2014 NEW ENGLAND ASIAN STUDIES CONFERENCE EVENTS
University of Connecticut – Storrs
Saturday, October 4, 8AM – 6PM
The Asian and Asian American Studies Institute in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences is pleased to co-host the annual meeting of the New England Association for Asian Studies. All of the Saturday conference activities will take place at the Nathan Hale Inn and Conference Center. Detailed information available at 2014 New England Asian Conference Schedule .
Registration is Free to all UConn Faculty, Staff and Students, and $20 (USD) for non-UConn registrants. Please RSVP by email to: Maxine.Smestad-Haines@uconn.edu with heading “NEAAS Conference” and include list of names (indicate if faculty, staff or student and department affiliation if applicable).
AAASI is also pleased to include a slate of Pre-Conference Events as follows:
Film Screening: Gate of Heavenly Peace, Video Theater 2, Homer Babbidge Library (UConn)
Directed by Richard Gordon, Gate of Heavenly Peace documents the 1989 protests at Tiananmen Square, which culminated in a violent government crackdown on June 4, and features archival footage and contemporaneous interviews with Chinese workers, students, intellectuals, and government officials, powerfully recalling what most refer to as the Tiananmen Square Protests or the ’89 Democracy Movement.
Remembering Tiananmen Panel: Jeffrey Wasserstrom (Univ. of California, Irvine) and Chaohua Wang (Independent/Visiting Scholar, UCLA), Class of 1947 Room, Homer Babbidge Library (UConn)
This panel takes as a starting point the twentieth anniversary of what most know as the Tiananmen Square Protests (or ’89 Democracy Movement) and considers the legacies of the movement and its aftermath, featuring Jeffrey Wasserstrom (editor for the Journal of Asian Studies) and Chaohua Wang (at the time, a student activist).
Asian Philosophy Colloquium: Jay Garfield (Yale-NUS), Charles Hallisey (Harvard University), and Emily McRae (University of Oklahoma), Class of 1947 Room, Homer Babbidge Library (UConn)
Focusing its attention on ethics and the multiple philosophical and moral implications at the forefront of and embedded in Asian philosophical thought and practice, this panel is also billed as a “prequel” to the Saturday Conference panel on philosophy in the Indian Renaissance.
Film Screening: Chinatopia (directed by Evans Chan), Video Theater 2, Homer Babbidge Library (UConn)
In Chinatopia, Evans Chan resurrects a potent figure whose life and thoughts have haunted China’s troubled (post)modernity. Kang Youwei (1858-1927) was China's pioneering dissident and constitutional reformer, who prophesized gay marriage, strove to unbind women’s feet and wrote modern China’s first major utopian tract – an acknowledged influence on Mao Zedong. Kang’s cosmopolitanism and his Asian American activism astound – an anti-American boycott he orchestrated in 1905-06 to beat back the Chinese Exclusion Acts resulted in two meetings with a conciliatory Theodore Roosevelt.
The NEAAS Conference is generously co-sponsored by the Association for Asian Studies (AAS), the UConn Humanities Institute, the Office of Global Affairs, the Department of Philosophy, the Department of History, the Department of English, the Department of Political Science, the Languages, Cultures, and Literatures Department, the Fund for Interdisciplinary Research Endeavors (FIRE), and the India Studies Program.
For more information, contact: Ms. Fe Delos-Santos at fe.delos-santos@uconn.edu