Speaker: Jordan Sand, Professor of Japanese History, Georgetown University

Abstract: The Ise shrines stand at the ritual center of Japanese imperial ideology. At the same time, they are admired around the world for their architecture and for the unique practice of periodic reconstruction. Yet the historical relationship between their ideological role and their architecture is seldom considered. By tracing the evolution of meanings attributed to the buildings and their reconstruction over a millennium, this lecture will reveal the many ways the shrine sites have been mobilized and show the gradual emergence of modern conceptions of architectural value.

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.

International Fair showcases Cornell's global opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students. Explore the fair and find out about international majors and minors, language study, study abroad, funding opportunities, global internships, Cornell Global Hubs, and more.

The International Fair is sponsored by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies and Office of Global Learning (both part of Global Cornell) in partnership with the Language Resource Center.

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This talk will explore the social, environmental, and economic legacies of plywood across the Americas, focusing on Honduras and the U.S. South. During and after World War II, demand for southern pine lumber created patterns of inequality that continue to shape the contemporary world. In 1964, the Georgia Pacific Corporation invented a process to create glued plywood from southern pine, transforming the political economy of forests across the hemisphere. Using ethnographic and archival research in rural Honduras, Arkansas, and Florida, this talk will explore how the search for building materials transformed and connected places across the Americas in surprising ways.

Daniel Reichman is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Rochester. A specialist in contemporary Latin America, he earned his PhD from Cornell and has conducted anthropological research in Honduras and Brazil. He is the author of two books, The Broken Village: Coffee, Migration, and Globalization in Honduras and Progress in the Balance: Mythologies of Development in Santos, Brazil. In addition to his academic writing, he writes for popular media outlets and has spoken on immigration policy at the White House, United Nations, and the Interamerican Development Bank. He is co-editor of the Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures, the longest running anthropology lecture series in North America, which is published by Duke University Press.

Talk by Marc Herman (Humanities, York University)

In this book talk, Marc Herman discusses his new book, After Revelation: The Rabbinic Past in the Medieval Islamic World. This book demonstrates that medieval Jewish legal thought was forged in dialogue with various and competing schools of Islamic law. Herman homes in on the central doctrine of post-biblical Judaism: the notion that God had supplemented the written Hebrew Bible with an Oral Torah. Tracing medieval interpretations of this idea from Baghdad to Córdoba to Cairo, three major centers of medieval Jewish life, Herman reveals previously unrecognized commonalities between Jewish and Islamic constructions of religious law. For medieval Jews and Muslims alike, legal theory was a primary form of religious self-fashioning, and as such, it must be understood in light of the cross-cultural discourses in which it was fashioned.

Marc Herman is an assistant professor in the Department of Humanities at York University who focuses on Jewish and Islamic intellectual history in the medieval Mediterranean and Judeo-Arabic law. Marc graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and held postdoctoral fellowships at Columbia University, Fordham University, Harvard University, Rutgers University, the University of Michigan, the University of Pennsylvania, and Yale Law School. He is the coeditor of Accounting for the Commandments in Medieval Judaism: Studies in Law, Philosophy, Pietism, and Kabbalah (Brill, 2021) and Worlds of Jewish Law: Premodern Legal Cultures in the Making (currently under review). His first book, After Revelation: The Rabbinic Past in the Medieval Islamic World, was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in August 2025. Marc’s current project reconstructs the writing, rewriting, and transmission history of Maimonides’s Book of the Commandments.

Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Bradley Davis, Professor of History from the Eastern Connecticut State University.

This Gatty Lecture will take place at The Kahin Center, 640 Stewart Ave. Lunch will be served. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

Abstract

In 2025, leadership in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam initiated sweeping reforms to the administration of the country. Some territorial units became blended into others and long-standing categories in Vietnamese political geography, such as “city” thành phố and “province” tỉnh either transformed beyond recognition or vanished completely from the map. Despite its seeming novelty, and contrary to the judgments of policy analysts and commentators, these twentieth-century reforms were neither unprecedented nor, from a long-term historical view, entirely unexpected. In fact, we might find their clearest antecedents in reforms launched two centuries ago, when the imperial Vietnamese state sought to enhance its control over people, territory, and resources. Vietnam’s imperial past not only presaged its administrative present, it also opens a view towards possible multicultural futures.

About the Speaker

Bradley Camp Davis examines Vietnamese history with a multicultural and interdisciplinary approach. His publications include Imperial Bandits (University of Washington Press, 2017), which was long-listed for the ICAS book prize, and, as co-editor, a two-volume annotated collection of Yao texts, Sách Cổ Chữ Dao (Hanoi, 2009), and The Cultivated Forest (Washington, 2022) along with research articles in English, Vietnamese, and French. He has held visiting appointments at Université Paris-Cité, the Program in Agrarian Studies at Yale University, and, most recently the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Currently, he is completing a book manuscript on the multi-species environmental history of imperial Vietnam as well as a book manuscript on the history of administrative reform. Since 2012, he has taught courses on Southeast Asian and world history at Eastern Connecticut State University.

The East Asia Program is honored to have Wu Hung, the Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor of Art History and Director of the Center for the Art of East Asia at the University of Chicago, to give the 2025-2026 Hu Shih Distinguished Lecture: “Emperor Qianlong’s Peep Boxes: A Case of 18th-century Global Interaction in Art and Visual Culture.”

This is a hybrid event. To attend online, please register here with your cornell.edu email address: https://cornell.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_OKbtn2tEQ92ZW_FrQ_FaNw

Abstract: By focusing on a group of newly discovered visual materials—most notably a pair of peepshow boxes produced in Europe and China, respectively—this talk examines a series of transformations unfolding in eighteenth-century art and visual culture across geographic and cultural boundaries.

Bio: Wu Hung has published widely on both traditional and contemporary Chinese art. His interest in both traditional and modern/contemporary Chinese art has led him to experiment with different ways to integrate these conventionally separate phases into new kinds of art historical narratives, as exemplified by his Monumentality in Early Chinese Art and Architecture (1995), The Double Screen: Medium and Representation of Chinese Pictorial Art (1996), Remaking Beijing: Tiananmen Square: the Creation of a Political Space (2005), A Story of Ruins: Presence and Absence in Chinese Art and Visual Culture (2012), and Zooming In: Histories of Photography in China (2016). Several of his ongoing projects follow this direction to explore the interrelationship between art medium, pictorial image, and architectural space, the dialectical relationship between absence and presence in Chinese art and visual culture, and the relationship between art discourse and practice.

Wu Hung is Director of the Center for the Art of East Asia at the University of Chicago. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, and sits on the boards and advisory committees of many research institutes and museums in the United States and China.

Hu Shih Distinguished Lecture

In 2014 on the 100th anniversary of Hu Shih's graduation from Cornell, EAP initiated an annual distinguished lecture in honor of the philosopher and statesman. Leading scholars of Chinese and East Asian studies are invited to speak on critical issues in their field of research. These lectures are archived as a resource for the Cornell community and beyond. Learn more about one of Cornell's most distinguished alumni, Hu Shih.

Hu Shih Distinguished Lecture videos and programs are permanently archived in the Cornell eCommons.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.

Join us for an online discussion on colonial collections in and on the Philippines, featuring speakers from Yale University.

Dr. Cheryl Beredo, Director of Collections and Chief Curator, Yale University

Surveying several collections that can support the study of U.S. colonial archives of and on the Philippines, this presentation considers the conditions of their formation and explores their continuing dynamism. This talk examines how familiar government documents, national archives, and independent research collections in the United States and the Philippines not only chronicle the activities of the colonial state, but also the enduring work of both collection- and institution-building. It concludes with observations on possibilities to continue to build archives in this area today.

Aurélie Vialette, Associate Professor, Yale University

This presentation will discuss the colonial administrative archive of San Ramon penal colony (Zamboanga, Mindanao, the Philippines, 1869). The study of this archive provides an entrance to examine the transportation and labor of the imprisoned indigenous in the Philippines under colonial rule. It will cover the experiences working with archives, both in the Philippines and in Spain, and explain how to work with both databases and documents, showing specific examples from both countries.