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. The program is open to graduate students, recent graduates, and young professionals. Undergraduate 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 virtual session.

Can’t attend? Contact fulbright@einaudi.cornell.edu.

Speaker: Wu Hung, Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor of Art History and the College Chinese Art, University of Chicago

Title: How to Read Chinese Handscroll Paintings

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.
o 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.
o No preparation is required; all texts will be distributed at the meeting.
o Refreshments will be served.

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. The program is open to graduate students, recent graduates, and young professionals. Undergraduate 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 virtual session.

Can’t attend? Contact fulbright@einaudi.cornell.edu.

Speaker: Quan Gan, Lecturer of History, Rice University

Title: Invest the Gods, Praise the Lord: Royal Speeches on Temple Steles in Wuyue

Abstract: Throughout his political career, Qian Liu 錢鏐 (d. 932 CE) repeatedly petitioned the emperors in the north to grant honorific titles to powerful figures—both living and deceased, human and divine—within Wuyue. In this colloquium, I will examine two temple inscriptions commissioned by Qian Liu to commemorate the imperial bestowal of honorific titles upon two local deities: Pang Yu 龐玉, the patron god of Yuezhou 越州 (908), and the Dragon God of Hangzhou 杭州 (916).
These two steles offer valuable insight into practices of commemoration and political communication in post-Tang China. Both inscriptions are highly stylized, composed in the parallel prose form (pianwen 駢文), also known as “Four-Six Prose.” Written in Qian Liu’s first-person voice, they celebrate the political achievements of the ruler of Wuyue while foregrounding his ritual relationship with the northern emperor. Most intriguingly, both the textual content and the material form of the steles emphasize this connection. The imperial edict authorizing the bestowal of titles is not only incorporated into the inscription’s text but also visually reproduced on the stone itself.
I welcome discussion on how best to preserve the distinct registers, literary conventions, and layered voices of such inscriptions in English translation.

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.
o 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.
o No preparation is required; all texts will be distributed at the meeting.
o Refreshments will be served.

East Asia Program Lecture Series presents “Invisible Anatomy: Meridians and Math in Chinese Medicine"

Speaker: Lan Li, Assistant Professor of The History of Medicine, Johns Hopkins University

Description:

This talk is based on Body Maps: Improvising Meridians and Nerves in Global Chinese Medicine, which reframes generic anatomical images by considering illustrations of invisible structures as maps. Body Maps offers a long global history of medicine through hand-drawn body maps and spans across the tenth to the twentieth centuries to re-think cultures of objectivity beyond normative geographies of science and medicine. In this talk, I focus on the graphic form of a tu 圖 as a historical category of technical images to understand how illustrations of lines guided diagnostic and therapeutic practice. Scholars often debated whether to discursively interpret these lines as meridians, channels, or tracts; practitioners often debated whether these lines merely visualized nerves to articulate needling and heating practices. Specifically, this talk offers a critical examination of a thirteenth-century image of jingluo 經絡, or meridians, and considers it within the epistemological frameworks of global East Asian medicine. Drawing on analytical approaches from science studies, visual culture, and medical humanities, it traces the aesthetic, conceptual, and political dimensions of these anatomical images across premodern, modern, and contemporary periods.

Speaker's Bio: Lan A. Li is an Assistant Professor in the Department of the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University. Li is a historian of the body and media producer, contributing to podcasts and exhibitions related to acupuncture, Buddhist medicine, and metaphors in science and medicine. Li’s first book, Body Maps: Improvising Meridians and Nerves in Global Chinese Medicine (JHU Press, 2025) considers the long history of graphically representing invisible anatomy.

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. The program is open to graduate students, recent graduates, and young professionals. Undergraduate 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 virtual session.

Can’t attend? Contact fulbright@einaudi.cornell.edu.

A workshop with Joanna Krenz to discuss two papers she authored:

Programmer as Translator: The LHC of Chinese Artificial Intelligence Poetry

Virtual Conciliation: (Un-)Coding the Split between Tradition and Modernity in Chinese Artificial Intelligence Poetry

The workshop will focus on artificial intelligence (AI) poetry as a form of translation, understood here as the translation of a particular paradigm of poeticity operative within Chinese society into virtual reality. We will address three dimensions of this process—linguistic, human, and cultural—while identifying moments of unavoidable failure and examining their artistic and social consequences. The discussion will be preceded by a general introduction to the history and context of AI poetry in China, based on my research to date.

Joanna Krenz is Assistant Professor of Modern Chinese Language and Literature at the Institute of Oriental Studies, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. She translates and publishes widely on Chinese poetry and prose. She is the author of In Search of Singularity: Poetry from Poland and China Since 1989 (Brill, 2022). She is currently working on the project The World Re-Versed: New Phenomena in Chinese Poetry as a Challenge and Inspiration to Literary Studies.

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.

Join Einaudi Center experts for World in Focus Talks on global events in the news and on your mind. Our faculty's research and policy insights put the world in focus.

This year we’re hosting informal campus discussions on many Tuesday afternoons. This week’s topic:

In the United States and around the world, strict immigration enforcement and violence are being wielded as political tools. Recent U.S. actions include surveillance of communities, indiscriminate detainment, and violence against protestors. Despite being framed as necessary for the safety of citizens, these tactics are rooted in histories of slavery, the prison industrial complex, and xenophobia.

Does this type of enforcement infringe on rights? How can we understand current events through the lens of global and historical contexts? Do present-day immigration policies make communities safer?

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Featured Faculty

Shannon Gleeson (Migrations) | Industrial and Labor RelationsTristan Ivory (EAP, IAD) | International and Comparative LaborJaclyn Kelley-Widmer | LawNatasha Raheja (SAP) | AnthropologyIan Kysel | Law

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Conversations Matter at Einaudi

This conversation is hosted by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies and its regional and thematic programs. Find out what's in store for students at Einaudi!

East Asia Program Lecture Series presents Translucent Atmospherics: Media as Utility in China

Speaker: Angela Xiao Wu, Associate Professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University

Abstract
Utilities provide essential services like water, electricity, railroads, which societies strive to make affordable and widely accessible. As legacy media lose advertising revenue and “news deserts” proliferate, proposals to treat journalism as a public utility have reemerged. While liberal capitalist societies approach this idea through fragmented evidence and speculative hypotheticals, China has long treated news as a state-supplied, nonproprietary good, akin to earthquake alerts. Since 1978, the state’s stubborn commitment to this utility model has interacted with China's social, economic, and technological transformations, producing surprising configurations of public finance, intellectual property, distribution politics, journalistic forms, and popular culture.
In this talk, I introduce my book-length research tracing the evolution of China’s administration of the socialist press into its regulation of private digital platforms. Reframing media history as utility history, I disaggregate the Chinese state into its lesser-studied roles—as lawmaker, owner, investor, licensor, thinly stretched administrator, and purported guarantor of collective welfare—beyond propaganda and censorship. This perspective sheds new light on post-reform Chinese governance and offers the utility system as a broader framework for thinking about our digital present: What happens to public culture when it is governed through unified computing regimes?

Bio
Angela Xiao Wu is an Associate Professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. Her research sits at the intersection of media and communication studies and science and technology studies (STS), with broader interests in the politics and infrastructures of knowledge production. Her work spans critical data studies, platform studies, the political economy of media, political cultures, and post/socialism studies. Her book project has received support from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the Henry Luce Foundation, the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, the American Association of University Women (AAUW), and the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, among others.

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.

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. The program is open to graduate students, recent graduates, and young professionals. Undergraduate 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 virtual session.

Can’t attend? Contact fulbright@einaudi.cornell.edu.