true story of evacuees from Futaba in Fukushima. Unable to return to their hometown because of the ongoing disaster of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, residents are scattered throughout the country and mourn the loss not only of their community but of their traditions, such as the Futaba Bon-Uta, a festival musical performance they have celebrated for centuries.
Friday, February 9
The Center for Korean Studies at UC Berkeley is honored to introduce the 2023 winner of the UC Berkeley Hong Yung Lee Book Award in Korean Studies, Language and Truth in North Korea (University of Hawai’i Press, 2021), by Professor Sonia Ryang (Rice University).
Thursday, February 15
Jane Jin Kaisen will do a screening of her recent short film Burial of this Order (2022), followed by a talk and Q&A.
We are the same substance! Zongmi’s theory of the True Mind
Jenny Hung , Assistant Professor, Division of Humanities at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
Zongmi 圭峯宗密 (780-841) was a prominent Chinese Buddhist scholar who lived during the Tang Dynasty. He is considered to be one of the most important figures in the development of Chinese Buddhism, particularly the Huayan (Flower Garland) and the Chan school. When constructing his own theory of mind and nature, Zongmi proposed the concept of “true mind of original enlightenment” (本覺真心 benjue zhenxin).
In this presentation, I argue for two claims about the true mind: (1) we are the same substance: the true mind. Moreover, (2) the true mind is a cosmic mind, a fundamental mental substance as one unified whole, that is also the ontological ground of the myriad entities. I provide two interpretations of the characteristics of the true mind. The first is to say that it is pure awareness without content. The second is to say that it is pure awareness of all sentient being’s minds. I then devise a unity theory of consciousness modified from Brentano (1874/1995), according to which inner awareness is what unifies experience. I illustrate that this theory can be applied to explain how experiences merge to form a cosmic true mind, while each ordinary mind does not feel so.
Jenny Hung is an assistant professor in the Division of Humanities at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. She has two PhDs, one in philosophy, another in nanophysics. She investigates the nature of the self from both the Western and Eastern perspectives. She published in Philosophical Psychology, Philosophy East and West, Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy, Asian Philosophy, History of Philosophy and Logic, etc. She is now working on two books: Between Buddha-nature and Emptiness: The Peak Era of Chinese Buddhism (OUP) and What am I? Personal Ontology in Chinese Philosophy (under review).
Friday, February 16
This conference will thus be focused on political institutions as an aspect of transregional history, especially those involving collaborative governance, consultation, or condominial sovereignty. In the period under consideration, political institutions and traditions played a central role in integrating diverse regions or political cultures, building new, larger polities, and functioning as systems of extraction that moved goods, currency, and people across great distances.
Thursday, February 22
Lu Xun, one of the most important modern Chinese writers, once warned: “As long as you can still hear wailing, sighing, crying and begging, you should not be too worried. But confronted with cold silence, you must be careful: … it is the harbinger of real anger.”
Thinking across Ethnic Studies, Asian American Studies, and Southeast Asian Studies, this talk draws upon selected visual readings to examine how war losses incurred by Vietnamese bodies became incorporated back into the U.S. racial capitalist mode of production as site of value generation and extraction across race.
The ’Nanjing Miracle’ Reinterpreted: The Cult and Yogic Practices of the Bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara in Ming China
2024 Khyentse Lecture
Shen Weirong, Tsinghua University, Beijing
Shen Weirong holds a Ph.D. in Central Asian Science of Language and Culture from Bonn University (1998). Currently, he is Professor of Tibetan and Buddhist Philology at Tsinghua University, Beijing. He is the author of Leben und historische Bedeutung des ersten Dalai Lama dGe ’dun grub pa dpal bzang po (1391–1474)—Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der dGe lugs pa-Schule und der Institution der Dalai Lama (Styler Verlag, Institut Monumenta Serica, St. Augustin, Germany, 2002) and Philological Studies of Tibetan History and Buddhism (Shanghai Press of Chinese Classics, 2010).
Thursday, February 29
For the past two decades since 2003, approximately 20 South Korean films have achieved the status of ‘Cheonman Yeonghwa,’ recording over 10 million ticket sales—the highest index of domestic popularity. While their dynamic diversity and industrial issues within mainstream Korean cinema have been extensively discussed, this talk directs critical attention to their shared sociopolitical foundation in terms of psychoanalytic biopolitics.
This talk explores the kinds of political and economic systems, agricultural landscapes, ecological sacrifices, and labor that are necessary to produce coffee in Vietnam, the world’s second largest coffee producing country.
Friday, March 1
When can “machines be seen as the measure of men”, as the historian Michael Adas so beautifully opined? This talk focuses on three moments when technology became crucial in “wiring” maritime Asia into larger landscapes of modernity and colonization. First, we examine the laying of telegraphs across Indochina’s coasts en route to China, as the French started to plant flags in this part of the world. Second, we will look at the notion of building a canal across the Isthmus of Kra, in what is today southern Thailand, and what was then the semi-independent kingdom of Siam. Finally, we will also analyze the spread of lighthouses as Foucauldian instruments of coercion in the Anglo-Dutch sphere of Insular Southeast Asia, in land-and seascapes that currently comprise Malaysia and Indonesia. I argue in this presentation that all of these Asian processes were inter-related, and that they show in regional miniature the shadow and shape of larger forces that were then sweeping the globe.
Thursday, March 7
Presenting part of her book-in-progress, Dignity Archives, Kim examines the discourses of roadkill, habitat fragmentation, and animal confinement in relation to roads and in/human otherness. Through an analysis of contemporary cultural texts in various media, Kim reflects on the dignity that is revealed in the material presence of dead animals on the roadside, even in the absence of social mourning for them.
Friday, March 8
Southeast Asian Students for OrgaNizing (SEASON) Conference is a 2-day conference with various advocacy training workshops, keynote speakers, and community building activities. Our main goal is to provide a safe space for Southeast Asian students nationwide to strategize campus-based actions to effectively advocate for their community.
This year’s theme is LegaSEA: Leading a legacy involves creating a lasting impact or contribution that is remembered and valued by future generations. Students will learn from Southeast Asian organizations and community leaders from various fields to learn about what legacy they want to lead and leave behind.
RSVP priority deadline is February 24th. RSVP here
You can find this form and additional information at https://seasonconference.wixsite.com/home.
Additionally, if you have questions regarding SEASON, please do not hesitate to contact us via email at seasonconference@gmail.com.
This conference will bring together scholars from Europe, Asia and North America and serve as a platform for our graduate students and recent graduates with a specialization in Nepal, as well as current postdoctoral fellows, to present their work.
This talk presents a fascinating look at the anxious pleasures of Japanese visual culture during World War II.
This talk explores the stratified community that emerged under George Clunies-Ross, the kingly master of the Cocos-Keeling Islands from 1871 until his death in 1910.
Please kindly note this event has been rescheduled to 4pm, Friday March 8 at the same venue due to an emergency. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.
Like any theoretical term, the word local, together with its conceptual affiliates such as localism, locus, and location, invites different approaches of exploration, but in the context of Hong Kong literature and culture, the question that seems unavoidable is why and how the local as such has become or persisted as a question worth asking. In a world that is increasingly described as global (with Hong Kong officially promoting itself as “Asia’s World City”) but also simultaneous and instantaneous, should the local be understood as a time lag, a gap, and a pause in that incessant stream of simultaneity and instantaneity? If locality needs to involve time as much as space, how should it be discussed, in film and other visual media, other than factographically?
Saturday, March 9
This conference will bring together scholars from Europe, Asia and North America and serve as a platform for our graduate students and recent graduates with a specialization in Nepal, as well as current postdoctoral fellows, to present their work.
Sunday, March 10
This conference will bring together scholars from Europe, Asia and North America and serve as a platform for our graduate students and recent graduates with a specialization in Nepal, as well as current postdoctoral fellows, to present their work.
Tuesday, March 12
This talk asks: Having survived the colonial era, the World Wars, and through the end of the Cold War, how did the royalist elite of Thailand manage to survive US withdrawal from the Vietnam War without having the kingdom overrun by communist forces and even maintain a degree of dominance in domestic politics?
Tuesday, March 19
This talk focuses on circumstances in Myanmar to identify the indeterminate nature of political activist time. Activists must assess any action both for what it does (relatively) immediately, and for what it might produce in the (relatively) longer term: provisional failures can be resources for future victories, while erstwhile successes can become sundered after their moment of apparent achievement.
“The Yaksha Kingdom” (Yecha guo) in Liaozhai zhiyi 聊齋誌異 (Liaozhai’s Records of the Strange) by Pu Songling 蒲松齡 (1640-1715) tells the story of a Chinese merchant who suffers a shipwreck, drifts to an island, and with no better options, establishes a family with a female islander whom he identifies as a yakshini (mu yecha 母夜叉). This tale, intertwining fear, despair, reconciliation and humor, is a rewriting of earlier Chinese yaksha narratives, which emerged with the spread of Buddhism into China during the medieval period. Placing the tale within the context of cross-cultural encounters, this talk will examine the yakshas’ transition from Indian to Chinese culture and their various depictions in the Tang dynasty tales. It will also consider the recurring theme of the perils faced by shipwrecked merchant as portrayed in Yijian zhi 夷堅志 (Records of Yijian) from the Southern Song period. These two veins of investigation will enable us to further analyze how Pu Songling transforms the traditional horrific yaksha encounters into a nuanced story of separation and reunion, and to gain insight into the literary and cultural significance of this fantastic tale, which blends irony, ambivalence and shades of hope.
Wednesday, March 20
Activism, in its collective form, has become a ubiquitous practice for those members in Japanese opposition or minority groups, using different methods and approaches to make their voice heard. Using theoretical tools that read into the choir and polyphony in Mikhail Bakhtin and Jacques Rancière’s writings, I argue that the choir is the immediate embodiment of polyphony, but also transformation of the silenced into the arena of activism and voicing of minorities who were silenced and left behind, in the name of Japanese homogeneity
Thursday, March 21
When we study modern Buddhist history, we often use “modernity” as a frame of reference. But in the case of women, how well-balanced is the picture of the period that the term “modernity” provides? My argument is that assessing modernity through the creation of institutions and reforms does not tell the whole story of women’s history and their lives.
Language and language education are two central topics in the studies of Chinese diasporic culture. However, existing scholarship has overwhelmingly focused on how overseas Chinese populations deal with language politics in their hosting societies. This talk adopts a different perspective by examining how overseas Chinese played central roles in establishing Indonesian language programs in mainland China between the mid-1940s and mid-1960s.
This talk will examine writings by and about the men and women of one Huzhou literati family to explore its fraught process of reinvention in the wake of personal and political disarray during the Qing conquest. The complex interplay of familial and political meanings of loyalty and disloyalty is a central theme of this story. Two brothers of the Fei family fought with Ming loyalist forces to defend their hometown against the Qing invaders, one dying valiantly, while a second went on to write a secret account of the region’s notorious literary inquisition in the 1660s that implicated thousands of people in a seditious history of the fallen Ming Dynasty. Their younger brother and his son worked assiduously to build political and economic foundations for success as officials loyal to the new dynasty. Yet the family’s traumas continued to haunt them, shaping personalities and priorities in gendered ways, complicating aspirations for family cohesion, and presaging the betrayals that would destroy the family in the mid-eighteenth century.
Friday, March 22
The Centers for Japanese Studies and Buddhist Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, together with Ōtani University and Ryūkoku University in Kyoto announce a workshop under the supervision of Mark Blum that will focus on critically examining premodern and modern hermeneutics of the Tannishō, a core text of the Shin sect of Buddhism, and arguably the most well-read religious text in postwar Japan.
Saturday, March 23
The Centers for Japanese Studies and Buddhist Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, together with Ōtani University and Ryūkoku University in Kyoto announce a workshop under the supervision of Mark Blum that will focus on critically examining premodern and modern hermeneutics of the Tannishō, a core text of the Shin sect of Buddhism, and arguably the most well-read religious text in postwar Japan.
Wednesday, March 27
The Institute of Buddhist Studies and the Center for Japanese Studies at UC Berkeley are excited to announce this bilingual workshop, which brings together chaplaincy educators and working chaplains in Japan and the United States to reflect on how we connect Buddhist teachings with effective service.
Thursday, April 4
In this talk, I offer a critical reading of key scenes in One to One. I consider these scenes in relation to representations of orphanhood, Christian benevolence, and faith-based humanitarianism in the musical performances by the Korean Children’s Choir (formerly known as the World Vision Korean Orphan Choir) and by Julie Andrews.
How do European-language scholars with a Western cultural background perceive, understand and describe the human phenomena they observe in East Asia? How does their mind process written or spoken information conveyed in foreign script and languages? This lecture will discuss the cognitive and epistemological relationship existing between Sinology and source-language data from several complementary perspectives, including the role of metalanguage and culturally predetermined categories in the generation of learned discourse, the formation of terminologies, the coinage of neologisms, the epistemic value of the information produced, and the conditions of its reception by neighbouring disciplines in the humanities and by the educated public.
Friday, April 5
This lecture retells the story of Dunhuang art through the perspective of space. This is necessary because although there are countless overviews of the art of Dunhuang, the framework is generally temporal. Guided by the dynasties of China’s past, these overviews present a linear history of the Mogao Caves, supplanting the actual place with an abstract temporal sequence. This lecture presents an alternative narrative based on visitors’ experience and discusses some representative caves to demonstrate a new methodology in studying Dunhuang art Mogao.
Tuesday, April 9
In conjunction with the International Decade of Indigenous Languages, GETSEA, CSEAS and the Bophana Center present four short films by Indigenous Cambodian filmmakers on the themes of “Healing, Memory & Care.”
Wednesday, April 10
Through poetic exploration of voice, body, and costume, performer Aine Nakamura (Ph.D. student, Music) will present a new performance, Okaiko.
Thursday, April 11
This talk seeks to shed light on both the Philippines’ fraught democratic trajectory as well as its high-stakes diplomacy vis-à-vis the superpowers. Crucially, it also analyzes how deepening US-China competition is dramatically affecting the fate of pivotal states across the Indo-Pacific region.
The Birth of Prince Siddhārtha: From Divergent Textual Sources to Distinct Visual Narratives
Osmund Bopearachchi, Chao Visiting Professor of Buddhist Art
University of California, Berkeley
Monday, April 15
The Bancroft Library’s collections of materials relating to the Philippines span nearly 500 years. Highlights in this exhibit include a transcript of an Inquisitorial trial from 1646, a prayer book written in the Cebuano language, and UC Berkeley Filipino student publications from 1905 to the present. The exhibit also features selections from the personal papers of acclaimed author Jessica Hagedorn, including typewritten drafts of her novels, poetry, song lyrics, and a screenplay, as well as childhood drawings and writings.
Tuesday, April 16
The Bancroft Library’s collections of materials relating to the Philippines span nearly 500 years. Highlights in this exhibit include a transcript of an Inquisitorial trial from 1646, a prayer book written in the Cebuano language, and UC Berkeley Filipino student publications from 1905 to the present. The exhibit also features selections from the personal papers of acclaimed author Jessica Hagedorn, including typewritten drafts of her novels, poetry, song lyrics, and a screenplay, as well as childhood drawings and writings.
Wednesday, April 17
The Bancroft Library’s collections of materials relating to the Philippines span nearly 500 years. Highlights in this exhibit include a transcript of an Inquisitorial trial from 1646, a prayer book written in the Cebuano language, and UC Berkeley Filipino student publications from 1905 to the present. The exhibit also features selections from the personal papers of acclaimed author Jessica Hagedorn, including typewritten drafts of her novels, poetry, song lyrics, and a screenplay, as well as childhood drawings and writings.
Thursday, April 18
The Bancroft Library’s collections of materials relating to the Philippines span nearly 500 years. Highlights in this exhibit include a transcript of an Inquisitorial trial from 1646, a prayer book written in the Cebuano language, and UC Berkeley Filipino student publications from 1905 to the present. The exhibit also features selections from the personal papers of acclaimed author Jessica Hagedorn, including typewritten drafts of her novels, poetry, song lyrics, and a screenplay, as well as childhood drawings and writings.
I would like to raise the question of militarism to view Korean modernization beyond the idea of colonial modernity and colonial exploitation.
In this talk, Peter Frankopan will talk about the past, present and future of the Silk Roads, and set out some ideas of the benefits and challenges of focusing of joining up geographies, cultures, disciplines and periods that link Asia, Africa and Europe.
Friday, April 19
To mark the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, April 30, 1975, this conference, sponsored by the Department of History and CSEAS, features scholarship that centers Vietnamese individuals, communities, movements, institutions, and discourses in the history of twentieth century Vietnam.
This talk examines the strange case of the historiography of the Vietnam War, where a major belligerent, South Vietnam, has been consistently left out, depicted only as the background cast.
Tuesday, April 23
This book launch features renowned poet, artist, and writer Afrizal Malna, whose poetry collection, Document Shredding Museum, was recently translated by UCB Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies (DSSEAS) graduate student Daniel Owen.
Thursday, April 25
Through the story of Annah la Javanaise, a trafficked 13-year-old girl who was found wandering the streets of Paris in 1893 and who became the maid and model of painter Paul Gauguin, Fatimah Tobing Rony introduces theories of visual biopolitics to examine those who are allowed to live and those who are allowed to die, in representations of Indonesian women. In her talk she will be reading from her book and screening her short, animated film, Annah la Javanaise.
Widely acclaimed as China’s foremost 20th century painter, Chang Dai-chien (1899-1983) spent his last three decades living in self-imposed exile from his beloved homeland. This film unravels the mystery and controversy of his creative and spiritual quest abroad and his journey East to West to become an artist of global significance.
“Of Color and Ink” is a feature-length documentary that follows the journey of the Chinese artist Chang Dai-chien as he embarks on a quest from the East to the West in search of the Peach Blossom Spring, a utopian place of life and the ultimate truth of art. The film delves into Chang’s extraordinary exile journey and sheds light on his mission in the global art world.
Monday, April 29
This talk examines the DRV’s nation-building project since 1955 through a close examination of the ways in which “sex” entered the language, and from there to be deployed by the state.
Monday, May 6
This talk examines enduring fears and anxieties about ‘Chineseness’ that widely circulate in the Philippine social and cultural imaginary.