Category: News

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 third miniseries of talks looks at the intersection of pandemic, virology, disease and art, presenting three artists whose works inspect the delicate relationship between ourselves and the sicknesses that plague us, presenting their unique perspectives on wellness.

The lecture scheduled on Friday November 13th, 2020 at 6pm China Central time features the renowned UK bio artist Anna Dumitriu. 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.

Time: 11/13, Friday 6-7pm China Time

Location: Duke Kunshan Innovation Building 1046

Zoom: 262-835-7204

Continue reading “Art in the Age of Viral Infection Miniseries | Threads Across Time: BioArt, Synthetic Biology and Emerging Technologies (Artist: Anna Dumitriu)”

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”

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”

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?*”

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”

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”