Humanities Institute - Past Distinguished Lectures in China Studies

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Paul and Mary Ho Distinguished Lecture in China Studies

Past Lectures

2007-8: Erik Mueggler

Professor Erik Mueggler, Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan, was selected to deliver the second annual Paul and Mary Ho Distinguished Lecture in China Studies. Professor Mueggler's presentation also contributed to the Humanities Institute's 2007-8 Distinguished Visiting Lecturers Series on the theme of "Imagining the Human." Entitled "'A World of Slobber and Slime': British Imperial Botany, Technology, and Bewilderment in the Sino-Tibetan Borderlands," the lecture was presented on Wednesday, February 6, 2008, at 7:30 pm in the Avaya Auditorium (ACE 2.302).

Erik Mueggler is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan and an affiliate of Michigan's Center for Chinese Studies and Center for the Ethnography of Everyday Life. His fieldwork, scholarship, and teaching focus on the politics of ritual, religion, science, and nature in the border regions of China. The author of The Age of Wild Ghosts: Memory, Violence and Place in Southwest China, he is currently reconstructing the history of British botanical exploration in China's southwest borderlands with an emphasis on the relations of these explorers to the mountain inhabitants who worked as their guides, porters, and collectors.

2006-7: Gail Hershatter

Professor Gail B. Hershatter, of the University of California at Santa Cruz, was selected to deliver the inaugural Paul and Mary Ho Distinguished Lecture in China Studies, an endowed annual public lecture named for the two University of Texas at Austin faculty members who presented the generous gift. Professor Hershatter's presentation also contributed to the Humanities Institute's 2006-7 Distinguished Visiting Lecturers Series on the theme of "Labor and Leisure." Entitled "The Gender of Memory: Rural Women, Labor, and Collectivization in Early Socialist China," the lecture was presented on Wednesday, October 25, 2006, at 7:30 pm in the Art Auditorium (ART 1.102). All lectures in the Institute's Visiting Lecturers Series, including the Ho Distinguished Lecture in China Studies, are free and intended for both a campus and a general community audience.

An historian, Professor Hershatter's research focuses on modern Chinese social and cultural history, women's history, as well as sexuality studies and feminist theory. Her book, Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution and Modernity in 20th-Century Shanghai, received the 1997 American Historical Association's Joan Kelly Memorial Prize in Women's History, and has since been translated into Chinese. An active participant in interdisciplinary studies at UC Santa Cruz, Professor Hershatter is the Co-Director of the Center for Cultural Studies and a former Director and current Executive Committee member of the Institute for Humanities Research. In 2003, she also received the John Dizikes Teaching Award in the Humanities.