Past Events › Talk

Part of a series of talks on "Religion and the State in China", funded by the Weatherhead Conference Fund and presented by the Weatherhead East Asian Institute and the Modern Tibetan Studies Program at Columbia

Hoyt Long, University of Chicago This talk offers a history of quantitative approaches to modern Japanese literature. The impulse to reason about texts quantitatively goes back at least to Natsume Sōseki’s Theory of Literature (1907). More recently, computational techniques and the availability of digital corpora have taken this impulse further, promising new ways of engaging with Japanese literary history. Before diving into this possible future of reading, however, it is worth looking back at its antecedents. To this end, I trace a genealogy of quantitative imagining that begins with Sōseki’s formula for capturing the experience of reading, walks through the…

Deborah W. Anderson, UC Berkeley This talk will discuss the preservation of the world’s languages and cultures from the perspective of written text, focusing on work currently underway to make the modern and historic texts accessible in the digital world via the Unicode Standard.  What is the process to make languages available on mobile devices and computers, and how many scripts used to write languages are “missing”?  Why is this important, and how does emoji play into the work? The presentation will include examples of…

Wenzao Wu & Bingxin Xie Binggen Wang, President of Bingxin Research Society, Founding President of Bingxin Literature Museum Monday, March 5, 2018 2:00-4:00 PM 403 Kent Hall This talk will be given in Chinese. Sponsors and Cosponsors: Confucius Institute at Columbia University Columbia University Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures Columbia Global Centers|Beijing

“Songs for the ‘Great Leaders’: Ideology and Political Agitation in the Music of North Korea” Keith Howard, Fellow of the National Humanities Center, North Carolina and Professor Emeritus at SOAS, University of London Moderated by Charles K. Armstrong, Korea Foundation Professor of the Korean Studies in the Social Sciences in the Department of History Tuesday, 17 April 2018 4:00 PM International Affairs Building, Room 918 No Registration Required Songs have, for more than 70 years, taken a central role in North Korean cultural…

Principles of Relational Pedagogy: Linking Formal Conventions to Social, Individual, and Material Dimensions of Language Use Richard Kern, Professor and Director of UC Berkeley Language Center Tuesday, May 1, 2018 3-5:00 PM Kent Hall 403 A relational pedagogy aims to foster a reflective consciousness of how the ways we use language mediate and transform meanings, not merely transfer them from one individual or group to another. That is, it involves an ability to reflect on meaning-making practices broadly, but with…

Environmental Geographies of China under Mongol Rule Christopher Atwood, Professor, Mongolian and Late Imperial/Early Modern Chinese History, University of Pennsylvania Moderated by Robert Hymes, H. Walpole Carpentier Professor of Chinese History, Columbia University Wednesday, May 2, 2018 1:30-3:00 PM Kent 403