If a hiring committee has shortlisted you for a job, you may be invited to an interview and, possibly, to give a teaching demonstration. Join us for this 90-minute session during which two of our young assistant professors in the early stages of their careers, Prof. Chen Jizhou Jannis, and Prof. Sheng Yihui from the Department of Chinese Language and Literature, will share their strategies and tips on how to prepare for a successful job interview and teaching demonstration. The session will consist of a 60-minute sharing session by Profs. Chen and Sheng, followed by a 30-minute Q&A.

Speaker
Prof. Chen Jizhou Jannis, and Prof. Sheng Yihui from the Department of Chinese Language and Literature, CUHK

All are welcome!

Dr. Lau's academic pursuits took her from a BA and MPhil in Fine Arts to a PhD in Chinese Art History at CUHK, and a Graduate Diploma in Museum Studies from the University of Sydney. Her research delves into Chinese export art and treaty port culture of Canton.

Over the years, Dr. Lau has been actively involved in both traditional and contemporary art fields, leading a team dedicated to promoting the development of visual arts in Hong Kong and exploring new curatorial directions for the 21st century. Dr. Lau's leadership has seen her team achieve local and international acclaim for their public and community art projects.

Seize this opportunity to gain insights from Dr. Lau's vast experiences as she will discuss with us the intersections of art, community, and innovation.

Event Details:

• Date: 1 March 2024 (Friday)
• Venue: L1, G/F, CUHK Institute of Chinese Studies
• Schedule: Tea Reception at 4:00 pm (ICS Courtyard) | Lecture from 4:30 pm – 6:00 pm
• Speaker: Dr. Lesley Fung-ha Lau (BA (87), MPhil (95), PhD (12) NA/Fine Arts), Head of Art Promotion Office, Hong Kong
• Topic: Art Flâneur's Footprints
• Registration: Reserve your seat by signing up at CUHK Webform.
• Deadline for Registration: 25 February 2024 (Sunday)
• Enquiries: arts@cuhk.edu.hk

The lecture is open to all CUHK members, alumni, and art enthusiasts. Join us for a thought-provoking session with a distinguished leader in the arts.

We look forward to welcoming you to this inspiring event!
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Dr. Lesley Fung-ha Lau (87/95/12  NA/Fine Arts)
Head of Art Promotion Office, Hong Kong

• An outstanding alumna from the Department of Fine Arts at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). Dr. Lesley Lau completed her BA (1987), MPhil (1995) and obtained a PhD in Chinese Art History in 2012. Her academic research is on Chinese export art and treaty port culture of Canton.
• MPhil thesis was awarded Outstanding Thesis by the Graduate Division of Fine Arts at CUHK.
• Head of the Art Promotion Office (APO) and the founding curator of the APO and the artspace Oi! in Hong Kong.
• In 2011, Dr. Lau worked as a research fellow in The British Museum under the J. S. Lee Memorial Fellowship Programme, and in 2009, at the Phillips Library of the Peabody Essex Museum.
• International and local recognition: the artspace Oi! being selected as "The Best Public Space 2016” of Hong Kong; the "XCHANGE: Social Gastronomy" project receiving the “Best 100 – Good Design Award 2016” in Japan and the "City Dress-up: Seats۰Together" project winning the “Design for Asia Awards 2018 – Grand Award with Special Mention”.

The Research Institute for the Humanities (RIH) and the University Library invite proposals from the Faculty of Arts student community to form teams to participate in a 3D Printed Museum Competition.

Competition theme: Recreating Hong Kong in the 1960s & 1970s

This competition is open to CUHK Faculty of Arts undergraduate and postgraduate students only.
Each team should have between two and three members.

Prize: The winning team will receive $1,500 book vouchers, while the remaining shortlisted teams will receive $500 book vouchers each.

Speaker 講者
Paolo Boccagni (University of Trento)

Between 2018 and 2022 I did an ethnography in a centre for young male asylum seekers in Italy, often as a guest in the bedrooms of its residents (Boccagni, 2023). Throughout, one detail was striking, and somehow out of place, in the material cultures of generally bare and basically furnished dwelling spaces: the presence of a number of sneakers, well-ordered on bookshelves that had silently turned into shoe racks. Sneakers, I realized over time, are a powerful embodiment of dreams and aspirations of young male migrants such as my interlocutors, well beyond a matter of conspicuous consumption. As an accumulated background to everyday life in waiting, sneakers are an object of care - they are cleaned, even washed, as or more often than the rooms in which they lie. They often appear in selfies on social media.. They silently tell about the possibility to literally move into the future, as young and athletic men who take care of their outfits and bodies would aspire to do. As of now, though, they mostly stay still and unused – like their owners, in a way, as long as they keep waiting for a decision on their cases with apparently little to do. Sneakers, as a stratified and yet invariable presence in their bedrooms, do little to address major practical issues such as finding a job, getting the papers, sending money back home. Nevertheless, they can be analytical entry points into subtler, even existential questions in the lives of my young male interlocutors. While elaborating on this, I also address two broader questions: what meanings can one legitimately infer from objects that are as hypervisible in refugees’ rooms, as marginal in their self-presentations and narratives? And as far as one is committed to contrast the mounting hostility against refugees, how can one acknowledge their aspiration to modernity and success, without giving ammunition to anti-immigrant actors that could take these objects as proof of irresponsible over-consumption, if not undeservingness, from ultimately "bogus" refugees?

All interested are welcome

This talk is drawn from an ethnography of the spaces where queer, autonomous feminist and radical politics are mutually imbricated, adjacent, or coterminous India. Anchoring my thinking in the 'near histories' of South Asian sexuality politics, I focus on that period in every ethnographic project in which we search for the perfect, or almost perfect, ethnographic field site(s), only to find that the project requires modification, or relocation all together. The notion of both the quest and the habitation of a space that is later rendered as one's fieldsite in ethnographic writing disrupts the fixity of the site's coherence. At the same time, it confirms that ways in which the production of a fieldsite via physical habitation in a space or set of spaces over a long duree produces a unique form of knowledge, one that is both self-aware of its contingencies while able to reveal the complexities of waging everyday life that cannot be ascertained via any other method. This argument offers a bridge between positionality, textualism and the ethnographic value of inhabiting spaces over periods of time via a critique that demonstrates how sexuality research in India can offer methodological insights for our understanding of the fieldsite as a form and a frame of knowledge.
 

Speaker 
Svati Shah (Department of Anthropology, University of Massachusetts, Amherst)
Svati Shah is an anthropologist and queer feminist scholar whose work is drawn from their commitment to social justice and critical inquiry. They are based at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (UMass), where they are an Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies and are affiliated with the Department of Anthropology. Their research examines questions of sexuality in relation to materialist history, racialization, caste politics, and political economy in India. Their current book project is drawn from a long term ethnography of radical social movements in India, including left, queer, and autonomous feminist movements.

A light lunch will be served at 12:45 pm. First come, first served.
All interested are welcome.

Speaker 
Dr. Aniket DE
Department of History, Harvard University

The age of national self-determination, which conventionally establishes the system of post-imperial nation-states, begins with the founding of the League of Nations after the First World War. The development of self-government in British India in 1919 — particularly the principle of “dyarchy” or dual government run jointly by Indians and the British — is thought to be a progressive, if inadequate, measure in this era of self-determination. But it has not been noticed that the same imperial officials who formulated dyarchy had previously segregated and disenfranchised non-whites in South Africa. This talk will analyze how techniques of racial segregation were incorporated into structures of colonial self-government in a moment of imperial reconstruction after the War. Examining the ideas and careers of South African administrators who later shaped Indian dyarchy—members of the “Round Table” group like Lionel Curtis, Philip Kerr, and Howard Pim — I aim to show that self-government in India was not a step towards freedom, but a form of racialized rule designed to keep “natives” out of power. The making of this form of self-government in the early twentieth century framed a key moment of crisis in the imperial order, when the weakening of imperial structures due to the War led to increasingly strong anticolonial movements across Asia and Africa. Dyarchy, devised as a strategy to counter this crisis, characterized not only the last phase of European imperialism but also the structure of the post-colonial state. By tracing a hitherto unexplored genealogy of Indian self-government in relation to segregation in South Africa, I reexamine both the origins of colonial self-determination and its subsequent legacies in post-colonial states. Methodologically, the project attempts to bring together the global histories of self-determination and racial segregation, which have tended so far to run on parallel tracks.

Arab culture has long been a subject of fascination, misconception, and stereotypes. This talk aims to provide a comprehensive and engaging insight into the rich and diverse world of Arab culture. The talk will delve into:

• The conflation of the Arab world, Muslim world, and the Middle East · The origins of the Arab people
• Key features of Arab culture
• Arabic language and literature
• Music, art, and cuisine
• Dynamism in Arabic world

By providing the audience with a holistic and nuanced understanding of Arab culture, this talk aspires to foster greater cross-cultural understanding and appreciation for this vibrant and multifaceted culture. Through exploring the complexities and richness of the Arab world, participants will be empowered to challenge stereotypes, engage in informed conversations, and appreciate the contributions of Arab culture to the global cultural landscape.

Artificial intelligence technology has rapidly changed the study form of humanities. In this presentation, we will discuss the key issues in using natural language processing, deep learning, GIS, database and visualization technologies to design a new digital humanities database from the electronic texts of ancient books. We will introduce automatic tagging tools for ancient Chinese sentence/word segmentation, named entity tagging. Then, we will present a case study of constructing the DH database of Chinese classics Zuozhuan(左傳), Shiji(史記) and Zizhitongjian(資治通鑒), which offers word based multi-functional retrieval in addition to the full-text retrieval. Data analysis and visualization also reveal new facts from the texts, such as the personal social relations and travelling distance. Finally, we discuss the potential improvements and applications of the DH database.
 

Speaker
Prof. LI Bin
School of Chinese Language and Literature, 
Nanjing Normal University

Prof. LI Bin is a professor at the School of Chinese Language and Literature at Nanjing Normal University, and head of the Center of Language Big Data and Computational Humanities. He teaches Chinese information processing, syntax, data structures, mathematical logic, artificial intelligence, digital humanities and database applications. He earned Master’s and Ph.D. degrees from the School of Chinese Language and Literature at Nanjing Normal University. He was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Computer Science and Technology at Nanjing University from 2010 to 2013, a visiting scholar at the Computer Science Department at Brandeis University in the United States in 2015, and a visiting scholar at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University in 2019. His research interests include lexical analysis, cognitive semantic computing, corpus technology, ancient languages and digital humanities. He has published three books and over 70 papers.

This essay introduces the notion of Confucian exclusivism. Whereas Christian exclusivism refers to the belief that salvation is limited to those who exercise personal faith in Jesus Christ, Confucian exclusivism refers not to an ideological boundary between those who have faith in Confucius and those who do not. Rather, Confucian exclusivism refers to exclusivist attitudes and actions exhibited by Confucius as he is portrayed in the Analects. Attention is drawn to what may be plausibly interpreted as nationalism and speciesism in the Analects. Several passages are examined to assess the extent to which nationalism and speciesism pervade the Analects, marking out distinctions in moral value and consideration among groups of people and between humans and animals. These passages are juxtaposed with others in the Analects which challenge these exclusivist interpretations. Recent scholarship on Confucian exemplarist morality is also engaged, providing an additional impetus for engaging with this topic: If Confucius is a moral exemplar to be admired and emulated by those who encounter him in the Analects, it is necessary to critically confront the exclusivist strands of his thought and action.
 

Speaker 
Prof. Mathew A. Foust
Chair and Professor of Philosophy, Department of Philosophy and Religion, Appalachian State University

If you are interested to join, please register by 9 January 2024 (Tuesday).
 

Speaker
Prof. Li Chenyang
Professor, School of Humanities, Nanyang Technological University

In philosophical inquiry, we follow established principles. We follow the principle of charity, by which we interpret a speaker's statements in the most rational way possible and, in the case of any argument, considering its best, strongest possible interpretation. We follow the principle of humanity, which requires us to make sense of an idea or text by attributing to the idea holder “the propositional attitudes one supposed one would have oneself in those circumstances” (Dennett 1989). In developing Confucianism in the 21st century, I propose a principle of progressive humanity. On this enhanced principle, we should not only make sense of ancient thinkers by placing them under their own historical circumstances as prescribed by the principle of humanity, but also expand their ideas on the basis of their overall philosophical dispositions in response to modern sensibilities. That is, from an ancient thinker’s general attitude and philosophical framework, we propose new views that someone sharing such attitude and framework may come to hold under modern circumstances.

Online
No registration is required
Meeting ID: 921 2746 4116 
Link: https://cuhk.zoom.us/j/92127464116 

Face-to-face
Register by 4 January 2024
Link: https://cloud.itsc.cuhk.edu.hk/webform/view.php?id=13680180