Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Aurore Candier, Associate Professor of History and Director of the Center for Burma Studies at Northern Illinois University.

This Gatty Lecture will take place at The Kahin Center, 640 Stewart Ave. Lunch will be served. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

Abstract
While living and working in Burma for over twenty years, Aurore Candier conducted research on the evolution of knowledge and concepts among Burmese elites, especially as evolved in their encounters with other cultures in the early and modern periods. Through conceptual history and discourse analysis, Candier has investigated the semantic shifts in Burmese words and concepts through a diachronic corpus made up of texts from different literary genres and traced the progressive changes in the imaginary and thought of the Burmese Buddhist universe. She has explored semantic changes in Burmese concepts and categories of knowledge such as “reform,” “time,” categorizations of “people,” “secular knowledge,” and “astrology.” She has forged an intervention which challenges some of the most basic assumptions of Burmese historiography, especially as conceived of in the classical sense.

About the Speaker
Aurore Candier has been Director of the Center for Burma Studies and Associate Professor of History at Northern Illinois University (USA) since 2024. She is a historian of Burma, where she has conducted research for over two decades, building strong ties with local scholars, students, and artists thanks to her fluency in Burmese. Her work spans pre-colonial Mainland Southeast Asian politics, early 20th-century colonial history, and Burmese intellectual and cultural history. She focuses on the longue durée of ideas and knowledge in Burma and contributes to interdisciplinary projects on astrology and divination in Burmese society.