Hu Shih Distinguished Lecture
The 2025-2026 Hu Shih Distinguished Lecture
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.”
Thursday, April 23rd, 2026 | 4:30-5:30pm
Johnson Museum Robinson Lecture Hall
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.
History and Background
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.
Past Hu Shih Distinguished Lectures
- 2024-2025 - Patricia Ebrey (History, University of Washington), "From Research Assistants to Professors: Scholars from China as Experts on China, 1920-1960"
- 2023-2024 - Haun Saussy (East Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago) "Exile As Formative Experience in Classical Chinese Poetry"
- 2022-2023 - Michael Nylan (History, UC Berkeley ) "Majority Rule and Consortial Policymaking: The Evidence from Early China"
- 2021-2022 - Tim Brook (History, University of British Columbia), "Government for the People: Troubling Legacies of the Confucian Statecraft Tradition"
- 2020-2021 - Meir Shahar (East Asian Studies, Tel Aviv University), "Chinese Animal Gods"
- 2019-2020 - Dorothy Ko (History, Barnard College), "Gender and Material Culture: The Female Artisan Gu Erniang and the Craft of Inkstone-Making in Early Modern China"
- 2018-2019 - Victor Mair (East Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Pennsylvania), "An Important Dunhuang Manuscript Formerly in the Possession of Hu Shih: Transformation Text on the Subduing of Demons"
- 2017-2018 - Steven Sangren (Anthropology, Cornell University), "Filial Piety and Its Discontents"
- 2016-2017 - Francesca Bray (Social Anthropology, University of Edinburgh), "Hail the Maintainers: Rethinking Technology in Chinese History"
- 2015-2016 - Evelyn Rawski (History, University of Pittsburgh), "Moving from Nation to Region: China in Northeast Asian History"
2014-2015 - Benjamin Elman (East Asian Studies, Princeton University), "The Great Reversal: China, Korea, and Japan in the Early Modern World"
Hu Shih, the Greatest Cornellian
Sherman Cochran, the Hu Shih Professor Emeritus of Chinese History, presented the Cornell Contemporary China Initiative's inaugural lecture on November 20, 2015, making the case for Hu Shih (Class of 1914) as the "greatest Cornellian." Cochran framed his lecture as a comparison between Hu Shih and other Cornell graduates, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (Class of 1954), novelist Thomas Pynchon (Class of 1959), and professional football player and actor Ed Marinaro (Class of 1972). Read more about the event.
