History in Images, History in Words: In Search of Facts in Documentary Filmmaking


History in Images, History in Words: 

In Search of Facts 
in Documentary Filmmaking

A lecture by Carma Hinton

Robinson Professor of Visual Culture and Chinese Studies at George Mason University

Monday April 10, 2017 from 4-7 pm

at the Photonics Center (9th fl.), 8 St. Mary’s Street, Boston University

17_4_10 Carma_semifinal as of 3.20.17 1038amMy presentation will focus on the process of documentary filmmaking, especially the many challenges my team and I faced in trying to create engaging filmic narratives that are both factually accurate and encompass multiple perspectives. I will use excerpts from my films as well as out-takes to illustrate the difficulties in determining what information to include and exclude, assess the compromises involved in the choices, and explore the consequences of taking various possible paths. I will also address the different problems that a historian encounters when presenting history in images as opposed to in words: the potential and limitation of each medium and what information each might privilege or obscure.  I believe that in this age of “alternative facts” and “parallel universes,” reflections on the challenges in obtaining authenticity and truth and the importance of relentlessly striving to reach this goal, take on particularly urgent meaning.

About the speaker:

Carma Hinton is an art historian and a filmmaker. She received her Ph.D. in Art History from Harvard University and is now Robinson Professor of Visual Culture and Chinese Studies at George Mason University. Together with Richard Gordon, Hinton has directed many documentary films, including Small Happiness, All Under Heaven, To Taste a Hundred Herbs, Abode of Illusion: The Life and Art of Chang Dai-chien, The Gate of Heavenly Peace, and Morning Sun. She has won two Peabody Awards, the American Historical Association’s John E. O’Connor Film Award, the International Critics Prize and the Best Social and Political Documentary at the Banff Television Festival, and a National News & Documentary Emmy, among others. Hinton is currently working on a book about Chinese scrolls depicting the theme of demon quelling. Carma Hinton was born in Beijing. Chinese is her first language and culture.

Carma Hinton and Richard Gordon 1989

Economic Expansions, Past and Present

Economic Expansions, Past and Present:
How America's Experience Connects to Modern-Day China
Thursday, September 28, 2017
4:00 - 6:00 pm
Reception to Follow

Barristers Hall, BU School of Law, 1st Floor
765 Commonwealth Ave.

The Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future invites you to attend its upcoming forum, “Economic Expansions, Past and Present: How America’s Experience Connects to Modern-Day China.” The forum will be held at Barristers Hall on the first floor of the BU School of Law at 765 Commonwealth Ave. on Thursday, September 28, 2017 from 4:00 – 6:00 pm (reception to follow).

In late 2013, the Chinese leadership launched the ambitious Belt and Road strategy to counter industrial overcapacities and economic downturn. Economic priorities have driven the strategy’s implementation thus far. The Belt and Road, albeit in its early stage, has mobilized Chinese commercial actors into new development drives and helped stabilize the national economy. What can we make of the patterns of Chinese behavior? What kinds of short-term and long-term implications can we draw? To better understand these questions, we need to go beyond China and go back to history. The program invites Princeton University professor Atul Kohli to present his research on the political economy of historical British and American empires. Boston University professor emeritus Andrew Bacevich is invited to provide comments on Prof. Kohli’s research and on China’s outbound influence.


Free and open to the public.

Click here
to RSVP


Participants:



Comparative Persianate Aesthetics Symposium

Comparative Persianate Aesthetics Symposium poster

Comparative Persianate Aesthetics Symposium
Boston University
September 28-29, 2017

154 Bay State Road, The Eilts Room
Free and open to the public

Middle Eastern and South Asian studies in the last decade have been energized by the idea of the “Persianate” cultural realm in which the Persian language and courtly conduct (adab) played a central role in societies from the Balkans to Bengal, giving rise to a transnational Muslim cosmopolitanism. This intellectual framework has enabled scholars to examine modes of cultural exchange between powerful polities such as Ottoman Turkey, Safavid Iran and Mughal India, as well as with Europe. Gift-giving between the different courts resulted in a unprecedented movement of objects in this cultural region. Until today important paintings and manuscripts of literary and historical works are preserved in far-flung libraries from Sarajevo to Patna as scholars retrace their early modern itineraries. 

Our symposium will focus on the changing relationship that literary and historical texts and paintings had to Persian cosmopolitan models in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, and how they themselves became starting points for distinctive traditions that drew inspiration from local and regionally-specific cultural practices, including the non-courtly. We will also examine the ways in which vernacular production in turn transformed Persian culture. We will approach this topic through a variety of conceptual frameworks: translation, imitation, hybridity, and innovation, across various humanistic disciplines. Individual papers will discuss textual genres such as epic and love lyrics, images in illustrated manuscripts and albums, practices and performances, in their cultural contexts, but also comparatively.


The Symposium will take place on September 28-29, 2017
on the Boston University Campus at:

154 Bay State Road, Second Floor Ellis Room


Program

Thursday, September 28, 2017 (4-5 pm)

KEYNOTE:
Poetics of Influence: Diverse Origins and Diverging Paths of Persianate Cosmopolises / Selim Kuru (University of Washington)

Friday, September 29, 2017

Panel 1 (9:30-10:30 am)
Persianate Royal Biographies in Verse / Sunil Sharma (Boston University)

Heroic Verse and History-Writing in the Deccan: Nusrati Responses to the Shahnamah / Subah Dayal (Tulane University)

Coffee break (10:30-10:45 am)

Panel 2 (10:45 am-1 pm)
Safavid Shahrashub: Literary Form and City Experience in Seventeenth-century Isfahan / Farshid Emami (Oberlin College)

The Persianate in Paris: Mughal Manuscript Culture and French Knowledge Production in the Eighteenth Century / Chanchal Dadlani (Wake Forest University)

Branding Iran: Persian Art and Culture in the Age of Global Early Modernity / Kishwar Rizvi (Yale University)

Lunch (1-2:15 pm)

Panel 3 (2:15-3:15 pm)
‘Calligraphers Renowned in the Lands of Rum and Ajam’: Ottoman nastaliq in the Seventeenth Century / Emine Fetvaci (Boston University)

Two Seventeenth-Century Ottoman Sakinames in Persian / Sooyong Kim (Koc University)

Panel 4 (3:30-4:30 pm)
The Persian Sources of Mem û Zîn the First Kurdish Love masnavi / Amr Ahmed (Harvard University)

Dastan literature in late Mughal Bengal: Shah Garibullah’s Dobhashi Amir Hamjar puthi / Thibaut d’Hubert (University of Chicago) 


Participants:
Amr Ahmed (Harvard University)
Chanchal Dadlani (Wake Forest University)
Subah Dayal (Tulane University)
Farshid Emami (Oberlin College)
Emine Fetvaci (Boston University)
Thibaut d’Hubert (University of Chicago)
Sooyong Kim (Koc University)
Selim Kuru (University of Washington, Seattle)
Kishwar
 Rizvi (Yale University)
Sunil Sharma (Boston University)


Sponsored by:
Department of World Languages and Literatures
Department of History of Art and Architecture
BU Center for the Humanities
Center for the Study of Asia
Institute for the Study of Muslim Societies and Civilizations

Showdown on the Korean Peninsula


BU Center for the Study of Asia presents,

"Showdown on the Korean Peninsula: The United States, China and the Two Koreas"

Tuesday, October 3, 2017
Reception at 5:00pm, followed by presentations and discussion from 5:30 - 7:00pm 


The Symposium will take place at:
Boston University
121 Bay State Road, Boston MA

  Storm clouds are gathering over the Korean peninsula. The North Korean nuclear crisis has entered a new stage as Pyongyang has fired missiles at and over its neighbors and has tested what it claims to be a nuclear device. President Donald Trump has promised to meet North Korean aggression with “fire and fury” and has called on the international community to isolate and pressure the North Korean regime to give up its nuclear weapons program. In the meantime, the People’s Republic of China , while distancing itself from its erstwhile North Korean ally, has been calling for a negotiated settlement based upon mutual compromise and a suspension of hostile actions by all parties.  How will this crisis resolve itself? Will North Korea give up its weapons? Will the United States and the rest of the international community be forced to come to terms with living with a nuclear armed Korea? Or, is it possible that we may be on the eve of military conflict - even war - in East Asia?


Participants

Sung-Yoon Lee  -  Kim Koo-Korea Foundation Professor of Korean Studies at the Fletcher School for Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University. Professor Lee has written extensively on North Korea and diplomacy on the Korean peninsula. His publication includes articles in Foreign Affairs, Asia Policy and Korean Policy Review.

Robert S. Ross – Professor of Political Science at Boston College and a leading expert on Chinese defense and security policy.  Professor Ross’s recent publications include Chinese Security Policy: Structure, Power, and Politics, China’s Ascent: Power, Security, and the Future of International Politics, and New Directions in the Study of Chinese Foreign Policy.

Gary Samore -  Executive Director for Research at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.  He has extensive experience in public service and served for four years as President Obama’s White House Coordinator for Arms Control and Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD), including as U.S. Sherpa for the 2010 Nuclear Security Summit in Washington, DC and the 2012 Nuclear Security Summit in Seoul, Korea.

Moderator 

Thomas U Berger – Professor of International Relations, Pardee School for Global Studies at Boston University. Professor Berger is an expert on East Asian security and Japanese defense and national security policy. His books include Cultures of Antimilitarism: National Security in Germany and Japan, and War, Guilt and world Politics: The Legacy of WW II in Europe and Asia.

 

The Harvard-MIT-BU Chinese Politics Research Workshop


Harvard-MIT-BU Chinese Politics Research Workshop

"Calculating Bully - Explaining Chinese Coercion in the South China Sea (1990-2015)"
Presentation by Ketian Zhang, PhD candidate at MIT's Department of Political Science

Wednesday, October 4 2017
6:00 - 7:30pm


The workshop will be held at:
Harvard University 1730 Cambridge Street, Room 153


ABSTRACT: 

Since 1990, China has used coercion for maritime territorial disputes in the South China Sea, despite adverse implications for its international image. China is also curiously selective in the timing, target, and tools of coercion: most cases of Chinese coercion are not military coercion, nor does China use coercion against all states that pose the same threats to its national security. The question regarding China’s coercion patterns – crucial for the prospect of peace and stability in the Asia-Pacific region – has not been systematically answered. More importantly, questions of the conditions under which states coerce and the factors influencing choices of coercive tools are understudied. I therefore examine when, why and how China attempts to coerce states over perceived threats to its national security. This question entails two parts: 1) when and why does China choose coercion over inaction, and 2) if coercion is chosen, what tools does China utilize? I explain Chinese coercion with the cost balancing theory – and test it against China’s coercion in the South China Sea. I employ qualitative methods such as process tracing and congruence testing, leveraging on primary Chinese documents and interviews with Chinese officials, government analysts, and scholars. Contrary to conventional wisdom and in contrast with historical rising powers, China is a cautious bully, does not coerce frequently, and uses military coercion less when it becomes stronger, resorting mostly to non-militarized tools. In short, states’ decision to coerce and choices over coercive tools cannot be simply explained by the power variable. I identify the centrality of credibility and economic vulnerability in states’ calculation of coercion. States coerce one target to deter others – “killing the chicken to scare the monkey.”
 

“Bhakti and Accidental Grace: Hate as Love in the Hindu Tradition”

IPR Doniger Flyer


2017-2018 Lecture Series: LOVE AND HATE

"Bhakti and Accidental Grace: Hate as Love in the Hindu Tradition"
A Lecture by Wendy Doniger

Wednesday, October 4, 2017
5:00PM


The Lecture will take place at:

Boston University School of Theology,
745 Commonwealth Avenue, Room 325
This lecture is free and open to the public.

Supported by the Boston University Center for the Humanities.
More information and our complete schedule can be found at our website: http://www.bu.edu/ipr/

“Freedom’s Open Wound” Conference at Tufts University

The Center for South Asian and Indian Ocean Studies Presents:

"Freedom's Open Wound: Kashmir and the Future of South Asia"

A conference on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of South Asia's independence from British colonial rule, to be held on October 6th and 7th, 2017


The conference will take place at:
Cabot 7th Floor
The Fletcher School
Tufts University

PROGRAM

Friday October 6

Film Screening of Iffat Fatima's Khoon Diy Baarav (Blood Leaves Its Trail) 93 minutes; Kashmiri/English subtitles
4 p.m. - 6:00 p.m. in Tisch Library 304

A small reception will be held at the Center of Humanities (48 Professors Row)

Saturday October 7

Opening Remarks: 9:30 a.m.

Session 1: "Kashmir's Absent Presences"
10:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.

Suchitra Vijayan, "Records of Repression"
Barrister-at-Law, Political essayist, and Photographer

Cabeiri Robinson, "The Territoriality of the Refugee Body and the Sovereignty
of Azad Kashmir"
Associate Professor, Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies,
University of Washington

Saiba Varma, "Injury, Affect, and Trauma to Politics in Kashmir"
Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, UC San Diego

Lunch: 12:00 p.m. - 1:00 p.m.

Session 2: "Kashmiri Imagination and Resistance"
1:00 p.m. - 3:00 p.m.

Shahla Hussain, "Kashmiri Imaginings of Freedom in the Global Arenas"
Assistant Professor, Department of History, St. John's University

Mona Bhan, "Tunneling to the Future in India" "Concrete, Counter-insurgency,
and Everyday Resistance in Kashmir" Assistant Professor, Department of
Anthropology, DePauw University

Iffat Fatima, KHOON DIY BAARAV (Blood Leaves Its Trail)
Documentary Film-maker based in India

Coffee Break: 3:00 p.m. - 3:15 p.m.

Session 3: "Kashmir on the World Stage"
3:15 p.m. -5:15 p.m.

Sugata Bose
Gardiner Professor of History, Harvard University

Ayesha Jalal
Mary Richardson Professor of History, Tufts University

Haiku as World Literature

Haiku-Poster

BUCSA Asian Cultural Heritage Series Part I: The Art of Letters

Haiku as World Literature:
A Celebration of the 150th Birthday of Haiku Poet Masaoka Shiki
October 12 & 13, 2017

 Haiku is perhaps the best travelled of all world literary genres. Since the seventeenth century, when Matsuo Bashō wrote his masterpiece, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, haiku poets have embarked on countless figural and literal journeys, and they have taken the genre with them. By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, dense social networks of haiku poets crisscrossed the whole of Japan, and by the early twentieth century, haiku in its modern form had spread across the globe through the work of poets including Ezra Pound, Rabindrath Tagore, Frederico Garcia Lorca, and Yu Ping Bo. Today millions of people write haiku in Japanese and dozens of other languages.

This symposium marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of the haiku poet Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902). Despite spending the last seven years of his short life immobilized by tuberculosis, Shiki contributed more than any other poet to the genre’s emergence as a globe-trotting literary form. Scholars and poets working on haiku in Japanese, English, Persian, Chinese, and Spanish will share their work on Shiki and on the poetics of haiku in its global dimensions. We will also celebrate the recent digitization on the “Open BU” archive of 145 back issues of the Shiki kaishi: the journal of the Matsuyama Shiki Society, a treasure trove of original research on Shiki and his circle written by the Society’s members.


The Symposium will take place on October 12, 2017 at:
(9:00am to 5:00pm) BU Law School Barristers Hall / 765 Commonwealth Avenue

The Haiku Circle will take place on October 13, 2017 at:
(11:00am to 1:00pm) BU Pardee School, 121 Bay State Road
Register for the event here


Schedule

(8:30-8:45)
Breakfast Reception

(8:45-9:00) Welcome:
Catherine Yeh, Director of the BU Center for the Study of Asia
J. Keith Vincent, Chair WLL

(9:00-9:30) KEYNOTE: Janine Beichman (Professor Emerita, Daito Bunka University)


(scroll down for panel paper abstracts and speaker bios)

(9:30-11:00) Masaoka Shiki and the Birth of the Modern Haiku

Discussant: Yoon Sun Yang (Boston University, WLL Korean)

Nanae Tamura (Matsuyama Shiki Society)
“"On the 150th anniversary of their Birth: Shiki, Sōseki, Kyokudō & Matsuyama"

Robert Tuck (University of Montana)
“Haiku Gets Political: Shiki, Nippon, and Meiji ‘Newspaper Literature’”

Reiko Abe Auestad (University of Oslo)
“Abe Yoshishige on ‘Masaoka Shiki as a Person’”

(11:00-12:30) Shiki’s Poetics

Discussant: Anna Elliot (Boston University, WLL Japanese)

Rebekah Machemer (Boston University WLL Alumna)
"Shiki's Haiku in a Comic Panel: Exercises in Composition and Contextualization"

Lorenzo Marinucci (Sapenzia University of Rome)
Shiki's Bashō: Malady and Modernity of a poetic Meeting.

J . Keith Vincent (Boston University, WLL)
“Better than Sex? Shiki’s Food Haiku”

(12:30-1:30) Break for Lunch

(1:30-3:00) Haiku Before and After Shiki:

Discussant: Peter Schwartz (Boston University, WLL German)

Cheryl Crowley (Emory University)
“Does Good Haiku have a Gender?  Tagami Kikusha O(1753-1826) and the Mino School”

Sarah Frederick (Boston University, WLL)
"Mountains and Rivers on her Desk:  Novelist Yoshiya Nobuko's Haiku Diary (1944-1973)"

Anita Patterson (Boston University, English)
"'Projections in the Haiku Manner': Richard Wright and Transpacific Modernism"

(3:00-3:30) Coffee Break

(3:30-5:00) Haiku in the World:

Discussant: Wiebke Denecke (Boston University, WLL)

Faryaneh Fadaeiresketi (Heidelberg University)
“Japanese Haiku in a Persian Dress” (tentative)

Christopher Maurer (Boston University, Romance Studies)
"’This Lyrical Box of Chocolates":  Lorca Discovers Haiku

Catherine Yeh (Boston University, WLL)
“Japanese Haiku and the Formation of the Chinese Short Poetry”

Because the best way to appreciate haiku is to write one yourself, we will reconvene on Friday, October 13 for a Haiku Circle, led by Nanae Tamura of the Matsuyama Shiki Society.  We will meet at the Pardee School 121 Bay State Road, from 11:00-1:00. Register for the event here


Paper Abstracts and Speaker Bios













 


 

With thanks for the generosity of the following sponsors:

The Boston University Center for the Humanities
Boston University Center for the Study of Asia
National Endowment for the Humanities Professorship
BU Department of World Languages & Literatures
BU Department of Romance Studies

Beyond the Headlines: Jammu & Kashmir: Is Resolution Possible?


Beyond the Headlines: Jammu & Kashmir: Is Resolution Possible? 

Starts: 12:00pm
Monday, October 16, 2017


The lecture will be held at: 

121 Bay State Road

Registration:
RSVP to eventsps@bu.edu

Having lingered over 70-years, the Jammu and Kashmir dispute between India and Pakistan is now the oldest unresolved international dispute on the United Nations docket. By now it also has intricate political and security manifestations for both countries, and for the region’s and the world’s stability. And it is in the news again. This Beyond the Headlines @BUPardeeSchool panel will discuss whether a resolution is at all possible.

Panelists include Pardee School Professor Jayita Sarkar, Amit Kapoor of the Indian Council on Competitiveness, Monish Verma of InCircle and Pardee School Dean Adil Najam.

Lunch will be available. RSVP to eventsps@bu.edu.

 

 

Longmen Grottoes: New Perspectives

Longmen Grottoes New Perspectives 10_26_17-1


"Longmen Grottoes: New Perspectives"

October 26, 2017
9:00am - 5:30pm


Location:
CGIS South 354 and 450

A UNESCO World Heritage Site filled with magnificently carved Buddhist caves, the Longmen Grottoes are renown throughout the world for their enduring legacy to Chinese art. Join experts from the Longmen Grottoes Research Academy and leading scholars for a day of cutting-edge research, archaeological findings, preservation work, and a special viewing of the Longmen Digital Retrieval Project.
Longmen Grottoes Research Academy Recent Projects
CGIS S354 9:00-12:30PM 
Recent Global Research on the Grottoes  
CGIS S354 1:30-4:00PM 
Harvard and Longmen
CGIS S450 4:00-5:30PM 
 
Graciously sponsored by the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Fund for Asian Art, the Harvard History of Art and Architecture Department, Harvard Visual China, and the Longmen Grottoes Research Academy