Event Category Archives: Featured Events

Space Fantasy: Nagaoka Shusei’s Contributions to Afrofuturist Visual Culture

JAPAN STUDIES LUNCHTIME SPEAKERS SERIES, 2024-2025 The foundations of Afrofuturism lie in the efforts and aspirations of African, African American, and other African diasporic actors. And yet in the realm of African American popular music there was a special window in time when a diasporic Japanese illustrator based in Los Angeles, California—Nagaoka Shusei (1936-2015)—worked to […]

Preserving Enemy (Japanese) language Histories

JAPAN STUDIES LUNCHTIME SPEAKERS SERIES, 2024-2025 In Canada, with the onset of WWII, Japanese was deemed the enemy language, resulting in the erasure of cultural heritage, archival sources, and histories based on the Japanese-language. My aim is to recover the undocumented loss and perseverance of war-time Japanese-language literary spaces, through tracing the journey of a […]

Taiwan Democracy and the Chinese Humanistic Tradition

2025 Capstone Lectures with Dr. Josephine Chiu-Duke Taiwan’s peaceful transformation from authoritarian rule to a liberal democracy in the early 1990s has been praised as a remarkable political achievement. This achievement, despite the many challenges it has faced and still confronts, has been thriving in the face of China’s claim of sovereignty over the island […]

Translating Persian, Universalizing Islam: The Case of Rumi’s “Moses and the Shepherd”

The event recording is now available: The Alireza Ahmadian Lecture in Iranian and Persianate Studies presents: Translating Persian, Universalizing Islam: The Case of Rumi’s “Moses and the Shepherd” on March 8, 2025. The tale of Moses and the Shepherd is one of the best-known stories from Rumi’s Masnavi. In this lecture, Austin O’Malley examines how […]

Framing Asia: The Queen of My Dreams

Join us for a screening of director Fawzia Mirza’s critically celebrated feature film, followed by a discussion with Kiran Sunar (assistant professor, Asian Studies) and Fahad Naveed (PhD student, Asian Studies). Synopsis: Azra, a Pakistani Canadian woman who has had a strained relationship with her parents since coming out as a lesbian, finds herself on […]

Translating “pop fiction” from 1000 years ago: Ochikubo monogatari (Lady of the Low Chamber)

JAPAN STUDIES LUNCHTIME SPEAKERS SERIES, 2024-2025 This talk will discuss the features of the 10th century Ochikubo monogatari as a piece of popular fiction in the Heian period. These features include an emphasis on plot and a narrative style that relies heavily on dialogue and interior monologue. The tale is considered a parody of the […]

Reading Group on Anti-Racism and Racial Justice Transformation

The Anti-Racism and Racial Justice Transformation Committee would like to invite you to its first reading group session on appreciation and appropriation, led by Siyun Pan. Participants are encouraged to read “Between Appreciation and Appropriation: Race-Transitioning among Hallyu Fans” by Min Joo Lee, a chapter in an edited volume ahead of the session – an […]

2024/25 Yip So Man Wat Memorial Lecture: Journey into Exile: The Rare Books of the National Peiping Library, 1933–1941

The 2024/25 Yip So Man Wat Memorial Lecture with guest speaker Professor Sophie Volpp (UC Berkeley) Lecture: Journey into Exile: The Rare Books of the National Peiping Library, 1933–1941 In fall of 1941, the National Library of Peiping, now the National Library of China, sent 100 crates of rare books to the Library of Congress […]