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RESPECT (Revitalizing and Enriching Society through Pluralism, Equity, and Cultural Transformation) is a newly inaugurated interdisciplinary doctoral program for Multicultural Innovation at Osaka University. RESPECT aims to explore issues related to multicultural coexistence through advanced theoretical research and hands-on practical training in various issues, including multicultural education and communication as well as policy analysis. For example, one of the program’s field projects includes diversity issues in disaster management. The program has satellite offices in Zambia, Indonesia and Iwate in northeastern Japan, and has been endeavoring to pursue collaborative research on how natural and social disasters can be handled to better reflect the needs of people with diverse backgrounds.

In support of this project, a special summer school for the RESPECT program is being held at the University of Toronto on August 18th-27th, 2014.

In conjunction with the Toronto summer school, a RESPECT research opportunity information session will be held on Wednesday, August 27th, 2014, from 12:00 to 1:30 PM at the Munk Centre in room 208N. Please see the attached poster.

The information session will be followed by a student workshop from 2:00-3:30 PM. Osaka students will present their findings from the Toronto summer school and their observations of multiculturalism in Canada. U of T students and faculty are welcome to attend the workshop.

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A public discussion focusing on methods and strategies for Taiwan’s foreign relations and economic integration between Taiwan and mainland China will be joined by a visiting delegation of Taiwanese university students.

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To register your name on the waitlist for this event, please visit: http://www.eventbrite.ca/e/windows-of-opportunity-working-in-the-frontiers-of-biomedical-research-tickets-8110626101

Dr. Lap-Chee Tsui has had a distinguished academic career with major discoveries in Genetics and Genomics. He identified the Cystic Fibrosis gene in the late 1980s and in further studies of the human genome, characterized chromosome 7. He contributed significantly to fighting the SARS coronavirus in 2003 and led the Hong Kong consortium in the international effort in completing the first comprehensive catalogue of the human genetic evaluations. Dr. Aubie Angel, President of Friends of CIHR, notes that “Dr. Tsui has brought international recognition to Canadian strength in Human Genetics”. He has trained a cadre of scientific investigators who are part of the next wave of Canadian scientific leadership. He maintains close ties with the Canadian genomics community as Emeritus University Professor, University of Toronto, and Adjunct
Scientist, Hospital for Sick Children, Research Institute.

The Henry G. Friesen International Prize in Health Research was established in 2005 by FCIHR in recognition of Dr. Henry Friesen’s distinguished leadership, vision and innovative contributions to health and health research. The $35,000 Friesen Prize is awarded annually. For further information on Friends of CIHR and the Friesen International Prize, please visit: www.fcihr.ca

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The territorial dispute over the small group of islands, known as the Senkaku islands in Japan and the Diaoyu islands in China has strained Sino-Japan relations considerably in recent years. As speculation grows that China and Japan are preparing for war over their maritime dispute, Asia Pacific leaders from former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to Japanese Primer Minister Shinzo Abe have drawn parallels between 2014 and 1914, suggesting the East China Sea may be the location for the start of the next world war.

In his new book Bridging Troubled Waters: China, Japan, and Maritime Order in the East China Sea, Dr. James Manicom reminds us that the tensions over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands are only a part of a long history of both conflict and cooperation in maritime relations between Japan and China. He examines the cooperative history between China and Japan at sea and explains the conditions under which two rivals can manage territorial and maritime disputes.

James Manicom has held research fellowships with CIGI, SSHRC and the Japan Foundation. Dr. Manicom’s expertise is in the fields of East Asian security, Arctic governance and international security with an interest in maritime security. He is the author of “Bridging Troubled Waters: China, Japan and Maritime Order in the East China Sea” published by Georgetown University Press. Other recent published works have appeared in the “Journal of Strategic Studies”, “Asia Policy”, “Polar Record, Geopolitics”, the “Asian Wall St. Journal”, the “Globe and Mail”, the “China Brief”, “PacNet” and “East Asia Forum”.

Please join James Manicom for a book signing and following the presenation.

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The talk introduces Bianco’s forthcoming book comparing the Russian and Chinese Revolutions under Stalin and Mao. Starting with a brief comparison of two great empires at the early phase of economic development, the book assesses their developmental processes and strategies as accomplished by 1953 and 1976. How are we to explain and evaluate Mao’s additions to “Marxism-Leninism”? While similarities of Soviet and Chinese political institutions and practices are emphasized, the book argues that we cannot overlook the significance of Mao’s attempt to correct the Russian model. Setting aside the sacrosanct proletariat, the book compares both Russia and China’s repressive peasant policies which, in spite of their divergent beginnings and paths, brought about catastrophic results. The book also compares the development of what Milovan Djilas had called the “new classes” in both revolutionary regimes, and examines how Stalin and Mao dealt with them.

Lucien Bianco is Professor and Director of Studies Emeritus at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. His recent (post-2000) English-language publications include: “Peasants Without the Party : Grass-roots Movements in Twentieth-Century China”, (M.E. Sharpe, 2001), winner of 2003 Joseph Levenson Prize; ” Jacqueries et Révolution dans la Chine du Xxème siècle”, (La Martinière, 2005), winner of 2005 Augustin-Thierry Prize; “Les origines de la révolution chinoise, fourth revised and updated edition”, (Gallimard, 2007); (with Eric Dessert), “Une autre Chine”, (Editions Lieux-dits, 2009); “Wretched Rebels : Rural Disturbances on the Eve of the Chinese Revolution”, (Harvard University Press, 2009)

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There has been surprisingly little systematic comparison of the Chinese, Kazakh, Ukrainian, and Soviet famines to date. This conference will bring together specialists of these famines to produce a deeper understanding of these phenomena. The presenters, on the basis of their research and knowledge of the rapidly increasing specialized literature, will assess the common features and significant differences and place their findings within the dynamics of the histories of the respective countries.

Speakers:

Lucien Bianco is an eminent French historian and Sinologist specializing in the history of the Chinese peasantry in the 20th century. His Les origines de la révolution chinoise 1915–1949 (1967; published in English in 1971 and subsequently in revised editions) remains a highly regarded signature work. He has also written the award-winning studies Peasants without the Party (2001) and Jacqueries et révolution dans la Chine du Xxe siècle (2005).

Sarah Cameron is assistant professor of Soviet history at the University of Maryland-College Park. She earned her PhD in history at Yale University, where her doctoral work won the John Addison Porter prize for the best dissertation in the arts and sciences. She is working on a book project, The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan.

Andrea Graziosi is a professor (on leave) at the Università di Napoli Federico II, an associate of the Centre d’études des mondes russe, caucasien et centre-européen (Paris) and a fellow of Harvard’s Ukrainian Research Institute and Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies. In 2005 he was awarded the Order of Yaroslav the Wise for his studies on the Holodomor. The author of books on Soviet, Eastern European, and Italian history, and the co-chair of the series Dokumenty sovetskoi istorii, Professor Graziosi sits in the editorial boards of numerous academic journals, and has taught and lectured in several European and American universities.

Niccolò Pianciola is Associate Professor of History, Lingnan University, Hong Kong. His research focused on the history of colonization and decolonization during the late Tsarist Empire and the early Soviet Union, and on the great famine in Kazakhstan. He is currently researching the Aral Sea crisis. His last book (co-edited with Paolo Sartori) is Islam, Society and States across the Qazaq Steppe (18th–Early 20th Centuries) (2013).

Ralph Thaxton is a Professor of Politics at Brandeis University specializing in twentieth-century China. His Salt of the Earth (1997) examined the basis for rural support of Mao’s revolutionary China. His later Catastrophe and Contention in Rural China: Mao’s Great Leap Forward and the Origins of Righteous Resistance in Do Fo Village (2008) studied the social, cultural, and personal impact of the Mao’s policies in rural Chinese areas, notably the issue of famine.

Nicolas Werth is Research Director at the CNRS’s Institut d’Histoire du Temps Présent (Paris). Since his first book (Être communiste en URSS sous Staline, 1981), he has written numerous works on Soviet social history, Stalinism and mass violence. He is a co-author of The Black Book of Communism (1998; English edition, 1999). Among his recent books are: L’ivrogne et la marchande de fleurs. Autopsie d’un meurtre de masse, URSS 1937–1938 (2011), L’État soviétique contre la paysannerie ( with A.Berelowitch, 2011), and La Route de la Kolyma (2012). As well, he co-edited the series Istoria stalinskogo Gulaga ( 7 vols., 2004).

Xun Zhou is Lecturer of Modern History at University of Essex and the author of The Great Famine in China, 1958-1962: a Documentary History (2012). She is one of an increasing number of historians who are pioneering the history of the People’s Republic of China through new oral and archival evidence. Based on interviews she has collected, her new work, Forgotten Voices: Mao’s Great Famine (1958-1961), is the very first book to record ordinary people’s memories of the horrors of the Great Leap Forward and the famine.

Discussants:

Olga Andriewsky is an Associate Professor in the Department of History, Trent University (Canada). The main focus of her research is the 19th-early 20th century history of Ukraine and the Russian Empire. She also maintains an active interest in the Stalin era and has written about the historiography of the Holdomor. She has taught undergrauduate and graduate courses on Stalin and Stalinism for many years.

Kimberley Manning is Associate Professor of Political Science at Concordia University. Co-editor of Eating Bitterness: New Perspectives on China’s Great Leap Forward and Famine (2011), she has published articles in Modern China, the China Quarterly, and The China Review. Her monograph (under review), “Attachments: Personal Ties and Social Policy Reform in Revolutionary China,” shows how elite and grassroots “party family” networks contributed to the early successes and catastrophic losses of the first decade of the People’s Republic of China.

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Peasants were by far the main victims of both the Soviet famine of the early 1930s and Great Chinese Famine of 1958–61. The peasant policy of the respective ruling revolutionary regimes, which deprived farmers of a substantial part of the grain they produced, was the single most important cause of both catastrophes. The Bolsheviks, whose understanding of Marxism identified the peasantry with barbarism, were from the onset hostile to peasants. By contrast, most Chinese Communists were born and raised in villages and as a rule had a positive attitude toward peasants, who had helped them to come to power. This lecture seeks to reconcile how such divergent predispositions ultimately resulted in similarly destructive policies leading to mass famine.

Lucien Bianco is an eminent French historian and Sinologist specializing in the history of the Chinese peasantry in the 20th century. His Les origines de la révolution chinoise 1915-1949 (1967; published in English in 1971 and subsequently in revised editions) remains a highly regarded signature work. He has also written the award-winning studies Peasants without the Party (2001) and Jacqueries et révolution dans la Chine du XXe siècle (2005).

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A comparison of the destructive twentieth-century Ukrainian, Chinese, Kazakh, and Soviet famines is the theme of this roundtable discussion. This event is part of the second day of the “Communism and Hunger” conference, which brings together renowned specialists of these famines to produce a deeper understanding of these phenomena.

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This public lecture starts by analyzing various aspects of Stalin’s and Lenin’s theory of nationality, including its roots, ties to nationalism, and divergence from Marx and Engels’s original ideas as well as the role it assigned to peasants as possible agents of national liberation, and therefore of revolution. The legacy of the 1917–1922 conflicts, and particularly that of the Bolshevik’s 1919 defeat in Ukraine, will then be assessed. This defeat played a crucial role in the establishment of Soviet “indigenization” policies, yet it also left Soviet authorities with a deep-rooted distrust for the Ukrainian village. The third part of the lecture will be devoted to the Holodomor in the light of the more general social and economic crisis caused by Stalin’s 1929 “Great Turn.” The specificity of the Ukrainian famine, its abnormally high death rates compared to those in other part of the USSR, its extreme time-frame and geographical concentration, as well as its connection with radical anti-Ukrainian policies in Soviet education, culture, and state-building will be assessed against the background of the evolution of Stalin’s ideas on the national question.

Andrea Graziosi is a professor (on leave) at the Università di Napoli Federico II, an associate of the Centre d’études des mondes russe, caucasien et centre-européen (Paris) and a fellow of Harvard’s Ukrainian Research Institute and Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies. The author of books on Soviet, Eastern European and Italian history, and the co-editor of the series Dokumenty sovetskoi istorii, Professor Graziosi sits in the editorial boards of numerous academic journals, and has taught and lectured in several European and American universities.

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How might one explain the rise of “chongbuk chwap’a” , or “pro-North leftists” discourse given South Korea’s recent history of the democratization movement and the transition from a series of authoritarian regimes to a parliamentary democracy? In what ways does this discourse differ from the anticommunism of the earlier period? What are some historical and political implications of the discourse in contemporary South Korea? These are some of the questions explored by Professor Namhee Lee as she situates this discourse broadly within the context of the persistence of the Cold war regime on the Korean peninsular and discourse of failure of revolutionary experiences worldwide.

Namhee Lee is an associate professor of Korean history at University of California Los Angeles and her publications include The Making of Minjung: Democracy and the Politics of Representation in South Korea (Cornell). Lee is working on a book project entitled Social Memory and Public History in South Korea, which explores production of historical knowledge outside academic institutions.

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Register online at: http://urbanclimateresiliencesea.apps01.yorku.ca/event-activity/thinphanga-09-2014/

Medium-sized cities in the Lower Mekong countries are rapidly urbanizing. Most urban centres are geographically located in hazardous space, such as low-lying floodplains, river deltas, and coastal zones. Rapid growth and expansion, leading to significant changes in ecological landscapes and land use, exacerbate existing risks. Weak governance and institutional capacity magnify the impacts of climate change and natural disasters, contributing to increasing vulnerability of urban residents. Regionalization will accelerate the pace of urbanization, particularly in smaller border towns. As cities continue to protect urban economic centres from weather-related disasters, risks are shifted and transferred to the hinterlands. But the development growth of urban centres is dependent on the hinterlands for natural resources and labour. Understanding regionalization and urbanization implications as complex, transformative processes is critical for assessing climate vulnerability and strengthening urban resilience to climate change.

Dr. Pakamas Thinphanga is one of the co-directors of the Urban Climate Resilience in Southeast Asia Partnership, funded by IDRC and SSHRC. As a Programme Manager at the Thailand Environment Institute Foundation, she leads the Urban Climate Resilience Programme and is responsible for the overall management, strategic planning, and building capacity of the project teams. Under the programme, projects, including the Rockefeller supported Asian Cities Climate Change Resilience Network (ACCCRN) and USAID funded Mekong Building Climate Resilient Asian Cities (M-BRACE), focus on research areas in urbanization, climate change, understanding vulnerability and resilience concepts, and translating urban climate resilience concepts into practice. Pakamas provides technical assistance to city stakeholders in urban climate resilience planning and building efforts. Her team at TEI also focuses on disseminating and communicating urban climate resilience thinking to broader audience for dialogues and to inform decision-making processes.

Pakamas has a technical background in biological sciences and coastal ecology with a PhD from James Cook University, Australia and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Oxford.

A light lunch will be served. To assist us with catering, please RSVP to alicia.filipowich@utoronto.ca before Wednesday, 1 October 2014 and include any food sensitivities or allergies in your RSVP email.

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It is a truism that police in India generally lack legitimate authority and public trust. This lack is widely understood by scholars, policy analysts, and police practitioners as being rooted in the institution’s colonial development as a means of oppression, and its alleged corruption and criminalization in the postcolonial period. The social facts of situational hyper-empowerment and the widespread decadence of police do much to explain their poor image and performance, but these explanations do not account for the fact that police in India are also structurally disempowered by cultural-political and legal-institutional claims to multiple and conflicting forms of authority that challenge and often overwhelm the authority of police. This structural disempowerment and its performances in everyday interactions between the police and the public constitute an ongoing social process of delegitimation of police authority in contemporary India. Following ethnographic analysis of this process of delegitimation, I explore the implications of focusing on police disempowerment for theorizations of the sources and capabilities of state legal authority more generally

Beatrice Jauregui is an Assistant Professor of Criminology and Anthropology at the University of Toronto. Her research interests involve ethnographic and historical study of the lived experiences of persons working in police and military bureaucracies to understand the everyday dynamics of authority, security and democratic order. Her forthcoming book, with the working title Provisional Authority: Policing and Order in India, is based on more than two years of fieldwork with police in Uttar Pradesh.

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International film production studies often considers the importance of location shooting.The popular “woods” suffix appended to various film industries: Bollywood, Nollywood, and Kollywood frames a kind of imagined location of practices dispersed across different places. While location can become part of a region’s creative capital, it can also stand in for the nation and link to imperatives that position the national within global. Since tourism ties into the auratic assumptions about location and a perceived irreproducible distinctiveness, international film producers have been drawn to location shooting because unique local geographies provide the requisite authenticity to anchor a film’s narrative. On the other hand, the transposable mutability of place: Vancouver for New York, Dubai for Mumbai, means that location is now integrated into broader policy and economic frameworks. This talk considers Hollywood’s production of place, focusing on American cinema’s real and imagined engagement with India. Professor Govil will discuss how geographies of production narrativize place across histories of practice.

Nitin Govil is Assistant Professor of Critical Studies at the USC School of Cinematic Arts. He is the co-author of Global Hollywood
(2001) and Global Hollywood 2 (2005). Other work has been published in over twenty journals and anthologies and has been translated into Chinese, Portuguese, Spanish, and Turkish. His new book, “Orienting Hollywood: A Century of Film Culture Between Los Angeles and Bombay”, will be out early next year. His new project is called “Out of Alignment: Bombay Film and the Cold War”.

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Occupy Central is a civil disobedience movement which began in Hong Kong on September 28, 2014. As an extension to the class boycott initiated by student groups in Hong Kong, it calls on thousands of protesters to block roads and paralyze Hong Kong’s financial district after Beijing and Hong Kong governments do not agree to implement universal suffrage for the chief executive election in 2017 and the Legislative Council elections in 2020 according to “international standards.”

To everyone’s surprise, the police unleashed unnecessary violence to the harmless protesters. Rumors that spread across people and media blurred the reasons to why the movement started in the first place. Amidst the chaos across the financial district of Hong Kong, there is talks of democracy, of Beijing intervention and whether or not this event will be a repeat of the 1989 Tiananmen Square incident. Therefore, what started out as a student protest and class boycott turned into a long-term civil disobedience movement that further segregates opinions.

The question now is, what will it take to defuse the current standoff? Is the “one country two system model” feasible? What is the event’s impact on the Greater China Region

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The Annual Conference on South Asia attracts over 700 scholars and other interested parties from countries all over the world and much of the United States. The conference features over 100 academic panels and roundtable sessions, as well as association meetings and special events like film screenings and musical and dramatic performances.

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To register, please visit http://afterlives-koreanwar.eventbrite.ca

From October 24th to October 25th, 2014, the Centre for the Study of Korea at the University of Toronto will be hosting a two-day symposium on the Afterlives of the Korean War. Co-sponsored by the Dr.David Chu Program in Asia-Pacific Studies, Asian Institute, at the Munk School of Global Affairs, this symposium aims to bring together scholars, artists, filmmakers and students to explore the multifaceted ways that unfinished wars are lived, experienced, imagined and transformed.

Last year marked the 60th anniversary of the end of the Korean War with the signing of the July 27, 1953 armistice. However, one of the most indelible features of the world’s first Cold War conflict is its unfinished nature. The Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), intended to be a temporary cease-fire line at the 38th parallel, is one of the most militarily fortified borders on earth. Continued hostility and mistrust between the two Koreas keep over 100,000 people separated from their kin. And the ebbs and flows of military tension on the Korean peninsula justify on-going social, economic, political and ecological repression in the name of national security, not only between the North and South but also in many countries around the world. The Afterlives of the Korean War brings together scholars, artists, filmmakers and students to explore the multifaceted ways that unfinished wars are lived, experienced, imagined and transformed.

On Friday, October 24th, 2014 a panel discussion will be held in The Vivian and David Campbell Conference Facility on the intersections between the military and geopolitics with the dynamics of race, nation, diaspora, gender, and sexuality, which will feature Dr. John Price, Dr. Monica Kim, Dr. Christine Hong and Dr. Hosu Kim.

Any students, faculty members, and members of general public interested on the Afterlives of the Korean War are welcome to join. All events are open for free.

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To register, please visit http://afterlives-koreanwar.eventbrite.ca

“Ara” is a Korean word whose various meanings include, “Ocean” and ,”Eye”, which symbolize themes of rebirth and wisdom. This piece will evoke the regenerative powers of the ocean, as the energizing force behind life, and the cycle of rebirth, as the histories and stories that have happened and still happen to the people on the land. This performance piece is dedicated to the history of the people, the stories, the land and justice of Jeju Island.

Born on Jeju Island in South Korea, where shamanic tradition is very strong, Dohee Lee learned Korean dance, Korean percussion, and vocals. Her art focuses on integrating these traditional forms with contemporary elements. Each piece and performance blends Eastern and contemporary Western musical forms with modern dance languages into works that emphasize the experimental, ritualistic and regenerative aspects of music, dance and visual bodies. Lee has presented her work at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and Asian Art Museum in SF and performed at Carnegie Zankel Hall in NYC with the Kronos Quartet, Teatro Municipal de Lima Peru, Beijing and Europe.

SKIM is an artist and cultural worker born and raised in New York, and currently producing music in Los Angeles. Through song, rap, and Korean folk drumming, SKIM’s work breaks silences, honours family, offers love, and demands change.

Over the past 12 years, SKIM has performed for a wide range of audiences and venues from independent theatres and music festivals, to HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, to youth and senior centers, schools, and juvenile halls, to actions protesting police abuse and war crimes from past to present. They have also shared their work and music through: drumming with organizers and members of Koreatown Immigrant Workers’ Alliance in LA and Jamaesori in the Bay area, performing at events with Still Present Pasts: Korean Americans and the “Forgotten War,” facilitating creative workshops with youth in Alternative Intervention Models, API Youth Promoting Advocacy and Leadership, the Chicago Children’s Choir; and recently joining a leadership cohort of the Brown Boi Project.

Any students, faculty members, and members of general public interested on the Afterlives of the Korean War are welcome to join. All events are open for free.

Description

To register, please visit http://afterlives-koreanwar.eventbrite.ca

Last year marked the 60th anniversary of the end of the Korean War with the signing of the July 27, 1953 armistice. However, one of the most indelible features of the world’s first Cold War conflict is its unfinished nature. The Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), intended to be a temporary cease-fire line at the 38th parallel, is one of the most militarily fortified borders on earth. Continued hostility and mistrust between the two Koreas keep over 100,000 people separated from their kin. And the ebbs and flows of military tension on the Korean peninsula justify on-going social, economic, political and ecological repression in the name of national security, not only between the North and South but also in many countries around the world.

The symposium’s keynote address will feature Prof. Dong Choon Kim (Sung Kong Hoe University) on rethinking reconciliation and reparation.

Any students, faculty members, and members of general public interested on the Afterlives of the Korean War are welcome to join. All events are open for free.

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The story of Rāma, first told in Vālmīki’s Rāmāyaṇa, has made a considerable impact on the social, political, cultural and religious life in South Asia and beyond. Though the Sanskrit epic Rāmāyaṇa is the oldest surviving, and in many ways normative Rāma story, it is just one of a plethora of tellings, adaptations of the Rāma narrative by artists and composers from different social, geographical and ideological backgrounds who rework the story in accordance with their own particular agendas. Jain authors too engaged with this story. This lecture will look at the two different ways in which Jains confronted the Rāma story and its growing popularity: by openly rejecting it on the one hand, and by appropriating it on the other.

Eva de Clercq received her PhD in Oriental languages and cultures from Ghent University (Belgium) in 2003 with a thesis “Critical study of Svayambhūdeva’s Paümacariu”, a Jain adaptation of the Rāmāyaṇa in Apabhraṃśa. Since then, she has worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University, SOAS London and the University of Würzburg (Germany) with projects on the Jain adaptations of the Sanskrit epics and Apabhraṃśa literary culture. In 2010 she was appointed assistant professor at Ghent University, where she teaches Sanskrit, Prākrit, Hindi (esp. Brajbhāṣā), Indian literature and Religious traditions of India.

For questions please contact Christoph Emmrich at christoph.emmrich@utoronto.ca.

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In China, the QWERTY keyboard and traditional typing practices are dead and have been reborn as innovative technolinguistic-cum-exstitential condition of writing referred to as “input”, or “Shuru”. In contrast to traditional typing methods, in which the typer relies on onto that we now refer to as “input” (shuru). In contrast to the world of “typing,” in which the typer relies on onte-to-one correspondence between symbols-upon-the-keys and symbols -upon-the-screen, “input” is more a form of telecommunication than inscription: the user sends out alphabetically coded transmission to onboard software known as an Input Method Editor (IME). The IME then returns to the user a menu of Chinese characters known as “candidates”. Thus, the Chinese computer user uses the QWERTY keyboard in an iterative process of code, candidacy, and confirmation.

The input system in China, however predates computers. The first input system was a 1940’s mechanical typewriter called MingKwai Chinese typewriter, invented by noted liguist and cultural commentor Lin Yutang. In this talk, historian Thomas S. Mullaney will chart out the historical origins of input and its evolution alongside evolving technologies.

Thomas S. Mullaney is a Professor of Chinese History at Stanford University. He is the author of Coming to Terms with the Nation: Ethnic Classification in Modern China and Critical Han Studies: The History, Representation and Identity of China’s Majority.
His current book project, The Chinese Typewriter: A Global History, examines China’s development of a modern, nonalphabetic information infrastructure encompassing telegraphy, typewriting, word processing, and computing. This project has received three major awards and fellowships, including the 2013 Usher Prize, a three-year National Science Foundation fellowship, and a Hellman Faculty Fellowship.