History in Images, History in Words: In Search of Facts in Documentary Filmmaking
History in Images, History in Words:
In Search of Facts
in Documentary Filmmaking
A lecture by Carma Hinton
Robinson Professor of Visual Culture and Chinese Studies at George Mason University
Monday April 10, 2017 from 4-7 pm
at the Photonics Center (9th fl.), 8 St. Mary’s Street, Boston University
My presentation will focus on the process of documentary filmmaking, especially the many challenges my team and I faced in trying to create engaging filmic narratives that are both factually accurate and encompass multiple perspectives. I will use excerpts from my films as well as out-takes to illustrate the difficulties in determining what information to include and exclude, assess the compromises involved in the choices, and explore the consequences of taking various possible paths. I will also address the different problems that a historian encounters when presenting history in images as opposed to in words: the potential and limitation of each medium and what information each might privilege or obscure. I believe that in this age of “alternative facts” and “parallel universes,” reflections on the challenges in obtaining authenticity and truth and the importance of relentlessly striving to reach this goal, take on particularly urgent meaning.
About the speaker:
Carma Hinton is an art historian and a filmmaker. She received her Ph.D. in Art History from Harvard University and is now Robinson Professor of Visual Culture and Chinese Studies at George Mason University. Together with Richard Gordon, Hinton has directed many documentary films, including Small Happiness, All Under Heaven, To Taste a Hundred Herbs, Abode of Illusion: The Life and Art of Chang Dai-chien, The Gate of Heavenly Peace, and Morning Sun. She has won two Peabody Awards, the American Historical Association’s John E. O’Connor Film Award, the International Critics Prize and the Best Social and Political Documentary at the Banff Television Festival, and a National News & Documentary Emmy, among others. Hinton is currently working on a book about Chinese scrolls depicting the theme of demon quelling. Carma Hinton was born in Beijing. Chinese is her first language and culture.
TODAY! Ted Goossen, Japanese Monkeys in the Making: Fifteen Years of Monkey (Business). BU Literary Translation Series (Feb. 3, 2023)
The 2023 Boston University Lecture Series in Literary Translation is pleased to present
Ted Goossen
(Dept. of the Humanities, York University)
Japanese Monkeys in the Making: Fifteen Years of Monkey (Business)
Friday, February 3, 2023 in CAS 306, 725 Commonwealth Ave., Boston MA 02215
Theodore (Ted) Goossen is Professor of Humanities at York University in Toronto, Canada, a founding member of the Department of Contemporary Literary Studies at the University of Tokyo, and a co-founder of the Canada Japan Society. He has translated many Japanese authors including Hiromi Kawakami, Naoya Shiga, and Haruki Murakami and is editor of The Oxford Book of Japanese Short Stories and co-editor of Monkey Business International, the first Japanese literary magazine available in an English version. At present, he is translating Kawakami’s recent novel, The Third Love (Sandome no Koi).
Lunar New Year Culture Fair! (Monday, Feb. 6, 2023)
Join us for a Chinese New Year and Lantern Festival Celebration!
Monday, February 6, 2023 from 5-6:15 pm at
Global House, 610 Beacon Street (near Kenmore Square), Boston
Because of space constraints, this event is open only to the Boston University community. Registration is required by scanning the QR code on the flyer below:
The Reach of the Revolutionary Propaganda State in Beijing, 1950-1953, with Prof. Zhao MA 馬釗 (Washington Univ) (March 21, 2023)
The BU Center for the Study of Asia and the BU Department of History
are pleased to present
About the Speaker, Zhao MA 馬釗 (from https://sites.wustl.edu/zhaoma/)
"I was born and grew up in Beijing. I received my Ph.D. in History from the Johns Hopkins University in 2007, and joined the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Washington University in 2011. My first book, Runaway Wives, Urban Crimes, and Survival Strategies in Wartime Beijing, 1937-1949, was published by Harvard University Asia Center in 2015. It uses criminal case files to explore lower-class women’s role in remaking wartime Beijing’s social and moral order. I am currently writing a new book, Seditious Voices in Revolutionary China, 1950-1953. It examines the relationship between rumor-mongering and political propaganda during the Korean War campaign, and offers a lens through which to study the transformation of urban informational space against the backdrop of war fever and emerging revolutionary politics in Mao’s China. At Washington University, I teach courses on 20th-century Chinese history, city and women, material culture, historical landscape, socialist culture, and US-China relations since 1949.
Besides researching and teaching at Washington University, I have been a Public Intellectual Program (PIP) Fellow at the National Committee on US-China Relations since 2014. As a PIP fellow, I have opportunities to participate in the meetings with government officials of United States and China and joined the U.S. congressional delegation to visit China. I have also been working closely with public media, including writing op-eds for Chinese newspapers, giving interviews to New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Reuters, and PBS, and speaking frequently at Voice of America on topics of Chinese politics, society, and US-China relations."
This event is sponsored by the BU Center for the Study of Asia and the BU Department of History.
Paul S. Cha, Serving Two “Masters”: Shinto Shrines and Protestant Churches in Colonial Korea (Monday Feb. 13, 2023)
The BU Center for the Study of Asia, the BU Center for Global Christianity and Mission, and the Institute on Culture, Religion, and World Affairs (CURA)
are very pleased to present
Dr. Paul S. Cha (University of Hong Kong)
Monday, February 13, 2023 from 4:00 to 5:30 pm
121 Bay State Road, Boston University, Boston, MA 02215
Discussant: Dana L. Robert
(William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor,
Director of the Center for Global Christianity and Mission, Boston University)
Abstract:
In 1935, the Japanese colonial government demanded that students at private schools operated by Protestant missionaries in P’yŏngyang bow at State Shinto shrine ceremonies. Neither the missionaries nor Korean Protestants uniformly rejected this order. Instead, their responses were multi-faceted, as the question of whether to bow at shrines was much more than a matter of religion or faith. Drawing from the speaker’s recently published book, Balancing Communities: Nation, State, and Protestantism in Korea, this talk will show how the shrine question laid bare long-standing tensions among missionaries, Koreans, and government officials over issues of church governance, political authority, and the boundaries of Christianity’s transnational message.
About the Speaker:
Paul S. Cha is an assistant professor of Korean studies in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Hong Kong. He received his PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles and his MA from the University of Chicago. He specializes in modern Korean history, and his first book, Balancing Communities: Nation, State, and Protestant Christianity in Korea, 1884-1942, was published by the University of Hawai‘i Press in 2022. During 2022-2023, he is a Visiting Scholar at the Harvard-Yenching Institute, where he is writing a book on how the South Korean countryside became the nexus of a global religious Cold War after the outbreak of the Korean War.
About the Discussant:
Dr. Dana L. Robert is William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor, and Director of the Center for Global Christianity and Mission. Her research and teaching interests span mission history, World Christianity, and mission theology. An Editor of the journal Church History, during 2016-17 she was a Henry Luce III Fellow in Theology, and Senior Research Fellow at the Leibniz Institute of European History in Mainz, Germany. She is a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2017, she received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society of Missiology. She has mentored over 80 doctoral students who serve in academic and ecclesial positions worldwide. Her books include Faithful Friendships: Embracing Diversity in Christian Community (2019); African Christian Biography: Stories, Lives, and Challenges (2018); Joy to the World!: Mission in the Age of Global Christianity (2010); Christian Mission: How Christianity Became a World Religion (2009, now in its twelfth printing); Converting Colonialism: Visions and Realities in Mission History, 1706-1914 (2008); Christianity: A Social and Cultural History (co-author, 1997), and the now classic American Women in Mission: A Social History of Their Thought and Practice (1997). She is on the Editorial Committee for the award-winning digital humanities project Dictionary of African Christian Biography and the Journal of African Christian Biography. An active lay United Methodist, in 2019 she spoke at the 150th anniversary of the United Methodist Women. In addition to STH, she is a faculty member in African Studies. Robert received her BA from Louisiana State University and her MA, MPhil, and PhD from Yale University.
“Crisis in Myanmar: Understanding Buddhist Nationalism, Decentralized Resistance, and Polycentric Federal Democracy,” with David Moe (Weds. Feb. 15, 2023)
The BU Center for the Study of Asia and the and the Institute on Culture, Religion, and World Affairs (CURA)
are pleased to present the next BUCSA Asia Forum event
Crisis in Myanmar: Understanding Buddhist Nationalism,
Decentralized Resistance, and Polycentric Federal Democracy
David Moe
(Henry H. Rice Postdoctoral Associate in Southeast Asian Studies, Yale University)
Wednesday, Feb. 15, 2023 from 5:00 to 6:30 pm
Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies, Boston University
121 Bay State Road, Boston, MA 02215
Abstract:
Myanmar is religiously and ethnically the second most diverse nation in Southeast Asia after Indonesia. Yet Myanmar exists as an “unfinished nation” that holds the politics of Buddhist nationalism, militarism, and the longest civil war in a post-colonial Southeast Asia. Why did Buddhist nationalism emerge? How does old Buddhist nationalism relate to the new 2021 coup? Since the coup on February 1, 2021, citizens from different religions and ethnicities have continued to launch the courageous and creative forms of decentralized resistance against military power. What has motivated this uprising, particularly among Generation Z? How has this resistance addressed Buddhist nationalism and bridged the religious and ethnic divides in Burmese politics? Is there a unifying vision of democracy amidst the religious and ethnic diversity? What would the future of Myanmar’s polycentric federal democracy look like? In this event, the speaker will explore the current state of decentralized resistance movement two years after the coup, based on his firsthand experience of Buddhist nationalism, his intellectual expertise in theory of Buddhist nationalism, and the vision of polycentric federal democracy.
About the Speaker:
David Thang Moe (Ph.D) is Henry H. Rice Postdoctoral Associate in Southeast Asian Studies at Yale University. At Yale, he is a lead person in Myanmar Studies for Southeast Asian Movement (SEAM), and teaches courses on religion, conflict, and reconciliation in Southeast Asia, and on colonialism, nationalism, and identity in Myanmar. He has published over 70 scholarly articles, and currently is working on a book project about the politics of Buddhist nationalism, ethnic conflict, and reconciliation in Myanmar. His research interests include Asian public theology of religions, colonialism, Buddhist nationalism, ethnic conflict, subaltern politics of resistance, ethnic reconciliation, and Christian-Buddhist engagement in Southeast Asia. He has been a featured speaker about Myanmar at Yale, Harvard, Columbia, Brown, Princeton, Boston College, New York University, George Washington University, Eastern Kentucky University, University of Kentucky, Toronto, Australian National University, University of Sydney, Oxford, Cambridge, Hamburg, National University of Singapore, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Yonsei, Ewha, and other universities. In addition to being a speaker, he also met with US senators to advocate for Myanmar’s democracy movement. He is on the editorial team of five journals, including The International Journal of Public Theology; The Journal of Southeast Asian Movement at Yale; Interreligious Studies and Intercultural Theology; Missiology: An International Review; and Asian American Theological Forum. He is a member of American Academy of Religion; Society of Biblical Literature; Association for Asian Studies; New York Southeast Asia Network; and Global Network for Public Theology.
Transforming Rumi Poetry into Accompanied Song in the Persian Musical Tradition, with Santur Master Mr. Ali Mehraban (Wednesday March 22, 2023)
Discovering the Resonant Sounds of the Persian Santur!
Join us for three upcoming events in honor of the BU School of Music's 150th Anniversary:
ISA: The World is One (Cultural performances with the BU Filipino Students Association and other groups) (Saturday, March 25, 2023)
BU's longest-running cultural show, ISA: The World is One, is back for its 2023 edition! This year, the theme is "alpas," which means to "break free" in Tagalog. The BU Filipino Students Association (BUFSA) collaborates with different organizations around campus to celebrate and learn about the uniqueness of each culture and how despite these differences, we can still come together and unite as one. If you like dancing, singing, or poetry, you don't want to miss out!
ISA: The World is One
Saturday March 25, 2023 from 7-9 pm
at the Tsai Performance Center, 685 Commonwealth Ave., Boston, MA 02215
From Development to Democracy: The Transformations of Modern Asia, with Dan Slater (U Michigan) (Weds. March 29, 2023)
The BU Center for the Study of Asia and the Department of Political Science are pleased to present
From Development to Democracy: The Transformations of Modern Asia
Dan Slater (University of Michigan)
Wednesday, March 29, 2023 from 4:00 to 5:30 pm at
The Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies, 121 Bay State Road, Boston, MA 02215
About the Speaker:
Dan Slater (Ph.D. Emory, 2005) specializes in the politics and history of enduring dictatorships and emerging democracies, with a regional focus on Southeast Asia. He came to Michigan in 2017 after twelve years on the faculty at the University of Chicago, where he served as Director of the Center for International Social Science Research (CISSR), Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science, and associate member in the Department of Sociology. His book examining how divergent historical patterns of contentious politics have shaped variation in state power and authoritarian durability in seven Southeast Asian countries, entitled Ordering Power: Contentious Politics and Authoritarian Leviathans in Southeast Asia, was published in the Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics series in 2010. His latest book is entitled From Development to Democracy: The Transformations of Modern Asia (Princeton University Press, 2022), which explores why rapid economic development has led to democratization in some Asian countries but not others. His published articles can be found in disciplinary journals such as the American Journal of Political Science, American Journal of Sociology, Annual Review of Political Science, British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Democratization, Government & Opposition, International Organization, Perspectives on Politics, Social Science History, Studies in Comparative International Development, and World Politics, as well as Asia-oriented journals such as Critical Asian Studies, Indonesia, Journal of East Asian Studies, South East Asia Research, Taiwan Journal of Democracy, and TRANS. Before commencing his doctoral studies at Emory in 1999 he received a B.A. in International Relations and History from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, an M.A. in International Studies from the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington, and spent ten months as a Fulbright scholar in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in 1998. Beyond Southeast Asia, he has done international consulting work on challenges related to democratization and demilitarization in cases such as Ethiopia, Fiji, and Pakistan. He has also recently worked as a consultant and nonresident fellow with international policy organizations such as the American Enterprise Institute, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Freedom House, OECD, and World Bank. [From https://lsa.umich.edu/polisci/people/faculty/dnsltr.html]
Zhuangzi and the Philosophy of Disability, with Chi-Keung Chan (at Suffolk Univ, March 31, 2023)
The Suffolk University Dept. of Philosophy and the Rosenberg Institute for East Asian Studies invite you to the next lecture in their 2023 Colloquium Series
Prof. Chi-Keung Chan (National Taiwan University)
Zhuangzi and the Philosophy of Disability
Friday March 31, 2023 from 12-1pm
73 Tremont Street, Room 5055, Suffolk University, Boston MA (near the Park St. "T" station)
Screening of the film, Shun Li and the Poet (Andrea Seager, 2011) (April 4, 2023)
The BU Department of Romance Studies is hosting a
Screening of the film, Shun Li and the Poet
April 4, 2023 at 6:00pm
in CAS 533B (Geddes Language Center, 685 Commonwealth Ave., Boston MA)
one week before Dr. Carolan's lecture "Orienting Italy: China through the Lens of Italian Filmmakers." This is because her lecture
on April 11 will focus in part on this film.
Dr. Mary Ann Carolan (Fairfield University)
will give a lecture drawn from her new book Orienting Italy: China through the Lens of Italian Filmmakers (SUNY Press, 2023),
which deals primarily with twentieth century orientalism.
Tuesday April 11, 2023 from 6:00 to 7:30 pm
in BU College of General Studies, 871 Commonwealth Ave. Room 505, Boston, MA
Attendees are requested to pre-register here: https://chinathroughthelensofitalianfilmmakers.eventbrite.co.uk
