International Fair showcases Cornell's global opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students. Explore the fair and find out about international majors and minors, language study, study abroad, funding opportunities, global internships, Cornell Global Hubs, and more.

The International Fair is sponsored by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies and Office of Global Learning (both part of Global Cornell) in partnership with the Language Resource Center.

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East Asia Program Lecture Series presents "Japan’s 'New Pre-War': On the Repetition of a Capitalist Form"

Ken Kawashima (Associate Professor, University of Toronto) will give a talk and lead a seminar on his current research, which explores the complex interrelationships between repeated capitalist crisis and the repetition of what he calls the ‘pre-war form’ of capitalist development in modern Japan. This talk is based on his recent article, “Japan’s ’New Pre-War’: Five Dislocations of its historical development”, published in Socialist Register 2024: A New Global Geometry.

To participate in the seminar, please read this article.

About the East Asia Program

As Cornell’s hub for research, teaching, and engagement with East Asia, the East Asia Program (EAP) is a forum for the interdisciplinary study of historical and contemporary East Asia. Part of the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, the program draws its membership of over 45 core faculty and numerous affiliated faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students from across Cornell's colleges and schools.

Come learn and practice Chinese calligraphy, an art form where Chinese characters are written using a brush and ink. All skill levels are welcome, and supplies will be provided. This workshop is co-sponsored by the East Asia Program and the Asian and Asian American Center as a part of the APIDA Heritage Month celebration.

To sign up for the workshop, please register here. Spots are limited.

APIDA Heritage Month

In honor of Asian Pacific Islander Desi American (APIDA) Heritage Month, the Asian & Asian American Center collaborates with academic departments, Cornell Health, student organizations, Cornell Dining and other campus partners to host a series of events in April.

Celebrated nationally in May, APIDA Heritage Month honors Asian, Pacific Islander, and Desi Americans who have enriched U.S. history and are key to its future success. The month consists of programs and events that educate all members of the Cornell University community about the histories, cultural diversity, contributions, and often underreported challenges of Asian, Pacific Islander, and Desi Americans.

View the full list of APIDA Heritage Month events here.

Join the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies’ undergraduate global scholars for a showcase of their capstone presentations providing public commentary and perspectives on global democracy.

Undergraduate global scholars advocate for building democracy on campus and around the world. They have partnered with the Einaudi Center's democratic threats and resilience faculty fellow Kenneth Roberts and Lund Practitioner in Residence Thomas Garrett—expert researchers and practitioners on building democracy—to design their projects.

Join Einaudi Center and Brooks School researchers for three-minute speed talks and community conversation on our contemporary moment.

Speakers will jump off from interdisciplinary and international research, experiences, and world events to provide a fresh perspective on current U.S. politics and public policy. Together we'll look at challenges faced and solutions found in a variety of academic fields and places around the world—to help us think through how to address emerging issues at home.

The event features clusters of speed talks on related topics—including free speech, U.S. elections, and international aid—with time for Q&A and conversation on each topic.

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Faculty Speakers

Lessons from Latin America

Kenneth Roberts, Democratic Threats Fellow (LACS) | GovernmentGustavo Flores-Macías (LACS) | Government and Public PolicySantiago Anria (LACS) | Global Labor and Work

International Implications

Magnus Fiskesjö (EAP/SEAP/PACS) | AnthropologyBryn Rosenfeld (IES) | GovernmentWilliam Lodge II (SAP) | Health Equity and Public Policy

Domestic Consequences

Mabel Berezin, IES Director | SociologyGautam Hans | LawMoon Duchin | MathematicsEllen Lust, Einaudi Center Director | Government and Public Policy

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Sponsors

This conversation is hosted by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, partnering with Cornell Brooks School of Public Policy's Governance and Local Development Institute and Data and Democracy Lab.

Find out how graduate and undergraduate students can get started at Einaudi.

Speaker: Thomas P. Kelly, Assistant Professor, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University

Description: My talk reconsiders the significance of self-inflicted book burning as a cultural phenomenon during the Ming-Qing transition by examining one of the most notorious fires of the period: Zhou Lianggong’s 周亮工 (1612–72) decision to burn his manuscripts and wooden printing blocks in 1671. This was a highly personal act of literary self-harm, one ostensibly motivated by recent career setbacks, experiences of familial loss, and deep-seated anxieties surrounding his compromised reputation as a “twice-serving minister.” The fire, however, also reflects and synthesizes much broader trends in seventeenth century Chinese textual culture, from the valorization of book burning in Neo-Confucian critiques of woodblock printing, to the political uses of auto-bibliocaustry among both loyalists and collaborators amid inter-dynastic war, to editorial tactics for evading repressive censorship campaigns under the early Qing emperors. Zhou was by no means alone among his peers in setting fire to books. Many of his teachers, friends, and collaborators enacted or at least openly contemplated similar acts of destruction. From this perspective, Zhou’s fire invites a reconsideration of self-inflicted book burning as a topic of widespread concern in seventeenth century China. Editing was under these circumstances not simply a matter of textual preservation and dissemination, but also of curation through erasure.

About Cornell Classical Chinese Colloquium

The group meets monthly during the semester to explore a variety of classical Chinese texts and styles. Other premodern texts linked to classical Chinese in Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese have also been explored. Presentations include works from the earliest times to the 20th century. Workshop sessions are led by local, national, and international scholars. Participants with any level of classical Chinese experience are welcome to attend.

At each session, a presenter guides the group in a reading of a classical Chinese text. Attendees discuss historical, literary, linguistic, and other aspects of the text, working together to resolve difficulties in comprehension and translation.No preparation is required; all texts will be distributed at the meeting.Refreshments will be served.

East Asia Program Lecture Series presents “Walls-as-Media: Between Cheng (Wall-City) and Ping (Wall-Screen)"

Speaker: Jinying Li, Assistant Professor, Modern Culture and Media, Brown University

Description:

As global networks promise boundless access, we are facing increasing layers of walls. From computer firewalls to China’s Great Firewall, from the Facebook wall to the virtual walls in virtual reality, digital media, in fact, are largely walled. The existence of these walls shatters the myth of what Manuel Castells has famously called “the space of flows,” and highlights the significant functions of walled enclosure in managing, controlling, and mediating information, knowledge, and experience. It problematizes the enlightenment ideals of transparency, depth, openness, and universal knowledge, and underlines walled mediation as the fundamental condition of modern experience. My talk proposes a theoretical framework to explore the meanings and functions of the wall in media history by studying its archeological formation as a media device as well as its genealogical development as a discursive metaphor. I first examine the media archeology of the wall as a material artifact, focusing on cheng 城 (wall-city) and ping 屏 (wall-screen) as two archetypal walls in Chinese media history. In their various renditions and configurations, both cheng and ping define the wall as an asymmetrical and contradictory structure, which is simultaneously a blocking barrier that encloses a territory and community as well as a displaying surface that expresses feelings and powers. This duality between a barrier and a surface further informs the genealogy of wall as a discursive formation, which I examine by comparing the development of the wall as a structure metaphor with that of the window metaphor in the competing conceptions of screen as a media system. I argue that the wall presents an alternative genealogy from the window, shifting from optical apparatus to spatial devices. This conceptual shift from the window to the wall, from optical projection to spatial construction, is also a move away from the perspective-centric conceptualization of modern media, pointing toward surface-oriented media configurations of environmental management, mobility control and socio-political demarcation.

Speaker Bio: Jinying Li is Assistant Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University where she teaches media theory, animation, and digital culture in East Asia. She co-edited two special issues on Chinese animation for the Journal of Chinese Cinemas, and a special issue on regional platforms for Asiascape: Digital Asia. Her first book, Anime’s Knowledge Cultures (University of Minnesota Press, 2024), explores the connection between the anime boom and global geekdom. She is currently competing her second book project, Walled Media and Mediating Walls. Jinying is also a filmmaker and has worked on animations, feature films, and documentaries. Two documentary TV series that she produced were broadcasted nationwide in China through Shanghai Media Group (SMG). She is one of the co-writers of animated feature film Big Fish and Begonia (Dayu Haitang, 2016). She also produced an experimental VR documentary 47km (2017) in collaboration with Chinese director Zhang Mengqi at Beijing Film Academy.

About East Asia Program

As Cornell’s hub for research, teaching, and engagement with East Asia, the East Asia Program (EAP) serves as a forum for the interdisciplinary study of historical and contemporary East Asia. The program draws its membership of over 45 core faculty and numerous affiliated faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students from eight of Cornell’s 12 schools and colleges.

Wang Tiande, the 2025 Wong Chai Lok Calligraphy Fellow at Cornell University, will conduct a special demonstration of his calligraphy process, free and open to all. Visitors can view the demonstration from the Hirsch Lecture Lobby, where the artist will work, or from above in the Gussman Entrance Hall.

This event is cosponsored by the East Asia Program and the Wong Chai Lok Calligraphy Fund.