“Biography of Mary” (Meili Xiaozhuan), “Travel Overseas” (Haiwai Zhuangyou) and “Wonderland under the Sea” (Haidi Qijing) were three classical tales written in the mid-1880s by the pioneering thinker and reformer Wang Tao in Late Qing. While scholars have pointed out the tensions between the traditional narrative form and the author’s ever-globalizing sensibility, Wang Tao expresses his disillusionment of Chinese culture when other reformers were advocating only for technological and institutional changes. Shi looks into both the contexts and texts of the three tales.

*See the file below for abstracts*
**RSVP requested**

PROGRAM

First Session | 1:30 – 3:00
Welcome and Introduction
Drew Armstrong + Mrinalini Rajagopalan
Architectural Studies Program
University of Pittsburgh

Diego Rivera and the ‘Building’ of Mexican Identity
Patricia Morgado
North Carolina State University

Generalizing Away Uniqueness: James Stirling's Interrogation of the Oxbridge Courtyard
Amanda Reeser Lawrence
Northeastern University

Coffee Break

Second Session | 3:30-5:00

Laura Mulvey is Professor of Film and Media Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London. She has written extensively on film and film theory. Her books include Fetishism and Curiosity (1996), Death Twenty-four Times a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (2006), Experimental British Television (edited with Jamie Sexton, 2007), and Visual and Other Pleasures (2nd edition, 2009). She has co-directed films, including Riddles of the Sphinx (1978) and Frida Kahlo and Tina Malatti (1980), as well as the documentary Disgraced Monuments (1996).

*Reception to follow*

In February President Obama announced the beginning of negotiations designed to produce a US-EU Free Trade Agreement. Mutual tariffs are already low and trade high; business and labor constituents seem supportive, and officials are eager to conclude this agreement “on one tank of gas,” i.e., quickly. But significant issues will be in play, including: opening markets for agriculture products, trade in services, and access to public contracts.

The Hagia Sophias of Istanbul, Iznik, and Trabzon shared similar conversion histories. All three were built as Byzantine churches, converted into mosques under the rule of the Ottoman Empire, and functioned as museums in the 20th century.

Among the Baroque paintings held in the Royal Collection in London are two works from the early modern Netherlands: the Dutch artist Rembrandt van Rijn's Portrait of the Shipbuilder Jan Rijcksen and his Wife Griet Jans, 1633, and the Flemish artist Anthony van Dyck's Cupid and Psyche, 1640. At first glance, these paintings could not look more different, yet they have more in common than at first appears.

Graduate Seminar building on Prof. Berman's talk "Figuring out Europe: Nation, State and the European Union in the German Public Sphere"

Graduate Seminar building on Prof. Berman's talk Is the Ivory Tower an Iron Cage? Why We Need to Reform Humanities Education

Popular Kiswahili Culture and Youth Identity in East Africa
By: Professor F.E.M.K. Senkoro, founding director of the Institute of Kiswahili at the University of Dar es Salaam, TanzaniaUniversity Tanzania