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.

Register for the virtual talk here: https://cornell.zoom.us/meeting/register/9scDvJ8BTNqY2h1Z4_o2Vg.

Climate change deteriorates habitability. How will people respond who inhabit the affected spaces? (Im-)Mobility is one of the most prominently debated behavioral responses. Importantly, there is little scientific support for the claim that environmental deterioration by itself results in international mass migration. There is, however, good evidence that migrants are vulnerable to climate change impacts during their journeys. This paper explores the extent to which the notion of future, inevitable large-scale, climate-driven, South-North migration prevails in official positions – despite these nuanced findings. To this end, the paper takes stock of how national governments frame these futures in their national security strategies. The paper discusses framing differences between countries that typically receive migrants and those that are typically countries of origin. Governments, particularly from the Global North, frame migration often as an inevitable function of climate change. They do refer to migrants not as victims of this breakdown of sustainability or as protagonists of adaptation – but as the drivers of breakdown of peace in destination countries. In closing, the paper points to framings that are more aligned with the state of scientific research and that are more conducive to a sustainable, peaceful response to potential climate-related displacements. More generally, the observed framing of climate-related mobility is a textbook case for counterproductive framings of climate-related insecurities. If not well aligned with research, such framings risk justifying unsustainable policies that prioritize reactive means and the securitization of national space over ambitious climate policies that aim for long-term human security and sustainability.

About the speaker

Dr. Anselm Vogler is a Non-Resident Fellow at IFSH since February 2024. Until recently, he was Postdoctoral Researcher at Harvard University, Cambridge, USA and, prior to that, at the Department of Geography at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 2024 he successfully defended his dissertation on climate security policies. From April 2020 until January 2024, he was research associate at IFSH and worked in the DFG cluster of excellency Climate, Climatic Change, and Society (CLICCS) at University Hamburg. Anselm Vogler studied political science in Dresden and New York. He was awarded an International Recognition for his dissertation by the Hans Günter Brauch foundation as well as the Viktor Klemperer Medal for distinguished success during studies and an award at the Beijing-Humboldt Forum.

Host

Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies, part of the Einaudi Center for International Studies

Register for the virtual talk here: https://cornell.zoom.us/meeting/register/9scDvJ8BTNqY2h1Z4_o2Vg.

Talk by Jason Cons (Anthropology, University of Texas at Austin)

Delta Futures explores the competing visions of the future that are crowding into the Bengal Delta’s imperiled present and vying for control of its ecologically vulnerable terrain. In Bangladesh’s southwest, development programs that imagine the delta as a security threat unfold on the same ground as initiatives that frame the delta as a conservation zone and as projects that see its rivers and ports as engines for industrial growth. This talk, and the book upon which it is based, explores how these competing futures are being brought to life: how they are experienced, understood, and contested by those who live and work in the delta, and the entanglements they engender—between dredgers and embankments, tigers and tiger prawns, fishermen and forest bandits. These future visions produce the delta as a “climate frontier,” a zone where opportunity, expropriation, and risk in the present are increasingly framed in relation to disparate visions of the delta’s climate-affected future.

Jason Cons is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of Delta Futures (University of California Press, 2025) and Sensitive Space (University of Washington Press, 2016). He is the co-editor of Frontier Assemblages (Wiley) and is a member of the Limn editorial collective and an outgoing editor of South Asia: The Journal of South Asian Studies.

This presentation is supported by a grant from the Central New York Humanities Corridor

Speaker: Jingyu Liu, Assistant Professor, Department of Religion, Rollins College
Description: The Shuilu fahui (水陸法會), or Water-Land Dharma Assembly, stands as one of the most elaborate and enduring Buddhist salvation rituals to emerge from medieval China. Designed to liberate suffering beings across all realms of existence – from the depths of hells to the heavens, and crucially including the vast multitude of wandering ghosts and spirits – it became a cornerstone of Chinese Buddhist liturgical practice and popular religious life. Its influence, however, extended far beyond China. By the 15th and 16th centuries, the ritual and its complex manuals had been transmitted to the Korean peninsula and Japan, where they were adapted and performed, leaving a lasting imprint on East Asian Buddhist cultures.
This workshop invites participants on a journey into the textual core of this remarkable ritual, with a particular focus on its Korean version. While the fundamental structure and liturgical content of the Korean Shuilu manuals remain deeply rooted in their Chinese origins, they serve as a crucial point in the cross-cultural transmission and reception of the ritual. Participants will be "reading" a multi-sensorial text, a ritual text that is not simply “read” but “chanted,” accompanied by incense.

To join virtually: https://cornell.zoom.us/j/99490446393?pwd=BKTvRTNGUizLayWCpHaaWA9XygLhr…

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.

Talk by Sara Kazmi (English, University of Pennsylvania)

This talk will focus on left, feminist, and anticaste literatures produced by radical intellectuals from Punjab, a border region split between India and Pakistan. I show how Punjabi writers deployed regional oral poetic and performative forms to critique caste, patriarchy, authoritarianism, and dominant religion in postcolonial South Asia. Focusing on Marxist playwrights Najm Hosain Syed and Gursharan Singh, the talk will analyze how they interpreted and referenced key genres embedded in poetic cultures that predate the national divide, like the Var of Dulla Bhatti, a historical ballad that celebrates 16th-century rebellions against the Mughal throne. In doing so, these authors responded to the rising significance of the peasant as a political actor in 1960s Punjab in both India and Pakistan, intervening in global debates around revolutionary transformation and decolonization. Moreover, they constituted a border-crossing literary practice that traversed, and indeed, actively challenged the colonially drawn boundary between the two nation-states.

Sara Kazmi is an Assistant Professor of English with affiliations in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory, and Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies. She is a scholar and translator whose work takes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of anticolonial, left, and oppositional literary production in the global south. Sara focuses on the Panjab region, and more broadly, on South Asia and South Asian diasporas, combining methods in literary studies, performance, and history to examine how marginal and vernacular writing engages planetary debates around decolonization, Marxism, and revolutionary transformation. Sara is also part of the Revolutionary Papers collective, which is a transnational research collaboration exploring 20th-century periodicals of left, anti-imperial, and anticolonial critical production. In addition to her work as a scholar, she is a performer and student of Indian classical music. She blends ragas with folk tunes in renditions of protest music from South Asia, some of which are archived at mein.beqaid (I, Uncaged). Prior to joining the University of Pennsylvania, Sara Kazmi was a Postdoctoral Fellow at LUMS University in Lahore, Pakistan. She received a PhD in Criticism and Culture at the Department of English, University of Cambridge, an MA in South Asian History at SOAS, London, and a B.A. (Hons) in Humanities from LUMS University.

Discussion with Sarah Thompson (Government, Cornell University), Sadia Mahmood (South Asia Program, Cornell University) and author Natasha Raheja (Anthropology and Performing & Media Arts, Cornell University)

Selective Welcome: Pakistani Hindus in India (Forthcoming, University of Chicago Press) explores the flexibility of minority-majority politics in the context of citizenship claims in South Asia. The book offers an ethnographic account of the migration of minoritized Pakistani Hindus to India, where they ostensibly become part of a religious majority. I argue that majority-minority politics in South Asia exceed state borders, in ways that are not nation-bound. Theorizing the ways that national majorities construct themselves as global minorities, and conversely, the ways that minorities imagine justice as majorities, I contend that liberal democracy's minority form does majoritarian work. As more and more national majorities consolidate authoritarian rule through imagining themselves as minorities under threat, this work makes an important contribution to scholarly conversations about political theory, migration, and borders across the humanities and social sciences.

Members of the Cornell community may read a draft of the book's introduction before the presentation (Cornell netID required to view).

Natasha Raheja is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Performing & Media Arts at Cornell University. She received her PhD in Anthropology from NYU and her BS in Biology and MA in Asian Languages and Literature with a focus on Urdu from UT Austin. Her projects explore questions of migration, belonging, and majority-minority politics in South Asia. Dr. Raheja is the director of Cast in India, an observational portrait of the Bengali metal workers who manufacture New York City manhole covers, and A Gregarious Species, an experimental, found-footage film featuring cross-border locust swarms in the Thar Desert region. She is also completing a book tentatively entitled Selective Welcome: Pakistani Hindus in India.

This Event is CANCELED due to family emrgency

Resisting Authoritarianism: The Political Journey and Mysterious Deaths of Two Young Americans in Pinochet’s Chile.

Allende’s revolution promised real democracy and real social change. It inspired idealistic young people from all over to travel to Chile to participate. Many who came were political exiles from South American countries that had become dictatorships. It was a political journey, full of hope. It ended in a military coup, encouraged by the United States, in which thousands were rounded up and executed. Two Norteamericanos—Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi—were secretly executed, and their murders inspired the Hollywood movie Missing. John Dinges was also in Chile at the time of the coup. His book tells what really happened. His surprising findings shed light not only on an iconic period in Latin America but provide signposts for the current slide toward authoritarianism in the United States.

John Dinges is a former foreign correspondent and the author of three books on major events involving the United States and Latin America. He was a special correspondent in Chile and Central America for The Washington Post, where he also worked as a foreign desk editor. He served as deputy foreign editor and managing editor of National Public Radio News. Mr. Dinges is the recipient of the Maria Moors Cabot Prize for excellence in Latin American reporting, and the Media Award of the Latin American Studies Association. He also shared two DuPont-Columbia University prizes for broadcast journalism, as NPR managing editor. He is currently on the faculty of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He has an MA in Latin American studies from Stanford University.

Chronic Kidney Disease of non-traditional causes (CKDnt) is among the first pathologies to be directly associated with climate change, and it has become a case study in the emerging field of “planetary health.” While its exact origins remain unknown, leading theories suggest that CKDnt is triggered by exposure to extreme heat. A desire to test that hypothesis has drawn occupational and environmental health researchers to sites where CKDnt is widespread. Perhaps most prominent among these is the sugarcane zone of western Nicaragua, where thousands of laborers have been diagnosed with kidney disease. In this talk, I develop a critical anthropological approach to planetary health, arguing that the recent focus on mitigating workplace heat exposure elides other environmental health concerns regarding industrial sugar production, particularly about the use of toxic agrochemicals. The systematic push by corporations and transnational scientists to find ways to profitably produce sugarcane under conditions of extreme heat is paralleled by the efforts of sugarcane zone residents to make knowledge claims about the slower and more accretive changes in climate wrought by chemically driven cane production.

Alex Nading is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Anthropology at Cornell University. He is the former editor (2021-2024) of Medical Anthropology Quarterly and author of two books, Mosquito Trails: Ecology, Health, and the Politics of Entanglement (2014) and The Kidney and the Cane: Planetary Health and Plantation Labor in Nicaragua (2025). His research and teaching interests include the anthropology of health, the environment, infrastructure, and science, and his latest project examines the relationship between technologies of personal protection and planetary ecological change.

Speaker: Chang Xu, Assistant Professor, Department of Transnational Asian Studies, Rice University
Description: Against the backdrop of the 1785 Qing–Russian trade embargo, reports of rhubarb smuggling in southern Xinjiang in 1788 prompted the Qianlong Emperor to impose a swift, empire-wide ban on rhubarb exports. Regarded by the Qing as an essential good in high demand in Russia, rhubarb became a tool of diplomatic leverage, with control over its circulation used to press Russia into meeting Qing’s demands. Yet as a vital medicinal substance, the complete ban soon clashed with local welfare needs, forcing the court to navigate between diplomatic goals and people’s livelihood. This text-reading focuses on edicts and memorials documenting Qianlong’s changing assessments of rhubarb’s medical necessity in Taiwan, Ryukyu, Manchuria, and Xinjiang, tracing how the state’s view of rhubarb evolved in step with shifting imperial priorities. We will also examine how the Qing wove diverse borderland realities into a coherent foreign policy, while applying regionally differentiated regulations to manage rhubarb circulation.

To join virtually: https://cornell.zoom.us/j/95438676960?pwd=328BU5VeyWZh3D2Z7fD8G9zYqUc48…

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.