Events at: Auditorium, Asian Centre

Tanomi shōmon: Political voice and “Democratization” within Tokugawa village society

JAPAN STUDIES LUNCHTIME SPEAKERS SERIES, 2024-2025 In this talk, Minami Orihara will share her ongoing research on quasi-legal agreements called tanomi shōmon. The presentation will involve primary source analysis and historiographical background on how this class of documents not previously studied in English emerged and evolved in the face of growing intra-village conflict and trans-village […]

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 “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 […]

Abul Mansur Ahmad’s America: A Global Intellectual History of the Language Movement in East Pakistan/Bangladesh

The UBC South Asia Research Colloquium offers a forum for specialists in South Asia to share their research in front of an interdisciplinary audience. This seminar features speaker Dr. Rochona Majumdar (University of Chicago). The politics of language and linguistic sovereignty drove a wedge in the unity of the new nation-state of Pakistan. Through a […]

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 […]