Come to the LRC or join us on Zoom to practice your language skills and meet new people. Conversation Hours provide an opportunity to use the target language in an informal, low-pressure atmosphere. Have fun practicing a language you are learning! Gain confidence through experience! Just using your new language skills helps you learn more than you might think. Conversation Hours are open to any learner, including the public.

Join Korean Conversation Hour via Zoom.

Speaker: Eno Pei-Jean Chen (Associate Professor, Taiwanese Literature at the National Chengchi University)

Description:

This talk speaks to the existing scholarship on "Cultural Cold War" and "Affective Turn" in gender/East Asian Studies, explores the dynamics of intra-East Asian literary contact nebulae. Building on the research approach conducted in my resent monograph Cold War Feelings (2024), this talk will first theorize affect/feeling/emotion as method and historicize it as research subject, for the better understanding of the post-war Taiwanese and South Korean societies, with the issues of the (re)construction of female subjects and Cold War ideology. Furthermore, this talk will demonstrate the historical specificity of 3 kinds of emotion--happiness, shame, and melancholia--and their intersectionality with each other, and the female subjects. Finally, I propose to analyze the historical impact in an intersectional manner in Taiwan and South Korea, with the transnational approach of inter-referencing Taiwan and Korea. My research shows that a broad archive of texts that have mediated the entanglement between East Asian societies, however, were routed through and interrupted by imaginative geographies incommensurate with the nation-state. This approach expects to explore the articulation of the specificities of the Taiwanese and Korean socio-historical situation, and to contrast it against the existing geopolitical referencing systems, as well as the division of gender and feelings.

Speaker's Bio:

Eno Pei Jean Chen is Associate Professor of Taiwanese Literature at the National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan. She received her PhD degree from the Dept. of Asian Studies, Cornell University in May 2016. She is the author of Cultural Politics of Love: Colonial Genealogy of Modern Intimate Relationships in Taiwan and Korea (2023) and Cold War Feelings: Politics of Gender and Affect in 1950-1980s’ Taiwan and South Korea (2024). Her current research projects focus on the Cold War genealogy of feminism, and the archival nature of queer cultural history in Taiwan and South Korea.

This lecture is sponsored by a grant from the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in New York and co-organized by the East Asia Program and the Department of Asian Studies.

Speaker: Wah Guan LIM Associate Professor of Transcultural Theatre National Chung Hsing University

Description:

The 1980s was a most important decade for global Chinese theatre. In large part prompted by changes in regional geopolitics, the search for a local identity peaked among the Chinese communities in East and Southeast Asia. This period coincided with the rise of the professional careers of four important diasporic director-playwrights—Gao Xingjian 高行健 (b. 1940), Danny Yung Ning Tsun 榮念曾 (b. 1943), Stan Lai Sheng-chuan 賴聲川 (b. 1954), and Kuo Pao Kun 郭寶崑 (1939–2002)—whose efforts shaped the contemporary Chinese-language theater scenes across China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore. While the geopolitical conditions of the Cold War imposed ethno-nationalist identities across the region, in contrast, these dramatists weaved together native, foreign, and Chinese elements in their theater praxis to give voice to the local. At the same time, by performing cultural identities alternative to the ones sanctioned by their own states, they also debunked the notion of a unified “Chineseness.” My talk highlights the key role theater and performance played in suturing identity in the diaspora and circulating people and ideas across geographical space, well before cross-strait relations were yet to thaw.

Speaker's Bio:

LIM Wah Guan (BA Hons 1 UNSW, MSt Oxford, MA Princeton, PhD Cornell) is Associate Professor of Transcultural Chinese Theatre at National Chung Hsing University, Taichung, Taiwan. His research interests span Chinese-language drama, cinema, and literature. His first monograph Denationalizing Identities: The Politics of Performance in the Chinese Diaspora (Cornell University Press, 2024) examines the role theatre and performance have played in identity formation in Chinese communities across East and Southeast Asia. Most recently the recipient of the Yushan Fellowship for Early Career Academics, he was the sole awardee in the Arts and Humanities category this year in Taiwan Ministry of Education’s effort to attract outstanding academics globally to strengthen the international standing of higher education in the country. He served previously as Assistant Professor at Bard College in New York and the University of New South Wales, Sydney, where he was Lecturer in Chinese Studies in the School of Humanities and Languages, and Fellow of New College.

To join virtually: https://cornell.zoom.us/j/92307207515?pwd=i3NiMc9IAzZN981x5PZnp4cqnM9GQ…

This lecture is sponsored by a grant from the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in New York and co-organized by the East Asia Program and the Department of Asian Studies.

Global Research Fellows are a new interdisciplinary research and professional development community at the Einaudi Center for advanced graduate students, Cornell postdocs, and visiting and local scholars. You'll find a community of fellow researchers with regional and international interests and a desire to foster a more equitable world.

Eligible students:
• Have completed at least two years of graduate education
• Engaged in research on a topic of global or regional studies significance
• Hold a strong desire to impact global challenges and create real-world solutions
• Interested in engaging and collaborating with other researchers

Can’t attend? Contact programs@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 of fall semester sessions.

Come to the LRC to practice your language skills and meet new people. Conversation Hours provide an opportunity to use the target language in an informal, low-pressure atmosphere. Have fun practicing a language you are learning! Gain confidence through experience! Just using your new language skills helps you learn more than you might think. Conversation Hours are open to any learner, including the public.

Come to the LRC to practice your language skills and meet new people. Conversation Hours provide an opportunity to use the target language in an informal, low-pressure atmosphere. Have fun practicing a language you are learning! Gain confidence through experience! Just using your new language skills helps you learn more than you might think. Conversation Hours are open to any learner, including the public.