Month: December 2025

Speaker: Sheldon Lu, Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature, University of California, Davis

Moderator: Beth Harper, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU

Date: Thursday, December 11, 2025
Time: 2:30 pm Hong Kong Time
Venue: Faculty Lounge (Room 430), 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU

This lecture offers a survey of the evolution of East-West comparative literary studies in the past decades. It begins with comparative poetics, schools of comparative literature, methods of parallel study. We pay attention to the subsequent rise of third-world literature and postcolonial study. In the twenty-first century, world literature and world-systems theory present new opportunities for innovative comparative studies. This lecture gives an account of such changes, continuity, and innovation. At the same time, it points out some possible strengths and blind spots associated with each of these trends.

Sheldon Lu is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California at Davis. He has served as the Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature and Founding Director of Film Studies Program at UC Davis. His scholarship and teaching lie at the intersection of literary studies, visual studies, film studies, China studies, and cultural theory. He is the author and editor of some 15 books in English and Chinese. His recent monographs include Contemporary Chinese Cinema and Visual Culture: Envisioning the Nation (2021) and Lyric Poetry and Solidarity Society in Hong Kong in the 1950s 一九五〇年代香港詞壇與堅社 (2022).

For updates on future events hosted by the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures, please visit https://www.csgc.hku.hk/

Follow us on:
– Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/csgc.hku
– Instagram: @csgc.hku

Roundtable Discussion

Speakers:
Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu, Professor, NYU
Kandice Chuh, Professor, CUNY Graduate Centre
Nadine Attewell, Associate Professor, Simon Fraser University

Moderator: Feng-Mei Heberer, Associate Professor, HKU and NYU

Date: Thursday, December 4, 2025
Time: 4:00 pm Hong Kong Time
Venue: Room 436, 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU

In recent years, there has been a groundswell of interdisciplinary interest in studying the everyday work of empire, racial capitalism, and settler colonialism in Asia from the specific grounded location of the diaspora. As showcased by books like like Experiments in Skin (Thuy Linh Tu), Bundok (Adrian De Leon), Asians on Demand (Feng-Mei Heberer) and Archives of Intimacy (Nadine Attewell), this intellectual, methodological, and geographical (re)turn to Asia has been routed through a diversity of theoretical frameworks: the transpacific, Asian indigeneity, global Asia, and so on. This, in turn, has brought Asian diaspora studies scholars into generative, if sometimes frictional engagements with colleagues in cognate area studies disciplines who bring their own distinct intellectual genealogies, theoretical frameworks, and methodological commitments to bear upon problems of shared interest.

These nascent attempts at using the contested geographical and racial formation of “Asia” as a hinge for bridging or mediating the gap between Asian and Asian diaspora studies have raised a series of productive questions that are the focus of this roundtable. What are the political and intellectual stakes of bringing Asian studies into closer engagement with Asian diaspora studies? What can the study of the emergence, circulation, and impact of heterogeneous contemporary meanings of Asia and Asianness helps us understand about current modalities of racism and racial formation? How might this scholarly “meeting of the disciplines” contribute to the urgent work of generating meaningful change under our currently intensifying conditions of crisis and emergency?

For updates on future events hosted by the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures, please visit https://www.csgc.hku.hk/

Follow us on:
– Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/csgc.hku
– Instagram: @csgc.hku