Please join Professor Sun in a fun and interactive exploration of a key mode of discourse in classical Chinese texts. Some famous but still not sufficiently understood passages from the Analects and Zhuangzi, as well as selected classical poems, will be discussed. You might just find something intellectually stimulating from these texts and even gain new insights in the way native Chinese speak today. 

This conference features keynote speaker Ambassador Peter Tomsen (GSPIA ’64), Former U.S. Special Envoy to Afghanistan and Author of "The Wars of Afghanistan". An R.S.V.P. is required. To attend, please email Beverly Brizzi by Monday, December 2nd, to confirm your registration.

All SAA members and international students are invited to experience board games from around the globe while enjoying traditional Thanksgiving foods - turkey, mashed and sweet potatoes, and pie!

International students can feel at home and American students can learn about cultures and traditions from around the world.

Register at: www.eventbrite.com/event/9187146001

The Japanese Civil War, also known as the Boshin War, is an understudied chapter in the Bakumatsu-Meiji transition. This talk will propose a new interpretation of the period as neither peaceful nor a conflict between a set pair of combatants, but rather as three conflicts in one. It will further analyze the defeat of the Northern Alliance (Ôuetsu Reppandomei), one of the conflict’s belligerent parties. Why was this alliance of 31 domains, stronger than the nascent Meiji government, defeated?

According to 2012 US Census, there are about 2.8 million Indian Immigrants in USA. They represent at least five religions, speak at least 16 distinct languages, they vary significantly in cultural, religious and dietary practices, and their income levels also are quite varied. The Indian Immigrants, as a group, are too diversified. The number of Indian Immigrants that have already retired or ready to retire are only about 100,000 and they are scattered throughout USA.

China already vies with the USA for Olympic gold. Will it similarly catch up in the innovation race? Chinese firms have come to dominate many manufacturing industries in the global marketplace. The Chinese leadership and some executives, however, have recognized the critical need for Chinese firms to be more innovative in order to break out of the low value-added segments that they occupy in most of these industries. The recent emphasis on “innovation” and “creative industries” is actually part of a long-term, continued effort to catch-up with leading nations.

This talk considers the low‐brow Hindi film *Disco Dancer *(Babbar Subhash, 1982) in terms of its seminal retooling of narrative, thematic, and star practices of Hindi cinema to accommodate new flows of international popular culture, specifically the “disco sensibility.” In its participation in a complex citational network of plagiarism, homage, and adaptation, the film is particularly seminal in its domestication of disco into a melodramatic mother‐centered narrative and its formal experimentation as it struggles to construct a cinematic language adequate to disco.

This one credit mini-course is part of a series organized by regions around the world based on their role on the world stage, their importance within the Muslim world, and the critical influence they play in the global community. The series and course seeks to illuminate the various perspectives of the Muslim community around the world.

The single fossil site Dmanisi, Republic of Georgia, rivals numerous sites in Tanzania and East Africa not only in geological age, 1.85-
1.78 million years ago, but also and especially in morphological diversity of human fossils. Recent research has demonstrated that although brief, the geological history of the site was not, as might be expected, relatively uniform, but rather very complex. This interesting and unique situation impacts interpretation of the human remains and, more broadly, raises important questions about the interpretation of human evolution during this period.

Teams of high school students from throughout the Pittsburgh region participate in the annual Pitt Model United Nations simulation.