Upcoming Events

 

Spring 2026

Wednesday, January 28, 5 PM – 6:30 PM
Room 220, 595 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston MA
Making Sense of Japan’s Defense Policy with KIRIDORI Ryo

Wednesday, February 4, 1:30 PM – 3 PM EST
Via Zoom (Register for the link.)
Cambodia and Thailand: Conflict, Diplomacy, and Regional Power with Sophal Ear

Monday, February 9, 5 PM – 6:30 PM
121 Bay State Road, Boston MA
China and the Philippines: A Connected History for our Untangling World with Phillip Guingona

Wednesday, February 11, 5 PM – 6:30 PM
121 Bay State Road, Boston MA
From Kakilala to Kapamilya: Building Connections through Filipino Language with Lady Aileen Orsal

Thursday, February 12, 4 PM – 5:30 PM
121 Bay State Road, Boston MA
Learning from Japan: Expos Past, Present, and Future with Angus Lockyer

Thursday, February 12, 4 PM – 5:30 PM
In person at 67 Bay State Road, Boston MA and via Zoom
Authoritarian Absorption: The Transnational Remaking of Epidemic Politics in China with Yan Long

Friday, February 13, 12:30 PM – 2 PM
121 Bay State Road, Boston MA
The Once and Future World Order: Why Global Civilization will Survive the Decline of the West with Amitav Acharya

Thursday, February 19, 4 PM – 5:30 PM
121 Bay State Road, Boston MA
Ten Weeks by Ship Along the China Coast with Grant Rhode

CANCELED:
Monday. February 23, 5 PM – 6:30 PM
121 Bay State Road, Boston MA
Can China’s New Venture Capitalists  Solve the Local Government Debt Problem with Jean Oi

Wednesday, February 25, 4 PM – 5:30 PM
121 Bay State Road, Boston MA
The Diplomacy of Gift Exchange: During the 1853-1854 Perry Expedition to Japan with Matthew C. Perry

Thursday, February 26
CAS 533B, 725 Commonwealth Ave, Boston, MA
Also via Zoom
Territorializing Manchuria: The Transnational Frontier and Literatures of East Asia with Mia Qiong Xie

 

Thursday, March 19, 4 PM
Friday, March 20, 9:30 AM – 8:30 PM
745 Commonwealth Ave., Boston MA
Conference: Alexander the Great and Iskandar: Dialogues on Medieval Reception

Monday, March 23, 11 AM – 12 PM
121 Bay State Road, Boston MA
Breath, Rhythm & Music for Your Wellbeing with Igor Iwanek

Monday, March 30, 5 PM- 6:30 PM
121 Bay State Road, Boston MA
The Party’s Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping with Joseph Torigian

Tuesday, March 31, 6PM
233 Bay State Road, Boston MA
Why Ghosts Matter: An Underground History of Japan with Haruo Shirane

 

Wednesday, April 1 and Thursday, April 2
121 Bay State Road, Boston MA
International Workshop: From Colony to Nation: Catholicism and Christianity in Taiwan (1600-1987)

Wednesday, April 1, 5 PM
225 Bay State Road, Boston MA (The Castle)
Converging Voices: How Faith Nourished Taiwanese Music—From Sacred to Secular with Kuan Yun Huang & Chen Lin Ma

Thursday, April 2, 9 AM – 10:30 AM
Via Zoom
Health, Knowledge, Politics: Understanding the Triad with Madhulika Banerjee

Monday, April 6, 2 PM – 7 PM
CDS 1750, 665 Comm Ave., Boston MA
The Joseph Fewsmith Commemorative Symposium

Wednesday, April 8, 4 PM – 5:30 PM
121 Bay State Road, Boston MA
Soong Mayling (Madame Chiang Kai-shek) and Her World

Thursday, April 16, 5 PM – 6:30 PM
121 Bay State Road, Boston MA
The Migration Workshop, Author-Meets-Critics Book Panel with Prema A. Kurien

Thursday, April 23, 5 PM – 6:30 PM
121 Bay State Room, Boston MA
Gender and Performance on the Chinese Onstage

 

Fall 2025 

Tuesday, September 9, 4 PM – 6 PM
121 Bay State Road, Boston MA
BUCSA Fall Reception

Thursday, September 18, 4 PM – 5:30 PM
75 Bay State Road, Boston MA
Development, Dispossession, and Desires in Jeju with Youjeong Oh

Monday, September 22, 2025,  5PM – 6:30 PM
Rm. 101, 610 Commonwealth Ave., Boston, MA 02215
Taiwanese Politics and US-China-Taiwan Relations Under Trump 2.0 with S. Philip Hsu

Monday, September 29,  1 PM – 2:30 PM
121 Bay State Road, Boston MA
An Infirm Ascendency? India’s National Security Challenges with Ashley Tellis

Wednesday, October 1, 5pm-6:30pm
121 Bay State Road, Boston
The Contested Meaning of Symbolic Spaces in Bangkok, Hong Kong, and Shanghai

Thursday, October 2, 5pm
8O8 Commonwealth Ave., 1st Floor, Boston MA
Film Screening: “Made in Ethiopia”

Tuesday, October 14
Fuller 206, 808 Commonwealth Ave., Boston MA
“The Dawn Is Too Far” A Film Screening and Discussion with Persis Karim

Monday, October 20, 4 PM-5:30 PM
121 Bay State Road, Boston MA
The Vietnamese Áo Dài in a Time of War: Fashion, Citizenship, and Nationalism (1954–1975)

Monday, October 27, 7 PM
Room 104, 808 Commonwealth Ave, Brookline, MA
Song of Earthroot: Film Screening and Talkback

Wednesday, October 29, 5 PM – 6:30 PM
871 Commonwealth Ave, Room 511, Boston MA
Together in Manzanar: The True Story of a Japanese Jewish Family in an American Concentration Camp with Tracy Slater

Thursday, October  30, 4 PM – 5:30PM
From Refugees to ‘Non-Criminal Collaterals’: Immigration after the Vietnam War and Now with Ben Tran

Thursday, October 30, 2025, 4:30 PM – 6 PM
Getting Along with Imaginary Others: Case Studies in Japanese Fiction with Christopher Weinberger

Saturday, Saturday, November 1, 2025, 7:30 PM
The Odyssey, Music by Vân-Ánh Vanessa Võ, Blood Moon Orchestra, and Arneis Quartet

Thursday, November  6, 4 PM – 5:30 PM
The Backstage of Democracy: India’s Election Campaigns and the People Who Manage Them with Amogh Sharma

Saturday, November 8, 2025, 11 AM
Free Seminar: Cinema Masala with Dr. Shilpa Parnami

Saturday, November  8, 2025, 3 PM
The Devil Takes Bitcoin: Uncovering the Intersection of Japan, Crime, and Cryptocurrency

Wednesday, November 12, 2025, 1:30 PM – 3 PM
US-PAKISTAN RELATIONS:  Past, Present & Future
A Fireside Conversation with  Amb. RIZWAN SAEED SHEIKH (Ambassador of Pakistan to the United States)

Wednesday, November 12, 2025, 5 PM – 6:30 PM
Perilous Straits: The Changing Military Balance Around Taiwan

Monday, November 17, 5 PM – 6:15 PM
Universities in Ages of Authoritarianism: Higher Education in the US and China

Friday, November 21, 2025, 9:30 AM – 4:30 PM
Conference: The Contours of Alid Devotion Past and Present

Monday, December 1, 2025, 5:30 PM – 8:30 PM
Celebrating Persian Culture

Wednesday, December 10, 4:00 PM – 6:00 PM
BUCSA Holiday Get-Together

 

03-19 to 20-2026 Alexander the Great and Iskandar: Dialogues on Medieval Reception

 

 

March 19-20, 2026

Free and open to the public

Dates & Location

March 19th, 2026 – Keynote
745 Commonwealth Ave, Room 625

March 20th, 2026 – All-Day Symposium
745 Commonwealth Ave, Room B23-24

Preliminary Program

03-30- 2026 The Party’s Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping with Joseph Torigian

 

 

Monday, March 30
5 PM - 6:30 PM
121 Bay State Road, Boston MA

Please register here.

The Party's Interests Come First is the first biography of Xi Zhongxun, the father of Xi Jinping written in English. It is at once a sweeping story of the Chinese revolution and the first several decades of the People's Republic of China and a deeply personal story about making sense of one's own identity within a larger political context. Drawing on an array of new documents, interviews, diaries, and periodicals, Joseph Torigian vividly tells the life story of Xi Zhongxun, a man who spent his entire life struggling to balance his own feelings with the Party's demands.

 

 

Joseph Torigian is an associate professor at American University's School of International Service, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and a center associate of the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

03-31-2026 Why Ghosts Matter: An Underground History of Japan with Haruo Shirane

 

Tuesday, March 31, 6PM

The Allen & Shirley Leventhal Center
233 Bay State Road, Boston MA

 

Ghosts are a key to understanding anxieties about family, social injustice, and political violence in Japan. Unpacking four types of ghosts in Japan: political ghosts, ancestral ghosts, social ghosts, and non-human ghosts, the talk shows how these "ghost lineages" interlink, how they transform over time, and what they tell us about notions of personhood, community, power, and the non-human in Japanese history.

 

Haruo Shirane, Shincho Professor of Japanese Literature and Culture at Columbia University, is the author of Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons: Nature, Literature, and the Arts (2012), Traces of Dreams: Landscape, Cultural Memory, and the Poetry of Basho (1997), The Bridge of Dreams: A Poetics of The Tale of Genji (1987), and other books. He is an honorary member of the Japan Academy. The Allen & Shirley Leventhal Center 233 Bay State Road March 31 - 6 PM

 

 

04-01-2026 Converging Voices: How Faith Nourished Taiwanese Music—From Sacred to Secular with Kuan Yun Huang & Chen Lin Ma

 

Wednesday, April 1
5 PM - 6:30 PM
225 Bay State Road, Boston (The Castle)

Open and free to the public with limited seats.
Please register here.

This performance explores the intertwined relationship between church music and secular life in Taiwan, highlighting Taiwan’s historical agency in shaping its own musical modernity.
While Western musical traditions entered Taiwan through missionary and educational networks, they were not simply adopted or imitated. Instead, they were reinterpreted, localized, and transformed through Taiwan’s diverse languages, communities, and historical experiences.
By presenting popular songs, church hymns, and Indigenous music side by side, this program positions Taiwan not as a cultural periphery, but as a site of creative convergence—where faith, sound, and identity are continuously rearticulated.

 

 

Kuan Yun Huang is a Taiwan Fulbright Grantee, violinist, and researcher whose work focuses on one-string instruments and world music, with particular interests in Taiwanese Indigenous music and Vietnamese musical traditions. Trained in Western classical music, he engages in cross-cultural performance, research, and education that explore how sound, history, and identity intersect. His work bridges academic inquiry and artistic practice through performance, fieldwork, and international collaboration.
 
Chen Lin Ma is a Taiwanese musician and educator with a background in Western classical music. She is an accomplished pianist and flutist. Ma and Huang are partners both in life and on stage, collaborating closely in performance and education.

04-16-2026 The Migration Workshop, Author-Meets-Critics Book Panel with Prema A. Kurien

 

 

Thursday, April 16
5 PM - 6:30 PM
121 Bay State Road, Boston MA

Join us for a discussion with Prema Kurien, author of Claiming Citizenship: Race, Religion, and Political Mobilization Among New Americans
(Oxford University Press 2025)

Panelists:
Prema Kurien, Syracuse University
Jyoti Puri, Boston University
Natasha Warikoo, Tufts University
Peggy Levitt, Wellesley College

Moderator:
Nazli Kibria, Boston University