Duke Kunshan University Humanities Research Center
Interdisciplinary Research Center in the Arts, Humanities, and Interpretive Social Sciences at Duke Kunshan University
The Humanities Research Center at Duke Kunshan University is pleased to announce a three day event Africa: Migration, Culture & Conflict featuring three keynote scholars:
By Yinan DU
During the second weekend of the fall semester, DKU welcomed its first drawing workshop and it turned out to be a huge leap towards the growth of Arts and Humanities o n our campus. The Spanish visual artist Edén Barrena is invited to instruct this three-days’ drawing workshop. She is fully experienced in interpreting the world around us and able to transmit the message she perceived to the audiences through various media forms. This drawing workshop aimes to help students do their research profile by integrating the creative practice. Through working with Edén , students were given abundant chances to explore arts and themselves and they start to develope a new spectrum for communication: talking through arts. Continue reading “Drawing Workshop With Edén Barrena”
Thursday 12th September, 4:30-5:30pm in Academic Building Auditorium
Performed by Prof. Xavier Bouvier and Students from the Geneva Haute Ecole de Musique Continue reading “Historically Informed Performance: Renaissance Repertoire and Jiangnan sizhu”
September 6-8, 2019 in DKU Water Pavilion
Edén Barrena is a Spanish visual artist based in Shanghai who has exhibited her work internationally. Join her in a drawing workshop aimed at integrating creative practice to your research profile. The workshop will include tips on accessing the archive, interpreting your research into a visual medium, and critique from an experienced artist.
Register online. Continue reading “Poster Drawing Workshop with Edén Barrena”
The Humanities Research Center will host a Humanities Career Forum on Friday 20 September from 12-1pm in the Water Pavilion the campus of Duke Kunshan University. The guest of honor will be Mr. Andrew Sohn, who majored in English at Columbia University before embarking on a career in investment banking, and then founding his own company, Due West Education. Continue reading “Humanities Career Forum Presents Andrew Sohn”
By Anisha Joshi, DKU’22
The word ‘memory’ can refer to many different things. It can mean an individual’s remembrance of a past experience, or the collective recollection of an event that impacts a larger group of people. With the Memory Project, documentarian Wu Wenguang explores both these avenues by documenting and protecting the memories of people who lived through the cultural revolution and who live in China with the legacy of this past. Support from the Duke Kunshan University Humanities Research Center, enabled Wu Wenguang to bring the project to the campus during the Water Town Film Festival with two of his team members, Hu Sanshou and Zhang Mengqi from Beijing. Continue reading “The Memory Project at Duke Kunshan University”
By Alberto Najarro and Zach Fredman
Duke Kunshan University welcomed historians from around the globe to our campus from July 12 to 13 for conference entitled “Uneasy Allies: Sino-American Relations at the Grassroots, 1940–1949.” Sponsored by the Humanities Research Center, this conference explored the wide-ranging encounters between Chinese and Americans in China during this crucial decade. Zach Fredman, assistant professor of history at DKU, co-organized the event with Judd Kinzley, associate professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Continue reading “Workshop Report: Uneasy Allies: Sino-American Relations at the Grassroots, 1940–1949”
The largest sustained engagement between Americans and Chinese that ever occurred in China took place during the 1940s. During this period, individual American and Chinese soldiers, scientists, nurses, and truck drivers, among many others, came together to collaborate in the fight against Japan. These interactions had a resonating impact: shaping popular perceptions of China and the United States, impacting the development of new and powerful institutions, and creating new markets and demands that would transform both countries and indeed much of East Asia. Yet, we know surprisingly little about these important grassroots interactions between Americans and Chinese. This conference, Sino-American Relations at the Grassroots, is an attempt to shine a direct light on the interactions between Americans and Chinese at all levels of the socio-economic spectrum in the 1940s. Focusing on grassroots perspectives rather than elite politics enables us to explore a wide range of Sino-American encounters during this period, from interaction between ordinary American servicemen and Chinese civilians to the trans-Pacific material exchange of American industrial goods for Chinese raw materials. Other themes include transnational disease control, intelligence and scientific collaboration, educational exchange, and the subjective experience of war. In addition to discussing current research, we plan to outline a framework for further study on the 1940s. Continue reading “Uneasy Allies: Sino-American Relations at the Grassroots, 1940–1949”
Over the last three decades, China’s rapid urbanization has been facilitated by the unprecedented mobility of rural migrant populations. Today it is estimated that some 240 million migrants have left the countryside to work in China’s cities, though the number is surely much higher. While there are heated debates about how to characterize what some have dubbed “largest human migration in history,” there is general agreement that this mobility has resulted from the increased demand for formal and informal labor in industry, for urban fringe agriculture, and for a range of services (everything from recycling and trash collection, to domestic work for the middle class to road and building construction, hotel work, food delivery services, entertainment and beauty services, sex work, and much more). As scholars on migration have emphasized, this mass human migration has unveiled the fluidity and dynamism of the rural and urban divide, even while the hukou 户口 or “household registration system,” created in the late 1950s, has remained the dominant mode to categorize and count rural and urban populations. Less understood is how rural migration to different kinds of urban spaces has created ambiguous interstitial spaces and networks through which new forms of labor and production of surplus value are emerging. These uneven urban spaces are inextricably linked to transformations in regimes of production and land use, as well as to changes in the organization of kinship and other social relations. Continue reading “Urban Villages in China”
by Xuenan Cao
Art in Global China was in the 1990s the site of intense contestation between market and art. This site continues in the present as both a public and private discourse space for gatherings of art historians, curators, artists, researchers and students, and others who are similarly invested in the making of the contemporary art scene. During the two-day event, Professor Eva Man, director of Film Academy and Chair Professor at Hong Kong Baptist University and Haoyang Zhao, MFA from Duke University gave academic talks on the institutional, cultural, and technical components that inscribe what make sense to us as art. The event also provided an opportunity for speakers and guests to review students’ photography and film works and nurture interests in these two prominent media of art-making. Continue reading “Art in Global China, February 23-24, 2019”
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