Category: News

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”

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”

Register your interest  by Monday, 26 October, 0800 China time​ for priority consideration

Learn how you can participate in research programs led by the Humanities Research Center. These include our Kunshan Digital Humanities program, our Planetary Ethics and Artificial Intelligence Lab, and other labs and activities. The Humanities Research Center is open to students in all disciplines across the university. Students will gain valuable research experience, work closely with faculty mentors, and can receive funding to carry out projects related to their signature works.

Screenings of:

• FAREWELL MY 19 YEAR OLD

By Hao Yongbo

Water Pavilion（湖心亭）, 2020/10/13, 8PM

• SELF-PORTRAIT: WINDOW IN 47KM

By Zhang Mengqi

Water Pavilion（湖心亭）, 2020/10/14, 8PM

Main Event:

PERFORMATIVE SCREENING EVENT

Water Pavilion（湖心亭）, 2020/10/15, 8:30PM

Background – The Memory Project 

Chinese Documentary filmmaker Wu Wenguang launched The Memory Project in 2010 to collect oral histories from survivors of the Great Famine (1958-1961) in rural China. Since 2010, several young filmmakers have joined the project. They have been to 246 villages in 20 provinces and interviewed more than 1,220 elderly villagers. The Memory Project aims to shine light on one of modern China’s most traumatic episodes, the Great Famine of 1958-1961. The project also covers Great Leap Forward of 1958-1960, Land Reform and Collectivization of 1949-1953, the Four Cleanups Movement in 1964 and the Cultural Revolution of 1966-1976. The amateur filmmakers from Wu’s studio discovered their family histories and identities in the process of interviewing the villagers, reconciling the official history taught in schools with each family’s experience.