Upcoming Events

10-01-2025 – The Contested Meaning of Symbolic Spaces in Bangkok, Hong Kong, and Shanghai

Wednesday, October 1, 2025
5 PM - 6:30PM
121 Bay State Road, Boston MA

Please register here.

This roundtable moderated by Robert Weller will bring together discussion of the parks, squares, monuments, and other symbolically important parts of three urban centers. The participants will discuss notable struggles to define the meaning and control the use of key spots within the metropolis they know best. The discussion will move from Bangkok and Hong Kong, where Netiwit Chotiphatphaisal and Hana Meihan Davis spent their formative years, to Shanghai, the city that Jeffrey Wasserstrom began his career studying.

Netiwit Chotiphatphaisal is an author, activist, translator, founder of a publishing house, and the co-producer of The Last Breath of Sam Yan, a documentary film about a Bangkok shrine that won a major prize in Thailand. He has just begun a graduate program at the Harvard Divinity School.

Hana Meihan Davis is the author of For the Love of Hong Kong: A Memoir from my City Under Siege, which was published in 2021. A graduate of Yale and a past editorial intern at and contributor to the Washington Post and the South China Morning Post, she is currently in graduate school at MIT pursuing a master's in architecture. 

Jeffrey Wasserstrom is a Distinguished Professor of History at UC Irvine. His books include Global Shanghai,1850-2010, which came out in 2009, and The Milk Tea Alliance: Inside Asia's Struggle Against Autocracy and Beijing, which was published earlier this year.

Robert Weller is a Professor of Anthropology at Boston University. His books include, as author, Resistance, Chaos and Control in China: Taiping Rebels, Taiwanese Ghosts and Tiananmen, which was published in 1994, and, as co-editor, It Happens Among People: Resonances and Extensions of the Work of  Fredrik Barth, which came out in 2020.

10-14-2025 – “The Dawn is Too Far” A Film Screening and Discussion with Persis Karim

Tuesday, October 14, 2025
5 PM - 6:30 PM
Fuller 206, 808 Commonwealth Ave., Boston MA

Please Register here.

The Dawn is Too Far: Stories of Iranian-American Life poetically narrates the story of a community of Iranian Americans who have made the San Francisco Bay Area their home over the past five decades. The film seeks to expand our understanding of Iranian immigration —what it means to leave home and country—and live through the episodes of turbulent histories of dissent, revolution, war, and separation––and reinvent oneself in a new place, country, and culture. The Dawn is Too Far does not paint a story of salvation and happy assimilation, but rather seeks to identify the complex ways that members of the Bay Area's Iranian diaspora community have navigated the challenges and traumas of history—both Iranian and American––to reinvent themselves and tell their own stories; these as yet untold stories build on a longer history of Iranian immigration to Northern California, where Iranians as students, activists, artists, draw on as well as influence the larger culture of the Bay Area. This community and all that it has faced, offers a more nuanced story of the Iranian diaspora—the ways that this community enriches and enlivens the region where they live, work, and build families and community. The Dawn is Too Far undermines the tired and overplayed news headlines that are dominated by narratives of enmity and mistrust between the government of Iran and the U.S., to offer a more humane understanding of the how people's lives and the sacrifices they make are part of the larger story of immigration.

Persis Karim (executive produce and co-director/co-producer) is an Iranian-American writer, poet, and professor at San Francisco State University. She grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, the daughter of an Iranian father who came here in the immediate aftermath of Iran’s military occupation by British and Soviet troops during World War II. She came of age during the 1979 Iranian Revolution and felt a deep concern for how Iran was represented in the media, defying what she experienced in her family and the larger community of Iranian Americans. She has been engaged with the Iranian diaspora community here for more than 30 years in her capacity as a professor, first at San Jose State University, where she founded the Persian Studies program, and then currently as the Director for the Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies at San Francisco State University. She has written extensively on the culture and literature of Iranian Americans and is the editor of three anthologies of Iranian diaspora literature: A World Between: Poems, Short Stories, and Essays by Iranian Americans (1999); Let Me Tell You Where I’ve Been: New Writing by Women of the Iranian Diaspora (2006); and, Tremors: New Fiction by Iranian-American Writers (2013). She also piloted a digital archive of Bay Area Iranian Americans on the DIVA site at SF State as well as did a digital storytelling Karim has worked actively to support and help build the Iranian diaspora community in the Bay Area—largely through her literary and cultural activism. She has watched over three decades from the seat of observer-participant as this community has evolved and grown, welcoming younger generations into it.

Soumyaa Behrens (co-director/co-producer) is an award-winning South Asian Bay Area filmmaker whose work is defined by an attention to women, people of color, and immigrant and marginalized communities. Behrens has directed three other films and is active in the Bay Area film and video community. She teaches documentary filmmaking at San Francisco State University and directs the DocFilm Institute. Behrens spent her childhood traveling back and forth between Illinois and India and the many airports in between. Behrens’s Indian parents were part of an accidental diaspora. They raised Behrens and her other Americanborn sisters, and successfully brought their father’s brothers and families to the U.S. where many of them set down roots. Behrens shares significant personal experiences that mirror those of the Iranian Americans in this film. 

11-4-2025 – Learning from Japan: Expos Past, Present, and Future with Angus Lockyer

Tuesday, November 4, 2025 
4 PM - 5:30 PM
121 Bay State Road, Boston MA

Please register here.

This summer saw crowds flocking to Expo 2025 on a reclaimed island in Osaka Bay. This may be a surprise, given its absence in the western media and the assumption among many that the age of expos is over. In this talk, we'll explore why expos are still a going concern. We'll start with a report from Osaka, then travel back in time, to understand how Japan got there, adopting the form of modern expos from the West in the 19th century, but also adapting it over the course of the 20th as a tool for development. Drawing on a recently-published book, the story will take us from early 18th-century exhibitions -- materia medica, exotic animals, animated puppets, and revealed deities -- through industry and empire, war and peace, technology and environment. We won't have time to look at all the 1,300-plus expos Japan has seen in the last 150 years. But we'll see enough to understand how Japan's use of them has served its own needs, and provided a model that continues to be adopted beyond its borders.

Angus Lockyer was educated in Dorset, Cambridge, Seattle, and California, and has taught Japanese, East Asian, and global history in North Carolina and London. Exhibitionist Japan: The Spectacle of Modern Development was published by Cambridge University Press earlier this year. Japan: A History in Objects, based on the collection of the British Museum, will come out from Thames and Hudson in early 2026. He currently lives in Rhode Island and teaches at RISD.

11-06-25 – The Backstage of Democracy: India’s Election Campaigns and the People Who Manage Them with Amogh Dhar Sharma

Thursday, November  6, 2025
4 PM - 5:30 PM
121 Bay State Road, Boston MA

Please register here.

Amogh Dhar Sharma is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Oxford Department of International Development, University of Oxford. He received hisPhD from the University of Oxford, where he has previously worked as a lecturer. His first book, The Backstage of Democracy: India's Election Campaigns and the People Who Manage Them, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2024. Currently, he is working on a project on the history of opinion polls and psephology in post-independence India.