The Shanghai Literary Review – Student Assistants – Recruitment

Starting with Issue Seven, DKU and The Shanghai Literary Review (TSLR) will work together in the planning and production of the magazine and will provide working apprenticeships and seminars on publishing for students at DKU.

The Shanghai Literary Review is an annual journal of literature and art, founded in 2016, with an editorial team spread across China, Europe, and the US. To learn more about TSLR, please visit shanghailiterary.com.

We are now looking for student assistants for The Shanghai Literary Review. If you have already filled the Qualtrics Survey, no further action is necessary. We’ll be in touch with you. If you haven’t, please email a one-page CV + short motivation letter with the subject line “Assistant TSLR” by November 2nd, 11:59pm (CST), to: stephanie.anderson@dukekunshan.edu.cn and caio.yurgel@dukekunshan.edu.cn

Number of Students to Hire: 1 or 2 (open to students from any track)

Starting date: 11/16/2020 

Reports to:

Professor Stephanie Anderson, Assistant Professor of American Literature

Professor Caio Yurgel, Assistant Professor of Humanities

Main Duties and Responsibilities:

The students will take part in activities related to the magazine and its events, including (but not limited to): distribution, social media management, publishing, marketing, administrative tasks, and event planning. A willingness to commit to the project for at least one academic year, and potentially more than one year, is desirable. Continue reading “The Shanghai Literary Review – Student Assistants – Recruitment”

Humanities Conference Keynote Report: Carmen Tong on Human-Animal Relationships in a Posthumanistic Future

By Sinan Farooqui

Class of 2022

The third keynote lecture for the Duke Kunshan Humanities Fall Conference 2020: Hum/Animal, was led by Professor Carmen Tong, the Lecturer in Sociology at Hong Kong University. Her research expertise lies in the sociological and ethnographic investigation of schooling and student culture in Hong Kong, while her recent research has been inspired by the rapidly growing field of human-animal studies and their potential contribution to sociological inquiries, relating back to her keynote lecture: A New Reality? Human-Animal Relationships in a Posthumanistic Future.

Professor Tong began her talk discussing the environmental phenomena and crises that Earth is currently experiencing and gives an example of the two major nuclear accidents that have occurred in the past century i.e. the Chernobyl explosion and Japan’s Fukushima incident. The significance of such events lies in their consequences which are still being dealt with. Professor Tong gave the example of Japan planning to dump over a million tons of radioactive water into the sea from the Fukushima power plant., highlighting the fact that while the public believes these accidents and their subsequent consequences to be dealt with, the effects of such accidents are long-term with the capacity to wreak havoc on the natural world. Moreover, the frequency of extreme weather conditions is increasing globally, with more tsunamis, hurricanes, and wildfires, which link back to climate change. Furthermore, Professor Tong highlights the emergence of new diseases such as Ebola, SARS, and of course, Covid-19, that affect humanity specifically, emphasizing on the need to adjust to the new normal and its harsh realities. Continue reading “Humanities Conference Keynote Report: Carmen Tong on Human-Animal Relationships in a Posthumanistic Future”

Points Center for Contemporary Art Series Talk | Conversation with Li Tingwei and Long Pan

Time: 10/30, Friday 6-7pm

Location: IB1046

Zoom ID: 262-835-7204

The Media & Arts Speaker series at Duke Kunshan University is a bi-weekly event that invites leading practitioners in media and arts to speak about their work and practice and engage with our DKU community.

The second short series features Points Center for Contemporary Art (PCCA). Situated in the greater Kunshan region, PCCA is dedicated to building a cultural ecosystem that embraces the local community within Kunshan city. Through this series, we hope to provide students an introduction to the art center, its guiding philosophy, its programs and artists.

The lecture scheduled on Friday October 30th, 2020 at 6pm China Central time features Points 2020 fall resident artists Li Tingwei and Long Pan where they will share with us their methodology and work. This series is organized and hosted by Prof. Vivian Xu and Prof. Benjamin Bacon, and supported by Arts and Humanities and the Humanities Research Center at Duke Kunshan University. This event is open to the public. Continue reading “Points Center for Contemporary Art Series Talk | Conversation with Li Tingwei and Long Pan”

Calling for Research Participants: First-Year Students and Third Space Lab – Part 2

Calling for first-year students as research participants for our study on “Transformative Learning and Third Space Personae in International Education”. Randomly selected students will earn a RMB 100 gift card for participating in the survey. Please click the link below to register and find out more: https://duke.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_2t2gTbysBN839pX

For any questions, please contact Dr. Emmanuelle Chiocca at emmanuelle.chiocca@dukekunshan.edu.cn or Dr. Zhang Xin at xin.zhang583@dukekunshan.edu.cn

Freedom Lab Event Report | Freedom’s Proximity: The Interconnections between American Slavery, British Colonial Abolition, and Slave Ship Revolt

By Sihan Wang

Class of 2023

Click [HERE] to watch the recording

With 50 participants, on February October the 13th, a talk on the Creole Slave-Ship Revolt was carried out via Zoom by Professor Jeffrey Kerr-Ritchie, a prestigious historian whose research interests include slavery, abolition, and post-emancipation societies, especially in North America and the Caribbean during the nineteenth century.

According to Professor Ritchie, the official termination of American participation in the trans-Atlantic slave trade announced in 1807 was marked as an end of seafaring commerce in the black population. However, this scenario ignores the arisen coastal dimensions of the slave trade, with many US slavery ships taking the maritime routes between different parts of America and the Caribbean. Consequently, despite the abolition of slavery in the British Empire and governmental manipulation, captives continued to be transported on US merchant ships in large numbers for decades due to the profit gained from buying and selling slaves as labors. The continuation of slave trading played a critical role within the context of the expansion of the United States as a maritime and territorial empire. Numerous ships transported men, women, and children for the manufacturing of products like tobacco and cotton, to spread commerce and develop new markets. Supported by primary sources, Professor Kerr-Ritchie concluded that between the 1820s and 1850s, more than 50,000 captives were moved from ports in the Upper to Lower South, in which thousands of lives were consumed and countless African-American families were torn apart.

Continue reading “Freedom Lab Event Report | Freedom’s Proximity: The Interconnections between American Slavery, British Colonial Abolition, and Slave Ship Revolt”

Egyptian Christians under Sisi: Where Do They Go Now?*

By Hyun Jeong Ha

Assistant Professor of Sociology

The Lebanese film Where do we go now (2011) begins with a procession of dozens of women to a cemetery in a secluded village. The women in black slowly march as a group, each one beating their chest with their hands out of deep sorrow at losing their loved ones. Upon arrival at the cemetery they separate. The Muslim women on the right mourn as they kiss tombstones and the Christians on the left kiss the crosses laid on the graves. The sectarian clashes that killed mostly male villagers is now history, but their grief still remains.

The faces of the village women overlapped with Egyptian Christians grieving the deaths of Christian worshippers caught in a suicide bombing at the Botroseya church (St. Peter and St. Paul’s churches) in December 2016. The film featured clashes between the villagers, while in reality, Christians were attacked by armed militants. This pre-planned attack has become a more frequent type of sectarian violence in recent Egypt with ISIS’s gaining of international prominence in 2014. This bombing was particularly surprising to many Cairenes because attacks on church buildings were something they believed to only take place in other parts of the country – places like Upper Egypt or the city of Alexandria where more radicalized militants or Islamists are based. As one of my interview participants, who lost her old church friend from the aforementioned bombing, said, this event made Christians living in the center of the country more concerned about their safety. Continue reading “Egyptian Christians under Sisi: Where Do They Go Now?*”

Humanities Conference Keynote Report: Oron Catts on Neolife and the HumAnimal

By Anisha Joshi

Class of 2022

The Covid-19 pandemic upturned many plans, one of them being Duke Kunshan University’s second Humanities Research Conference, initially scheduled for the Spring of 2020. Rescheduled for the fall of 2020, the Hum/Animal themed Humanities Research Conference was finally held over the weekend of September 18th, 2020. Thanks to the affordances of modern technology and the power of the internet, the conference saw undergraduate students, faculty and scholars from China and around the world.

‘We often significantly overestimate the likelihood of favorable currencies like winning the lottery, and underestimate the likelihood of relatively unlikely occurrences like unexpected accidents and crises,’ Professor Carlos Rojas, co-director of the Humanities Research Center remarked in his opening speech for the conference, zooming in from North Carolina. And indeed, no one could have predicted the way the covid-19 pandemic has shaken the world. Professor Rojas remarked on how relevant the theme of the conference- Hum/animal- was, given how the covid-19 is a zoonotic virus. Continue reading “Humanities Conference Keynote Report: Oron Catts on Neolife and the HumAnimal”

Humanities Conference Keynote Report: Gabriel Rosenberg on a More-Than-Human History of Sexuality

By Anisha Joshi, 

Class of 2022

Why is there an implicit (and unquestioned) assumption that studying animals does not require you to study sexuality? In his keynote lecture chaired by Professor Vivienne Xu, Professor Gabriel Rosenberg unpacked this question by analyzing and adding to William Cronon’s seminal text in environmental history, ‘Nature’s Metropolis’. Continue reading “Humanities Conference Keynote Report: Gabriel Rosenberg on a More-Than-Human History of Sexuality”

Humanities Conference Keynote Report: Mylan Engel on Animal Ethics, Sustainability, and Commonsense

By Sinan Farooqui

Class of 2022

The second keynote lecture for the Duke Kunshan Humanities Fall Conference 2020: Hum/Animal, was led by Professor Mylan Engel, who is a Professor of Philosophy at Northern Illinois University, specializing in epistemology and ethics, with an emphasis on animal ethics, environmental ethics, and global justice. Accordingly, he spoke on the topic of Animal Ethics, Sustainability, and Commonsense: Doing Right by Animals and by Ourselves. Continue reading “Humanities Conference Keynote Report: Mylan Engel on Animal Ethics, Sustainability, and Commonsense”

CAC:// DKU 2020 Research/Creation Fellowship Winner Announcement

Humanities Research Center is pleased to announce that the CAC://DKU 2020 Research / Creation Fellowship (USD$10,000) has been awarded to the artist GUO Cheng for his project proposal Wind Verification. Guo will start the 3-month residency program at Chronus Art Center (CAC) and Duke Kunshan University.

Jury Statement

The first collaborative initiative between CAC_Lab and Duke Kunshan University’s Humanities Research Center, the Fellowship aims to support and advance research-based artistic practice, with a particular emphasis on practitioners who employ or interrogate technology in the conception and production of their work. The selection was based on the strength of the proposed project, the proposal’s relevance to this session’s topic (“World Wide What”), and its feasibility.

GUO Cheng is set to dispute the relationship between the common perception of social media as altered, selective representation of reality, and art as means for collective “peer-review” of the unverified viral, in an attempt to provide alternative visions to what post COVID-19 “World Wide What” could become. Wind Verification draws on the practices of the likes of Giuseppe Penone and Forensic Architecture in an attempt to further legitimize creative practices not only as means for critical inquiry but as potential tools to bring about change.

Wind Verification is conceptually powerful and technologically ambitious. The project’s technical framework ranges from the computer vision algorithm analysing crowd-sourced footage scraped from mainly East Asian social media, to a physical installation setting that will use fans to recreate ‘verified wind’ realities. GUO Cheng aims to draw new potential functional purposes for social media and elaborate on a range of tools required for such advances to be achievable. Continue reading “CAC:// DKU 2020 Research/Creation Fellowship Winner Announcement”