Film critics consider Blind Shaft an excellent example of Sixth Generation film. It is “former documentary filmmaker Li Yang’s feature debut and is both a bleak film noir set on a lawless frontier and an indictment of China’s disastrous Economic Miracle…In modern Northwestern China, itinerant coal miners Tang and Song place a cash price on human life in a world where humanity has been deemed utterly worthless.

UCIS affiliated faculty and staff presented a professional development workshop via videoconferencing for faculty from the Nine University and College International Studies Consortium of Georgia.

In Lucky Girl (Algonquin, 2009) Mei-Ling Hopgood tells the story of when her birth family from Taiwan contacted her for the first time when she was in her twenties. The book explores her developing relationship with them and their culture. Her most recent book, How Eskimos Keep Their Babies Warm (Algonquin, 2012) is a tour of child-rearing practices around the world. Her visit is in connection with Marianne Novy's class, Changing Families in Literature, EngLit 0617.

Russell Berman is Director of German Studies at Stanford, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Editor of TELOS,
and recent President of the Modern Language Association. He is an expert on German literature and culture and
on cultural relations between Europe and the United States, and is a pioneer in German Cultural Studies.
In more than 80 articles and five books, he has written widely on modern German and European literature and politics,
as well as on issues in contemporary cultural theory.

In music and words, two Germans from different generations reflect on the Holocaust, German history, and what it means to be German in the 21st century.

*A discussion/question and answer period will follow the talk

ABOUT THE PERFORMERS

Open to: Undergraduate students of all levels doing research in the field of Asian Studies (Northeast Asia, East Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, and Central Asia, as well as the Middle East). For questions about the conference, e-mail Jennifer Murawski at jennm@pitt.edu

Over the past decade, local administrators in China has seen an explosion of reform and innovation. While Beijing still mandates central policies, county-level governments are now free to implement these measures as they see fit. This conference brings together a number of leading scholars from the United States and China to analyze changes in the delivery of education, public health, environmental protection, and cadre selection (voting).

Come to this information session to learn more about the Pitt in the Himalayas program for Fall 2013 (August 26 – Dec 16)! Earn 15 credits in anthropology, biology, sociology, environmental studies, creative writing, women’s studies and religious studies while taking expeditions to glaciers, temples, pilgrimage shrines, wildlife reserves, Himalayan villages, and more! Visit www.study.abroad.pitt/himalayas or contact jsalter@pitt.edu for more information.