Upcoming Events
- 11:00 am
- William Pitt Union Dining Room A
If you are interested in an international career, come join former and current government professionals to learn more about the range of opportunities available to early-career individuals! Panelists will talk about their career journeys followed by small breakout groups where students can ask questions and gain mentorship. Refreshments will be served.
Panelists:
Isabel Brum - U.S. Department of State Thomas R Pickering Fellow, University of Pittsburgh (linkedin.com/in/isabel-brum)
Betty Cruz - World Affairs Council of Pittsburgh, President and CEO( linkedin.com/in/bettycruz)
Megan Keil - Peace Corps, Regional Recruiter, Office of Volunteer Recruitment & Selection (linkedin.com/in/megan-keil)
Julia Santucci - University of Pittsburgh, Senior Lecturer in Intelligence Studies and Director, Johnson Institute for Responsible Leadership (linkedin.com/in/julia-santucci-431732129)
Sherry Zalika Sykes - U.S. Department of State, Diplomat in Residence Allegheny (linkedin.com/in/diplomat-in-residence-allegheny-4bb223288)
- Molly McSweeney
- 3:30 pm to 4:30 pm
- Global Hub
- Rachel Vandevort
- 4:00 pm to 5:00 pm
- Global Hub
- Molly McSweeney
- 5:00 pm to 7:00 pm
- Global Hub
Are you an undergraduate Pitt student planning to embark on a summer global experience? Join the Spring 2024 3-part UCIS Digital Narrative Workshop Series and create a short video to document your experience, which will be displayed on the big screen in the Global Hub!
3-part Workshop Series:
Workshop #1: Monday, February 26 | 5-8 pm | Posvar 4217
Workshop #2: Tuesday, March 5 | 5-8 pm | Posvar 4217
Workshop #3: Tuesday, March 19 | 5-7 pm | Global Hub (1st floor, Posvar Hall)
Note: Students should attend all 3 workshops. If you have class or other pressing conflicts, special exceptions might be made, although you are strongly encouraged to join as much as you can to get the most out of the experience!
Registration deadline: February 23
- 6:00 pm
- 202 Frick Fine Arts
Dr. Thomas Baudinette is Senior Lecturer in Japanese Studies and International Studies at Macquarie University. A cultural anthropologist, his research primarily explores how popular media and fandom culture inform knowledge about gender and sexuality across East and Southeast Asia. He is the author of Regimes of Desire: Young Gay Men, Media, Masculinity in Tokyo (University of Michigan Press, 2021) and Boys Love Media in Thailand: Celebrity, Fans, and Transnational Asian Queer Popular Culture (Bloomsbury, 2023). He i currently working on his third book, tentatively titled Queer Fantasies of Asia: Japanese and Korean Media Fandom in the Philippines.
- 2:00 pm
- Global Hub, First Floor Posvar Hall
Come have coffee and refreshments with Sherry Sykes, Pitt’s own Diplomat-in-Residence! She will provide guidance and mentorship to students interested in careers, internships, and fellowships with the U.S. State Department. Sherry will be available to chat anytime between 2-4 P.M. All are welcome!
Sherry is a senior Foreign Service officer, who previously served as Consul General in Durban, South Africa, and has held diplomatic postings in Mozambique, Nigeria and Ethiopia. In D.C. she has served in the State Department’s Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs, leading U.S. efforts on ocean, air, chemical and plastic pollution agreements, and in combating wildlife trafficking and climate change. As Diplomat-in-Residence, she will provide guidance and mentorship to students interested in careers, internships and fellowships with the U.S. State Department.
- Dr. Joseph Fewsmith
- 3:00 pm
- 4130 Posvar
Forging Leninism in China is a re-examination of the events of the Chinese revolution and the transformation of the Chinese Communist Party from the years 1927 to 1934. Describing the transformation of the party as “the forging of Leninism”, Joseph Fewsmith offers a clear analysis of the development of the party. Drawing on supporting statements of party leaders and a wealth of historical material, he demonstrates how the Chinese Communist Party reshaped itself to become far more violent, more hierarchical, and more militarized during this time. He highlights the role of local educated youth in organizing the Chinese revolution, arguing that it was these local organizations, rather than Mao, who introduced Marxism into the countryside. Fewsmith presents a vivid story of local social history and conflict between Mao’s revolutionaries and local Communists.
- 4:00 pm
- William Pitt Union Lower Lounge
- 6:00 pm
- 232 Cathedral of Learning
All That Breathes (2022)
In one of the world’s most populated cities, two brothers—Nadeem and Saud—devote their lives to the quixotic effort of protecting the black kite, a majestic bird of prey essential to the ecosystem of New Delhi that has been falling from the sky at alarming rates. Amid environmental toxicity and social unrest, the “kite brothers” spend day and night caring for the creatures in their makeshift basement hospital. Director Shaunak Sen explores the connection between the kites and the brothers who help them return to the skies, offering a
mesmerizing chronicle of inter-species coexistence.
Director Shaunak Sen
Shaunak Sen is an Academy award nominated filmmaker and writer based in Delhi. His film All That Breathes received nominations at the 2023 Academy and BAFTA awards. The film won awards at Cannes, Sundance, BFI London, IDA, Grierson and Cinema Eye, and 24 other film festivals. Cities of Sleep (2016), Sen’s first feature-length documentary, was shown at various major international film festivals and won 6 international awards. He has been a jury member at festivals including Sundance, Zurich, and the Kerala Film Festival.
He holds a PhD and has published in journals including Bioscope and Widescreen and is currently a visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute, Berlin.
- 3:00 pm
- 2800 Posvar Hall
- Neil Diamant
- 3:00 pm
- 4130 Posvar
In Useful Bullshit Neil J. Diamant pulls back the curtain on early constitutional conversations between citizens and officials in the PRC. Scholars have argued that China, like the former USSR, promulgated constitutions to enhance its domestic and international legitimacy by opening up the constitution-making process to ordinary people, and by granting its citizens political and socioeconomic rights. But what did ordinary officials and people say about their constitutions and rights? Did constitutions contribute to state legitimacy?
Over the course of four decades, the PRC government encouraged millions of citizens to pose questions about, and suggest revisions to, the draft of a new constitution.
- Ted Goossen and Motoyuki Shibata, founders of MONKEY New Writing from Japan, Chris Lowy, Carnegie Mellon University
- 2:00 pm
- McConomy Auditorium Cohon Student Center CMU
TED GOOSSEN is a literary translator, professor emeritus of Japanese literature at York University in Toronto, and a founding editor of MONKEY New Writing from Japan. His recent work includes Dragon Palace (MONKEY imprint, 2023) and The Third Love (Granta, 2024), both by Hiromi Kawakami.
SAM MALISSA holds a PhD in Japanese literature from Yale University. His translations of stories by Kyōhei Sakaguchi appear in every volume of MONKEY.
MOTOYUKI SHIBATA is a literary translator and professor emeritus of American literature at the University of Tokyo. He is the founder of the Japanese literary journal MONKEY and MONKEY New Writing from Japan. He has translated Paul Auster, Stuart Dybek, Brian Evenson, Laird Hunt, and Kelly Link, among others.
MEG TAYLOR edits Japanese literature in translation. She is the managing editor for MONKEY New Writing from Japan. She studied Japanese literature with Howard Hibbett at Harvard University and has spent most of her career in trade publishing.
DAVID BOYD teaches literary translation at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He is known for his award-winning translations of Hiroko Oyamada and Mieko Kawakami,
among others. His translation of Takaoka’s Travels by Tatsuhiko Shibusawa will be published in May 2024 under the MONKEY imprint withStone Bridge Press.
- Motoyuki Shibata, founder of MONKEY New Writing from Japan, Charles Exley, University of Pittsburgh
- 3:00 pm
- G4 Cathedral of Learning
Join us for a conversation between Hiromi Kawakami, in town from Tokyo for only two days, and the Pittsburgh-based author Adam Ehrlich Sachs.
HIROMI KAWAKAMI is one of Japan’s most popular novelists. Many of her books have been published in English, including Manazuru, The Nakano Thrift Shop, Parade, Record of a Night Too Brief, Strange Weather in Tokyo (shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2013), and The Ten Loves of Nishino. She has won numerous Japanese literary awards, including the Akutagawa Prize, the Tanizaki Prize, the Yomiuri Prize, and the Izumi Kyoka Prize for Literature. People from My Neighborhood, translated by Ted Goossen, was published in 2021. Dragon Palace, also translated by Ted Goossen, was published under the MONKEY imprint in 2023. Her work appears in every issue of MONKEY New Writing from Japan.
ADAM EHRLICH SACHS is the author of three books: Gretel and the Great War, The Organs of Sense, and Inherited Disorders. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, n+1, and Harper’s, and he was a finalist for the Believer Book Award and the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. Aoko Matsuda translated five of his stories from Inherited Disorders for the Japanese MONKEY (Spring 2018); for the same issue, she wrote a story in response to his work, which was translated into English by Polly Barton as “A Father and His Back” and published in MONKEY New Writing from Japan (2022).
- 6:00 pm
- 202 Frick Fine Arts
Xin Wang is a curator and art historian based in New York. A PhD candidate in Art History at New York University, writing a dissertation on Soviet Hauntology, she held curatorial and educational positions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, and received the Warhol Foundation's Arts Writers Grant in 2021. Publications such as "Asian Futurism and the Non-Other" have been widely translated and taught in university curriculums. She has served on jury panels for The Shed, the Creative Capital Grant, and Anonymous Was a Woman, as well as a regular visiting critic at Yale University's MFA program in Photography. She served as the Chief curator of the 4th art and technology-themed biennial program - titled "To Your Eternity" - at Beijing's Today Art Museum in Fall 2023.
- 6:30 pm
- 125 Frick Fine Arts
A screening of E.A. Dupont's 1929 silent film Piccadilly, starring Asian American icon Anna May Wong. The screening will be musically accompanied by local musicians, Appalasia and Tom Roberts. Come immerse yourself in their original score and experience one of early Hollywood's finest stars at her finest.
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