Taiwan's popular music has shaped China's music and culture to a surprising degree. The roots of Taiwan's music industry can be found in the 1930s Jazz era in Shanghai. Sixty years later, Taiwan was the hub of Chinese-language pop music industry--a sonic movement that shaped Chinese understandings of music, gender, and individuality in the contemporary age.

Considering graduate school? Preparing your application materials?

Join us as Pitt graduate program experts from the School of Public Health, GSPIA, Economics, History, and Asian Studies share expertise on crafting strong applications. Learn tips on writing effective personal statements, securing letter writers, and submitting desired credentials. Ask individual questions to admissions professionals at the breakout session.

Please join us for a poetry reading by Takako Arai at the Humanities Center (Cathedral of Learning Rm 602) on September 18 at 4pm. Ms. Arai will read a selection of her poems in Japanese and with English translation. She is in the U.S. as part of The University of Iowa’s prestigious creative writing residency, the International Writers Program. Arai is known for writing socially engaged poetry. She writes in particular about the lives of working women as they are affected by such forces as globalization, economic decline, and the 2011 triple disaster in northeastern Japan.

Drawing on a new book, Subnational Hydropolitics, this talk will explore the role that water has played in Chinese politics, its rapid economic growth, and its struggle to make its development sustainable. It will also discuss new and old tensions between China and its neighbors over shared water resources, and the role that conflict over water might play in China’s rise.

1989 doesn’t usually resonate in the chronology of significant anti-apartheid activism. Yet, that year saw the rise to power of FW de Klerk in South Africa and progress (albeit halting) towards the release of Nelson Mandela and other activists of the liberation struggle from prison, the unbanning of political organizations, and the negotiated dismantling of the apartheid state.

As part of the Global 1989 series, this film screening and workshop till focus on Asia.

Lydia Chen's documentaries—Inner visions and Art in Smog—explore three artists' careers as they navigate the radical cultural and technological changes in China over the past twenty years. The films take the audience from Beijing's first experimental art exhibit in the late 80s to its growing commercial marketplace in the 21st century and explore the shifting economic and political tides as that era unfolded.

The year 1989 witnessed momentous changes in global politics: the end of the Cold War, the acceleration of global neoliberal capitalism, and the start of a long decade of internationalism and interventionism -- G.H.W Bush's famous "New World Order."

Join us for an evening of language and cultural exchange between Pitt students and International students.