Upcoming Events
Research and Writing at the Intersection of Diplomatic and Legal History
Room 3401 (Lift 2 / Lift 17-18), HKUST
Historians construct narratives from fragmented and often contradictory sources — but in an era of digital archives, online databases, and growing restriction on archival access, the process of research and writing history can look and feel quite different from just a decade or two ago. In this session, Professor Jenny Huangfu Day reflects on the intellectual and practical challenges and opportunities of archival research, especially at the intersection of diplomatic and legal history. Drawing from case studies in her forthcoming book, she shares how research questions take shape in response to conflicting sources, and how archival work, particularly in diplomatic and legal contexts, demands both interpretive rigor and interdisciplinary methodology. READ MORE...
Past Events
Patriarchy Falling Short: Gender Failure and Suicide in Qing Law
Room 4504 (Lift 25-26), HKUST
This talk, drawn from Wang's ongoing research, focuses on several examples of male suicide from Qing period legal archives across the 18th & 19th centuries. Unlike early modern European societies, suicide was not inherently sinful or criminal in China, creating a unique suicidal "necropolitics." Furthermore, in this era, there was unprecedentedly widespread positive state recognition of female suicide for “chastity” as analogy to men's heroic self-sacrifice for the state, especially on the battlefield. Arguably, chastity became the main, if not the only, measure for proper femininity. What did this context mean for boys and men who attempted and completed suicide not linked to war? Wang will put forward an interpretation of these deaths as the result of “gender failure”: when men fall short of externally enforced & personally internalized gender norms, one way “out” was to end their lives. READ MORE...
Revolution, History and Time
Revolution is a time of history, and it is thus a narrated time. This talk attempts to explore historical temporality and revolutionary narrative as central problems in modern Chinese history. It derives from two separate sources. One is a dialogue held a couple of years ago with the Taiwan-based historian, Yang Rubin, whose mode of conventional conservative history is methodologically useful for thinking about texts and history. The second source is the speaker's 2020 Verso book, China's Revolutions in the Modern World, which re-centers the radicalism of revolution in China's and the world's modern history. The talk interweaves narrative concerns with paradigmatic questions. READ MORE...