For over 70 years, Chinese script has been a driving force in shaping the digital age and pushing it beyond familiar alphabetical ecologies. Western-designed screens, printers, keyboards, character encoding schemes, and more have all been forced to adapt to accommodate the intricacies of the world's one major non-alphabetical writing system. Despite China's position as a global leader in technology, however, these ecologies of Chinese computing have long remained uncharted territories--until now. Join Stanford historian Thomas S. Mullaney on a tour of Chinese in the digital age.

Scholars of eighth-century Japanese literary works such as Kojiki, Nihon shoki, and Man’yōshū are conventionally assigned the subfield of “ancient literature.” This subfield emerged in the late nineteenth century, when two paradigms vied to define the character of Japanese antiquity and, by extension, the nature of Japanese literature. One paradigm envisioned antiquity as immature and undeveloped, and ending around 710 CE. The other claimed that Japanese antiquity was a golden age of literate production, ending in 794 CE. In this talk, I show that Tokyo Imperial University Professor Haga Yaichi changed his position from the former paradigm to the latter between 1890 and 1899, and I argue that this reversal stemmed from the desire to create a national popular literature for the Japanese ancient period. Due to Haga’s influence, the latter paradigm is now the orthodox position, with great consequence for both the academic study of premodern Japanese literature and the popular perception of its constituent texts. A reevaluation of the origins of premodern Japanese literature, and especially of ancient literature, is necessary for the field to exorcise the ghosts of Meiji nationalism.

During the so-called “Age of Discovery,” Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and Japanese ships crisscrossed the Pacific in search of islands rich in precious metals. One of these fabled imaginaries materialized on the cartographic plane as the “Gold and Silver Isles.” They were often depicted in the northern seas off the coast of the Japanese archipelago. Known as kinshima (“Gold Isle”) and ginshima (“Silver Isle”) in Japanese, these islands became the object of both Japanese and European interests in the region, as seafarers spread word of their anticipated location. Through the transpacific voyages of Francisco Gali, Pedro de Unamuno, Sebastián Vizcaíno, Tanaka Shōsuke, and Hasekura Tsunenaga, the geographic imaginaries of Japan and New Spain found themselves intertwining at this mutual point of interest. But the isles’ location shifted and transformed as it was traded back and forth between various actors well into the eighteenth century. On the one hand, the islands reflected the conception of Japan as part of the New World—but also as separate from the New World; on the other, they provided a site of Japanese engagement with the circulating discourses on gold, silver, discovery, resource extraction, and colonization.

Current calls to decolonize global research renew the institutional and personal scrutiny of our “best practices” in conducting field research. Beyond formal adherence to the Belmont principles of “respect, beneficence, and justice,” researchers must reexamine some of the hidden (and not so hidden) costs borne by the local community in the research effort. Panelists will discuss ethical considerations of international research and ethnography in a variety of methodological practices: randomized control trials, focus group discussions, essay competitions, and selective summer camps.

Moderator

Rachel Beatty Riedl (Government, A&S; Einaudi Center)Panelists

Arnab Basu (Dyson School)Alex Nading (Anthropology, A&S)Sarah Thompson (South Asia Program, Einaudi Center)***

Grad Chats: Conversations on International Research and Practice is a series hosted by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies to support graduate students with interdisciplinary training and planning around conducting international research.

Spring 2023 Schedule

From Plan A to Plan B: Designing Research for a Changing World (Thursday, February 16, 4:30 pm – 6:00 pm, Uris Hall G02)Beyond the IRB: Ethics and International Research (Wednesday, March 29, 4:30 pm – 6:00 pm, Uris Hall G08)Best Practices and Challenges in International Field Research (Thursday, March 30, 4:30 pm – 6:00 pm, Uris Hall G02)Finding a Research Focus through Creative Writing (Tuesday, April 18, 4:30 pm – 6:00 pm, Uris Hall G08)Travel Health and Safety Awareness for Conducting Research Abroad (Tuesday, May 9, 4:30 pm – 6:00 pm, Uris Hall G08)

What do you do when the site where you planned to do your research has a major disruption making your research infeasible? What do you do when a loved one gets sick and you need to find more time for caregiving in the last semester of your program? What do you do when you get a job—a year earlier than you anticipated—and you need to finish quickly? Have a Plan B! Come hear from current and former PhD students who have had to make changes in plans, how they negotiated the process with their committee, and where they are today.

Moderator

Mildred Warner (City and Regional Planning, AAP)Panelists

Gloria Blaise (Natural Resources and the Environment, CALS)Michael Cary (Global Development, CALS)George Homsy (Binghamton University)Adam (Chuling) Huang (International and Comparative Labor, ILR)***

Grad Chats: Conversations on International Research and Practice is a series hosted by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies to support graduate students with interdisciplinary training and planning around conducting international research.

Spring 2023 Schedule

From Plan A to Plan B: Designing Research for a Changing World (Thursday, February 16, 4:30 pm – 6:00 pm, Uris Hall G02)Best Practices and Challenges in International Field Research (Tuesday, March 14, 4:30 pm – 6:00 pm, Uris Hall G08)Beyond the IRB: Ethics and International Research (Wednesday, March 29, 4:30 pm – 6:00 pm, Uris Hall G08)Finding a Research Focus through Creative Writing (Tuesday, April 18, 4:30 pm – 6:00 pm, Uris Hall G08)Travel Health and Safety Awareness for Conducting Research Abroad (Tuesday, May 9, 4:30 pm – 6:00 pm, Uris Hall G08)

The Institute for Comparative Modernities' second Global South Translation Symposium, featuring presentations by the 2022-2023 cohort of translators (see below). Moderated by ICM member Natalie Melas, with remarks by Jan Steyn (Translation Studies, University of Iowa) and others.

With presentations from the following ICM Global South Translation Awards recipients:

Abrona Lee Pandi Aden on Solon Karthak’s 2013 travelogue Visva Euta Pallo Gao (The World is the Next Village ) from the Nepali

Conor Bracken on Jean D’Amerique’s 2020 poetry collection Atelier du Silence from the French

Whitney DeVos on Martín Tonalmeyotl’s 2016 bilingual poetry collection, Tlalkatsajtsilistle/ Ritual de los olvidados translated from the Atzacoaloya Náhuatl/Spanish

Katherine Hennessey on The Collected Plays of Wajdi Al-Ahdal from the Arabic

Sumathy Sivamohan on a collection of Sri Lankan poems, dating from the 1930s to the present, from the Tamil

Jeremy Tiang on Hai Fan’s 2017 short story collection 可口的饥饿(Delicious Hunger), from the Mandarin Chinese

Open up a whole new world by studying abroad!

Cornellians who have studied abroad are sharing their experiences at the Office of Global Learning's study abroad fair. You'll learn about where in the world you can study, what programs work for you and your major, and how study abroad can enhance your college experience.

Join us for international treats! No registration required.

A distinctive Chinese Islamic intellectual tradition emerged during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) and Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). This talk by Kristian Petersen (Old Dominian University) traces the contours of this Sino-Islamic intellectual tradition and key Han Kitab authors.

Chinese Muslims established an educational system, scripture hall education (jingtang jiaoyu 經堂教育), which utilized an Islamic curriculum made up of Arabic, Persian, and Chinese works. The Han Kitab, a corpus of Chinese language Islamic texts developed within this system, reinterpreted Islam through the religio-philosophical lens of Buddhist, Daoist, and Confucian terminology. Several Han Kitab texts were produced by self-identified “Confucian Muslim” scholars (Huiru 回儒).