Exploring cheerfulness as a theme and structuring element in the work of major artists, Timothy Hampton (Comparative Literature and French) casts new light on literary history, the intersections of culture and psychology, and the history of emotions.
What might behaviorism, that debunked school of psychology, tell us about literature? Joshua Gang argues for its enormous critical value for thinking about why language is so good at creating illusions of mental life.
What happens when we talk? Michael Lucey offers a linguistic anthropological analysis of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.
Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age
The humanities, underfunded and popularly devalued, seem to be in a perpetual state of crisis. Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon show how the modern humanistic disciplines made crisis a core part of their project.
The Invention of Humanity, East and West
Li Wai-yee and Siep Stuurman explore the Eastern and Western roots of the notion that all the world’s inhabitants — regardless of ethnic origin, native place, or status — constitute a single human community.
Scholars and intellectuals share their perspectives on the trajectory of Ukrainian culture over the longer arc of history and in the contemporary post-Soviet era.
The Promise and Perils of Media
How do new and emerging forms of media shape perceptions of China’s complex contemporary reality? Panelists explore how various media platforms affect public opinion about China, both within and outside the Sinosphere.
On Chinese Democracy
Asking how essential democratic values can be adapted and deployed within a Chinese context, panelists respond to the groundbreaking work of Ci Jiwei, author of the 2019 book Democracy in China: The Coming Crisis.
SanSan Kwan explores how dance — based in body-to-body interaction on the stage — serves as a revelatory site, and ultimately carries the potential to model everyday encounters across difference in the world.
Edward Tyerman explores the role of China in the 1920s as the key site for Soviet debates over how the political project of socialist internationalism should be expressed through literature, film, and theater.