The Einaudi Center’s Foreign Language Introduction Program (FLIP) is heading into local communities to teach children about world cultures and languages. FLIP aims to connect our diverse Cornell community to K-12 students at local schools, libraries and community centers in Upstate New York. Cornell volunteer teachers will have the opportunity to share short introductory lessons on the foreign languages and cultures they are passionate about. Volunteer teachers should have at least an intermediate knowledge of their chosen language.

Register to attend either the Feb. 1 orientation in person or the Feb. 5 orientation over Zoom.

The Institute for African Development (IAD) offers 6-8 week summer internships that let you undertake challenging practical fieldwork in Ghana, Zambia, or Liberia. If you're a sophomore or junior, join this info session to find out how you can apply. Applications for Global Internships are due February 1.

Register for the information session.

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The Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies hosts info sessions for graduate and for undergraduate students. To learn more about funding opportunities, international travel, research, and internships, view the full calendar for spring semester sessions.

Speaker: Edith Aldridge, Linguistics, Academia Sinica

Taiwan is the homeland of the Austronesian language family, speakers of Proto-Austronesian having migrated there from southeastern China roughly 6,000 years ago before proceeding to populate the Philippines, Indonesia/Malaysia, Madagascar, and the Pacific islands. As many as twenty distinct languages were spoken in Taiwan at the beginning of foreign contact in the 17th century. Now a third of these are extinct, and the rest are endangered. The first of these to decline were languages spoken in lowland areas in contact first with the small Dutch presence in southern Taiwan in the mid-17th century and subsequently with waves of Chinese migration in the 18th and 19th centuries. Intensive contact with highland Austronesians began with Japanese colonization during the first half the 20th century and continued under the Nationalist government from 1945 until the lifting of martial law in 1987. In 2001, the government inaugurated a revitalization program with the hope of invigorating the by then already endangered Austronesian languages, for example by introducing ethnic language education into local school curriculums. This presentation sketches the history of foreign contact, government language policies (particularly in the 20th century), revitalization efforts, and some outcomes of these policies and programs.

Introduced by John Whitman, Linguistics, Cornell University.

Co-sponsored by the Linguistics Department.

Su-yeon Seo, (Cornell grad student, Asian Studies) will lead final Classical Chinese text-reading for this semester titled Naming and Knowledge in the East Asian Sea.

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 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.

Epitaphs Made Widely Available by Man Xu, History, Tufts University

The Cornell Classical Chinese Colloquium (CCCC) 古文品讀 , a reading group for scholars interested in premodern Sinographic text (古文), is welcomes Man Xu, History, Tufts University to lead this month's Classical Chinese text-reading.

Man writes: The style and content of epitaphs not surprisingly changed over time. Epitaphs preserved in Song collected works differ from Tang examples in emphasizing their subjects’ education, character, and career achievements. The individualized Song style set the tone for epitaph writing in late imperial China. In recent years, more than one hundred newly discovered epitaphs from Luzhou, Shanxi, a peripheral region in north China, are changing our understanding of this Tang-Song shift in epitaph writing. For more than a century after the beginning of the Song, Luzhou epitaphs remained anonymously authored and lacking in detail. They record subjects’ prestigious distant ancestors, employ archaic language, and adopt flamboyant metaphors and rhetoric. All these stylized features point to a surprising Tang-Song cultural continuity that historians had not detected earlier. The typical “Song-style” epitaphs did not appear in Luzhou until the second half of the eleventh century, when the local elite had better educational opportunities and became participants in the national elite culture.

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 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.

Bryan Hikari Hartzheim, Waseda University.

As the architect of the Metal Gear Solid franchise, video game director Hideo Kojima is synonymous with the “stealth game” genre, where tension and excitement is created from players avoiding enemies rather than confronting them. Through the franchise, Kojima also helped to bridge the gap between video games and other forms of media. In this talk, Bryan Hikari Hartzheim draws from his recently published book to explain the core tenets of Kojima’s game design. Despite working for a commercial game studio for most of his career, Kojima designed and directed games that were both industrially disruptive and socially relevant. Focusing on developer disclosures from Japanese game periodicals, Hartzheim argues that Kojima advocates for a “progressive game design” that expands the boundaries of both game industry conventions and sociocultural discourses in Japan.

Bryan Hikari Hartzheim is Associate Professor of New Media at Waseda University in Tokyo, Japan. He teaches and researches on game studies, media industries, and Japanese popular culture in the School of International Liberal Studies and Graduate School of International Culture and Communication Studies. He is the author of Hideo Kojima: Progressive Game Design from Metal Gear to Death Stranding (2023) and co-editor of The Franchise Era: Managing Media in the Digital Economy (2019).

Introduced by Andrea Mariucci, graduate student, Asian Studies. This event is created by the EAP Graduate Student Steering Committee.

Watch an interview with Bryan Hikari Hartzheim and Andrea Mariucci here! (2 min.)

The Fulbright U.S. Student Program supports U.S. citizens to study, conduct research in any field, or teach English in more than 150 countries. Students who wish to begin the program immediately after graduation are encouraged to start the process in their junior year. Recent graduates are welcome to apply through Cornell.

The Fulbright program at Cornell is administered by the Mario Einaudi Center for International studies. Applicants are supported through all stages of the application and are encouraged to start early by contacting fulbright@einaudi.cornell.edu.

Register for the information session. Can’t attend? Contact fulbright@einaudi.cornell.edu.

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The Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies hosts info sessions for graduate and for undergraduate students. To learn more about funding opportunities, international travel, research, and internships, view the full calendar for spring semester sessions.

The Fulbright U.S. Student Program supports U.S. citizens to study, conduct research in any field, or teach English in more than 150 countries. Students who wish to begin the program immediately after graduation are encouraged to start the process in their junior year. Recent graduates are welcome to apply through Cornell.

The Fulbright program at Cornell is administered by the Mario Einaudi Center for International studies. Applicants are supported through all stages of the application and are encouraged to start early by contacting fulbright@einaudi.cornell.edu.

Register for the information session. Can’t attend? Contact fulbright@einaudi.cornell.edu.

***

The Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies hosts info sessions for graduate and for undergraduate students. To learn more about funding opportunities, international travel, research, and internships, view the full calendar for spring semester sessions.

The Fulbright U.S. Student Program provides full funding for graduate and professional students conducting research in any field or teaching in more than 150 countries. Open to U.S. citizens only.

The Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Program supports doctoral students conducting research in modern languages or area studies for six to 12 months. Open to U.S. citizens and permanent residents of the United States. Travel to Western European countries is not eligible.

Register for the information session. Can’t attend? Contact fulbright@einaudi.cornell.edu.

***

The Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies hosts info sessions for graduate and for undergraduate students. To learn more about funding opportunities, international travel, research, and internships, view the full calendar for spring semester sessions.