2026 Critical Asian & Middle Eastern Humanities (CAMEH) Conference: Transregional Circuits and Critical Interventions (April 17–18)

Together with APSI and the Duke Middle East Studies Center (DUMESC), the Department of Asian & Middle Eastern Studies is hosting the first Critical Asian & Middle Eastern Humanities conference at Duke University from April 17–18, 2026. 

Keynote speakers

Margaret Hillenbrand (Oxford) | Victor Seow (Harvard) | Engseng Ho (Duke)

Agenda

Friday, April 17: Keynote speakers

10:15–10:30 — Opening remarks

Carlos Rojas, Ellen McLarney, Eileen Chow, Mbaye Lo 

10:30–12:00 — Keynote 1

"The Masked Face in the Theatre of Pandemic and Protest" — Margaret Hillenbrand (Oxford); Chair: Carlos Rojas

1:00–2:30 — Keynote 2

"Give Me a Coal Mine and I Will Raze the World" — Victor Seow (Harvard); Chair: Xingming Wang 

2:45–4:15 — Keynote 3

"InterAsia after Globalization" — Engseng Ho (Duke); Chair: Mbaye Lo 

4:15–5:00 — Reception

Saturday, April 18: Student & Alumni Panels

9:00–10:45 — Student panel 1 (Chair: Preeti Singh)

• Yuting Hu, “Back on the Jinggang Mountain in the Postmodern Age: Transnational Socialist Chinese Aesthetics in Japanese Synth-pop Musical Production”
• Jiayang Cai, “Fiction, Friction: Japan, Lotus, and the Grammar of Afro-Asian Solidarity”
• Xiang Gao, “The Literature of ‘Sound’ and the ‘Sound’ of Literature—Taking Dung Kai-cheung's ‘Congming shijie’ (“Hearing and Seeing World”) as an Example”
• Binlin Sun, “Scripted Subjectivity: Intimacy, Agency, and Desire in Chinese Otome Games”

11:00-12:30 — Student panel 2  (Chair: Eileen Chow)

• Zilong Pan, “Tokenizing the World: AI Language Infrastructure and Transregional Linguistic Hierarchies”
• Yuchen Wang, “‘Urban Villages’: Migrant Workers’ Imagination and Identification of Marginality in Contemporary China”
• Jing Xu, “Loss and Precarity: Re-imagining Nation in the Wartime Writings of Eileen Chang and Zhong Lihe”

12:30-1:45 — Alumni panel (Chair: Kimberly Hassel)

• Ling Jin: careers in “alt-ac” fields
• Anisa Khalifa: careers in fields relating to cultural production

1:45-3:15 — Student panel 3  (Chair: Ellen McLarney)

• Rachel-Beth Acker, “Cowboys and Iranians: the Role of Racialized and Gendered Narratives in the 1953 Iranian Coup d’état”
• Wanying Yang, “Daoist Thought and the Cross-Cultural Resonance in the Works of Mikhail Naim”
• Anqi Zheng, “Antiquarian Legacy, Evolutionist Legacy: A Chinese Antiquarian in the Era of Global Museum”
• Yixuan Jiang, “Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Buddhist Turn”

3:30-4:30 — Alumni panel 2 (Chair: Guo-Juin Hong)

• Ziyang Li, “One City-State, Two Spatial Logics: Singapore’s Reclaimed Land and Diasporic Counter-Geographies”
• Chuanhui Meng, “Cyborg Buddhism and the Emptiness of Form: A Buddhist Media Philosophy of Black Myth: Wukong”

4:30-5:30 — Round table discussion (Chair: Carlos Rojas)

featuring keynote speakers Margaret Hillenbrand, Victor Seow, and Engseng Ho

5:30–6:00 — Closing remarks: Prasenjit Duara (Duke)