CCCI welcomes Tani Barlow, the George and Nancy Rupp Professor of Humanities and Professor of History at Rice University to speak on, "Instinct and Society."

When Li Zehou burst onto the scene during the 1980s ‘culture fever’ he dragged back in altered form a much earlier foundational debate over evolution and instinct theory launched in the new social theory and human science movement during the May Fourth era.  Barlow's general research question now is how society got ontologized a century ago.  How did proof of “society,” a materialized model, get so embedded in our explanatory frameworks that we have trouble thinking outside of it, even though we regularly confront questions it cannot resolve. 

The Contemporary China Initiative this spring is directed by Arnika Fuhrmann, Associate Professor of Southeast Asian Studies at Cornell University and the author of Ghostly Desires: Queer Sexuality and Vernacular Buddhism in Contemporary Thai Cinema.

This semester's CCCI lecture series is connected to Asian 6623 being taught by Professor Fuhrmann called 'The City.'

CCCI spring 2022 is co-sponsored by the East Asia Program, the Department of History, Asian Studies, the Cornell Society for the Humanities, Comparative Literature, and the Migrations Initiative.