Ambassador Robert O. Blake, former Ambassador of the U.S. to Indonesia, will provide remarks on climate change and discuss the need for greater institutionalization of climate diplomacy at the State Department, the role of the private sector, and an Indonesian project to transition from coal to green energy.

Film screening: "A Brighter Summer Day" (Edward Yang, 1991, 237 min, Taiwan, Mandarin with English Subtitles, DCP)

Buddhist monastics are supposed to observe a large number of rules or precepts: 250 for monks and 348 for nuns in East Asia. In medieval Japan, most monastics did not observe many of these, but occasionally serious monks would strive to re-establish the precepts.

In a new book, Taisu Zhang argues that China's fiscal weakness in the late 18th and 19th centuries was fundamentally ideological in nature, stemming from a confluence of traditional political ethics and the trauma of dynastic change.

Film screening: "Legend of the Mountain" (King Hu, 1979, 192 min, Taiwan/Hong Kong, Mandarin with English subtitles, DCP) New 4K restoration!

Join Duke Professor Gennifer Weisenfeld for a discussion with Professor Paul Jaskot about her new book, Gas Mask Nation: Visualizing Civil Air Defense in Wartime Japan

This talk examines one of the most popular Japanese publications of the twentieth century, Ōkubo Yasuo's translation of Gone with the Wind (Eng. 1936, trans. 1938), suggesting that the translation and its publicity campaign tapped into popular representations of the Meiji Restoration.

Dr. Kevin Chang (Academia Sinica) sketches the long history of the dissertation and its arrivals and developments in East Asian countries. By looking at the transformation of the specimen of work that defines the qualification of a scholar, this historical sketch challenges the conception of the scholar and his scholarship that we have taken for granted.

This talk discusses research that leveraged Singapore's unique demographic composition to measure the extent to which individuals' ethnicity, national identity, and class influence their altruism towards outgroup members.

Drawing on English and Chinese-language sources from all areas of China where US forces deployed during the 1940s, Fredman shows how each side brought to the alliance expectations that the other side was simply unable to meet, resulting in a tormented relationship across all levels of Sino-American engagement.