Past Events

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Approaching the seven-day week as an artificial construction of modern society, David Henkin explores its role as a dominant organizational principle that shapes our understanding and experience of time.