The Korean Language Program will be hosting its 12th annual K-Pop Noraebang Contest on 12/6 (Mon) at 7:30pm in Goldwin Smith HEC auditorium. Korean language students who passed the audition will compete for awards and the audience will vote. Free Korean t-shirts will be given to the first 30 audience members and through trivia during the event. Enjoy the special performances by LOKO and E.Motion at the opening and closing. This event is sponsored by the Joh Foundation and is open to the public.

The Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, in partnership with the Society for the Humanities, presents this symposium featuring five cutting-edge researchers whose work crosses disciplinary lines to tackle some of the world’s most pressing problems.

Join postdoctoral fellows Mohamed Abdou, Eman Ghanayem, Bamba Ndiaye, Eleanor Paynter, and Grace Tran for a discussion of their work in the fields of migration studies and global racial justice. Topics will include identity, colonialism and decolonization, indigeneity and dispossession, refugee studies and mobility, economic and social justice, and critical race theory. Learn how new approaches and developments are changing scholarship in these critical fields.

Einaudi Center director Rachel Beatty Riedl will introduce the event, and Viranjini Munasinghe (Department of Anthropology) will moderate.

Speakers

Mohamed Abdou, Global Racial Justice Postdoctoral Fellow, Einaudi Center"Non-statist Indigenous and Muslim Conceptualizations of Sovereignty: The Decolonial Inseparability of Race from Religion"

Eman Ghanayem, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Comparative Literature and Society for the Humanities"Being Native, Being Refugee"

Bamba Ndiaye, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Music and Society for the Humanities"From Mbas Mi to Mbëkk Mi: Covid-Induced Migration and Social Movement Advocacy in Senegal"

Eleanor Paynter, Migrations Postdoctoral Fellow, Einaudi Center"Witnessing Migration 'Crises': Race, Coloniality, and Asylum in Italy"

Grace Tran, Migrations Postdoctoral Fellow, Migrations Initiative"What’s Love Got to Do With It?: Transformative Effects of Vietnamese-American Engagement in 'Marriage Fraud' Arrangements"

Learn about the Laidlaw Undergraduate Leadership and Research Program. Open to first- and second-year students, this 2-year program provides generous support to carry out internationally-focused research, develop leadership skills, engage with community projects overseas, and join a global network of like-minded scholars from more than a dozen universities.

Join us to learn more about the program, its benefits, and the application process, as well as tips for approaching potential faculty research mentors and writing a successful application. Sponsored by the Tatkon Center for First-Year Students and the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies.

Please join us for a talk by James Robson 羅柏松 (James C. Kralik and Yunli Lou Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University).

It has become increasingly well-known that religious statues throughout Asia have hidden cavities that are filled with various objects inserted during a consecration ritual. This talk explores the hidden world of these statues through a discussion of a large collection of statues from throughout East Asia (China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam), including some intriguing European examples. The history of such images has been the object of much research in Japan and Korea that this talk will also use to contextualize the Chinese Buddhist images. These statues provide a valuable glimpse of local religion, ritual practice, lay devotion, and sutra fragments. These statues also raise a host of significant interpretive questions for historians of religion, including issues such as the place of icon animation, idolatry, and iconoclasm in Chinese Buddhism and Chinese Religious history generally. The images discussed in this talk contain a niche carved into their back (or sometimes in the uṣṇīṣa, base, or pedestal) that is filled with a variety of objects, including relics, religious manuscripts and printed texts, medicinal herbs, desiccated insects, talismans with magical writing, and a “consecration certificate” or “vow text.” These statues are ubiquitous but have had a particularly intriguing history of visibility and concealment in East Asia and in Western scholarship. This talk will raise questions about why sacred images and icons such as these have been objects of extreme devotion for some, but also presented problems for priests, politicians, missionaries, philosophers, and academics who for various reasons have found them distasteful, attacked their validity and power, and have tried to hide them away or destroy them. Why, even in the face of ideological critique and iconoclastic destruction, have they persisted and proliferated?

The Cornell Buddhist Studies Seminar Series is co-sponsored by the GPSA-FC, the Departments of Anthropology, Asian Studies and Philosophy, by the South Asia Program, and by the Society for the Humanities. The talk is open to all interested; for accessibility queries please contact buddhiststudies@cornell.edu

Up to now, we have had little sense of Tibetan lifespans before the 20th century. The Buddhist Digital Resource Center hosts the largest online biographical database on Tibet and includes data on the lifespans of some 2000 famous Tibetan lamas. Working with a research assistant, I have sorted this data by time periods and found interesting patterns in longevity in relation to historic events. Most surprising, over the centuries, average lifespan in Tibet significantly declined from the mid-10th to the mid-20th century. I also make comparisons to the data available on the Dharma Drug Digital Database of some 6000 Chinese monks. I will discuss the implications of the patterns discerned through analysis of this data, asking what this data tells us about the lives of lamas and what the lives of lamas tell us about Tibetan society and history.

Please join us for a talk by MK Long (PhD Candidate, Department of Asian Studies).

This paper opens the historical study of initiated female Buddhist devotees (thilashin) in Myanmar through analysis of the 1982 biography of Daw Medawadi (1862-1932), founder of a Buddhist nunnery (chaung) at the turn of the twentieth century. Attending to rhetorical models of practice that reveal the stakes of the historically specific and local social worlds in which thilashin have sought to establish and maintain institutional footholds, I reconsider the assumed predominance of tropes of renunciatory asceticism in the self-presentation of thilashin and propose a more closely calibrated understanding of thilashin as non-ordained but initiated women unevenly empowered by relationships and practices that enable their advancement on a Buddhist path to liberation. In particular, I focus on the biography’s emplacement of its subject, Daw Medawadi, within a family system and within a patronage network as evidence of the meaningful persistence of highly intimate and localized networks of belonging and affiliation amidst the state-driven reorganization of Myanmar Buddhist institutions of the 1980s. Read intertextually with other contemporary, vernacular Burmese literature written by and about thilashin, Medawadi’s life narrative and other thilashin biographies offer a vital and largely untapped source that can contribute to our understanding of the social and historical underpinnings of understudied institutional forms of female Buddhist devotion in Myanmar.

The Cornell Buddhist Studies Seminar Series is co-sponsored by the GPSA-FC, the Departments of Anthropology, Asian Studies and Philosophy, by the South Asia Program, and by the Society for the Humanities. The paper can be read in advance, by those with a Cornell NetID at this link; interested parties without a NetID may contact MK directly at ml2458@cornell.edu.

The talk is in-person and open to the graduate and professional student community; for accessibility queries please contact buddhiststudies@cornell.edu