BUCSA Hosts BU New England Asia Seminar
The Center for the Study of Asia (BUCSA), an affiliated regional studies center of the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, hosted the Boston University New England Asia Seminar on February 8, 2017 which included two panels on the theme “World is Coming: The Media Machine.”
Catherine Yeh, Director of the Center for the Study of Asia, welcomed guests to the seminar, and said the seminar would focus on how the world became part of the ever-present mental horizon only with the dramatic increase in the mobility of information, goods and people since the early nineteenth century. In this process media – books, newspapers, images, moving images, and digitized information – played a key role in making “the world” a daily reality for an ever wider range of people.
The first panel of the seminar, entitled “Visualizing the Boxer Rebellion and its Enemies,” featured Ellen Sebring, Research Associate and Creative Director at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Peter Perdue, Professor of History at Yale University. The presentation focused on the Visualizing Cultures website at MIT which explores contacts between Asia and the West through the use of online media combined with visual essays, uniting text and imagery in a new form of historical interpretation.
The seminar continued with a presentation from Yeh on the ways in which the formation of the notion of a world civilization was presented through a discussion of East-West relationship in D.W. Griffith’s silent film Broken Blossoms or The Yellow Man and the Girl (1919).
The second session of the seminar featured David Damrosch, Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature at Harvard University, on “Asian Writing in the Global Mediascape,” and Rudolf Wagner, of Heidelberg University and Harvard University, on “The Shared Agenda of the Newspaper: Bringing the World Home.”