2022-2023 LRCCS Event Videos

Michael Nylan, Professor of History, University of California, Berkeley

In the end, a truly "global perspective" should consider how Chinese thinking, taken seriously, might help us revise our default presumptions and priorities in today's EuroAmerica. Dr. Nylan’s talk will register two main points: (1) that the early thinkers Xunzi and Aristotle both urge due attention to the situation at hand (communal as much as individual, institutional as much as volitional), unlike many modern philosophers intent upon devising universal ethical principles for individual autonomous rational beings; and (2) that these two early thinkers excel in leading us to consider how best to avoid becoming enslaved by people and things, with their kind of self-rule (being "lord over oneself") an attainment that fundamentally depends upon long training by a range of social institutions. Her talk will also suggest that Xunzi's worldview suits the exigencies of the contemporary world somewhat better than Aristotle's perspective.

Michael Nylan 戴梅可 generally writes in three disciplines: the history of the early empires in China (475 BC-AD 316), philosophy, and art and archaeology. Of late, she has been focusing on the sociopolitical context for local communities in China; on aesthetic theories and material culture; and cosmological belief; and on gender history and the history of such emotions as "daring" and "salutary fear" (aka prudential caution). She is finishing up two books, a mammoth translation of the Han-era Documents classic and a book tentatively titled "The Four Fathers of History" (on Herodotus and Thucydides, Sima Qian and Ban Gu). Her comparative interests have been highlighted in such books as "Chang'an 26 BCE: an Augustan Age in Rome" and "The Chinese Pleasure Book," as well as in numerous essays.

Adam Brookes, Author and Journalist

In 1933, as Japanese armies ravaged China, a small band of museum curators began packing the art collections of the Forbidden City for evacuation to safety. Adam Brookes' book talk will describe how the curators shepherded a quarter of a million artworks and texts thousands of miles across war torn China to preserve them from bombing and plunder, and how the collections were split between China and Taiwan.

Adam Brookes grew up in the UK and studied Chinese at SOAS, University of London. For many years he was a reporter for BBC News and served as correspondent in Jakarta, Beijing and Washington DC. His latest book is “Fragile Cargo: The World War II Race to Save the Treasures of China's Forbidden City”, to be published by Simon and Schuster/Atria in February 2023.

Peter Braden, LRCCS Postdoctoral Fellow, University of MIchigan

In 1952, American prisoners captured in the Korean War accused their own government of using bacterial warfare (BW) against civilians. Searching for ways to counter this supposed demonstration of Communist brainwashing, the American government tested novel, mind-altering chemicals such as LSD on human and animal subjects. At the same time, the Chinese government launched national rodent-killing campaigns to eradicate the vectors of diseases such as plague. This presentation shows how communities of rodents separated by the Pacific Ocean experienced these semi-scientific responses to the conflict in the Korean peninsula.

Peter Braden is a postdoctoral fellow at the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan. He is a historian whose research interests include environmental history, science and technology studies, and animal studies. His first book manuscript is titled “Serve the People: Bovine Experiences in China's Civil War and Revolution, 1935-1961.” Peter is using his time at the LRCCS to publish his first book and to develop his second monograph, “Collateral Killing: Humans, Rodents, and Medicine in China: 1940-1980.” Before joining the LRCCS, he received his doctorate in history from the University of California-San Diego, and completed an An Wang postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University's Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies.