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.

The tender longing for the stars, an impulse familiar to many, has unfolded alongside another trajectory in modernity: from Captain Cook’s pursuit of Venus to NASA’s Space-Age invocation of Christopher Columbus, tracing a historical course intertwined with imperial expansion. The cultural imagination of space exploration, arguably most concentrated in the genre of science fiction (sf), is also haunted by what Gerry Canavan calls a “bad [colonial] conscience.” While scholars such as Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr., John Rieder, and Jessica Langer have examined the colonial and postcolonial operations within the genre, others, including Sheree Renée Thomas, Grace Dillon, Lou Cornum, and Taryne Jade Taylor, have turned to minoritarian SF traditions—Afrofuturism, Indigenous futurism, and Latinx futurism—that foreground speculative geographies illuminating decolonial concepts of temporality and subjectivity.

Engaging with this constellation of scholarship on colonial speculation and alternative futuring in the Anglophone sphere, this presentation turns to early revolutionary Cuba, whose anti-colonial, socialist, and Cold War conditions offer a unique historical, linguistic, and cultural vantage point for speculative imagination. Specifically, I focus on Ángel Arango’s 1964 short story “El cosmonauta” (“The Cosmonaut”)—an early exemplar of Cuban science fiction—and ask: How does Arango’s playful engagement with Indigenous narratives, Caribbean postcolonial writing, and European colonial travelogues reconfigure the genre’s inherited traditions? In what ways does it invite us to rethink our relation to history and the human subject? In other words, what alternative visions might it bring to complicate prevalent capitalist techno-utopian discourses of space exploration?

Lu Han is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Romance Studies. Her research focuses on 20th- and 21st-century Hispanophone Caribbean and Mexican literature, visual culture, and intellectual traditions. She is currently developing a project on alternative perspectives of space exploration in Latin American speculative imagination, from the 1950s to the present. This project emphasizes non-Western ideas of temporality, technology, ecology, and the human, while also highlighting how space ambitions create complex dynamics among postcolonial modernity, decolonization, and racialization.

This talk examines how to ensure Indigenous Peoples are meaningfully involved in jurisdictional REDD+ initiatives, with their rights safeguarded and their perspectives actively shaping decisions. It highlights practical approaches for designing benefit-sharing systems, implementing safeguards, and establishing governance models that reflect both climate goals and Indigenous priorities. Drawing on lessons from diverse regions, it showcases successful collaborations among governments, Indigenous organizations, and civil society that have advanced equitable, transparent, and high-integrity climate finance. Attendees will gain concrete strategies and real-world examples to strengthen Indigenous participation in REDD+, fostering trust, resilience, and lasting outcomes for both climate and biodiversity.

Edgar Godoy is a senior environmental strategist and trained biologist with over 15 years of experience in sustainable forest governance, climate change mitigation, and jurisdictional REDD+ implementation. He holds a degree in biology and has built his career through leadership roles in international NGOs, government collaborations, and multilateral platforms. He is a former Director for Rainforest Alliance Latin America and has provided technical support to Mexico’s National Protected Areas Commission (CONANP).
Edgar specializes in forging lasting partnerships with subnational governments, Indigenous Peoples, and local communities to design and scale high-integrity forest carbon finance solutions. With deep expertise in policy frameworks, safeguards, and benefit-sharing mechanisms, he ensures technical assistance aligns with country priorities while fostering inclusive climate action.
His leadership has been pivotal in advancing carbon market readiness, facilitating ERPA negotiations, and engaging diverse stakeholders across Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia. By connecting policy, science, and local priorities, Edgar brings strategic insight and diplomatic skill to the fight against deforestation, helping shape equitable, lasting climate solutions.

Talk by David Engerman (History, Yale University)

Apostles of Development offers a history of international development through the lives and work of six South Asian economists who all studied together in Cambridge in the 1950s. They were an illiustrious group, with long careers and many succeses: winning a Nobel Prize (Amartya Sen), spending a decade as Prime Minister of India (Manmohan Singh), inventing the Human Development Index (Mahbub ul Haq), becoming a leading economist of international trade (Jagdish Bhagwati), agitating for independent Bangladesh (Rehman Sobhan), and helping create the modern Sri Lankan economy (Lal Jayawardena).

David C. Engerman, Leitner International Interdisciplinary Professor of History and Global Affairs, teaches international history at Yale University. Between receiving his Ph.D. from the University of California-Berkeley in 1998 and joining Yale in 2018, he was on the faculty at Brandeis University. In 2016, he served as elected president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. He is the author of four books – Modernization from the Other Shore; American Intellectuals and the Romance of Russian Development (Harvard, 2003), Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America’s Soviet Experts (Oxford, 2009), The Price of Aid: The Economic Cold War in India (Harvard, 2018), and most recently Apostles of Development: Six Economists and the World They Made (Penguin/Random House-India, Oxford, 2025); he is also the editor or coeditor of multiple collections, including a volume of the new Cambridge History of America and the World.