Lecture

Since 2015, Jain communities have defended the practice of santhārā, a voluntary ritual fast until death practiced mostly by elderly laywomen, against claims formalized in Public Interest Litigation that the fast amounts to illegal suicide and its abetment through communal and familial coercion. Laywomen's santhārās employ a religious idiom to shift the strain of aging and death within the household, where norms of elderly, ascetic, and maternal self-effacement run together.

A Guggenheim Fellow, Yunte Huang has taught at Harvard and the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he is a professor of English. The author of “Inseparable” and the Edgar Award-winning biography “Charlie Chan”-both National Book Critics Circle Award finalists-Huang speaks frequently about American popular culture.

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.

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).

Studies on Japanese-Brazilian relations, though thoroughly researched, do not always consider the possible influences of Portuguese diplomacy on policies facilitating Japanese immigration to Brazil. This presentation will focus on Wenceslau Jose de Souza Moraes, a pioneer of Lusophone diplomacy in Japan. Moraes's writings reveal a fascination with the concept of self-sacrifice and an emphasis on commonalities between Portugal and Japan.

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?

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.

Selda Altan is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Randolph College, Virginia. Her fields of specialization encompass modern Chinese and Asian history, labor history, and comparative approaches to empires and colonialism in Asia and the Middle East. Her first monograph, Chinese Workers of the World: Colonialism, Chinese Labor, and the Yunnan–Indochina Railway (Stanford University Press, 2024), analyzes labor conflicts during the construction of the Yunnan railway (1898–1910) in the larger context of twentieth-century French colonialism and capitalist development in China.