Speaker: Irving Goh, Professor of Comparative Literature, Emory University
Moderator:Alvin K. Wong, Associate Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Date: Wednesday, April 29, 2026 Time: 4:30 pm Hong Kong Time Venue: Room 436, 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU
In this talk, Irving Goh will present on his latest book, Living On After Failure (Duke UP, 2025). He will share his thoughts on failure as failure, that is, failure without recuperation, failure as all negativity. Such a thinking of failure as a thorough impasse not only resists narratives of progress and ideologies of success and its accompanying notions of grit and resilience. It also registers, at the ontological level, the affective structure of existence. Irving will also discuss the literary texts that inform his work on failure.
Irving Goh is Professor of Comparative Literature at Emory University. He is the author of The Reject: Community, Politics, and Religion after the Subject (Fordham UP, 2014), which won the MLA 23rd Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for French and Francophone Studies, L’existence prépositionnelle (Galilée, 2019), The Deconstruction of Sex (with Jean-Luc Nancy, Duke UP, 2021), and most recently, Living On After Failure (Duke UP, 2025). His next book, Touching Literature, or the Experience of the Limit (Cornell UP), is appearing this summer 2026. For his current book projects, he is interested in the end(s) of work, world literature and the question of citizenship, and theorizing the Asian figure.
For updates on future events hosted by the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures, please visit https://www.csgc.hku.hk/
At the age of twenty-four, Eileen Chang wrote what seemed a defining prophecy: “In the wasteland of the future, amid crumbling walls and debris, only a woman like a rustic ‘bengbeng’ opera starlet can survive with poise. She belongs to any age, any society; she is at home wherever she goes.” For the next fifty years, shifting her gesture to fit the changing times, she continued to “survive with poise”. She was a pioneer who possessed an early instinct for “star branding,” her life crossing paths with silver-screen divas like Li Lihua and Lin Dai. In an age of dispersal, some survived with poise; others vanished.
This lecture centers on Chang’s own practice of the “art of the diva”, tracing her grand entrance and her eventual final curtain. Using her as a guiding thread, we seek to unearth the faces of “divas” buried in history, measuring the distance between Eileen Chang and her era: a distance that is “so near, yet so far”—defined by a gaze of perpetual, longing scrutiny.
講者簡介 About the Speaker: 李青 筆名「一把青」，畢業於華東師範大學中文系及香港中文大學性別研究專業。任職財經媒體，業餘專欄評論，文章見諸《新京報書評周刊》、《南方人物周刊》、《文匯報》、《印刻文學生活誌》、香港 01、《香港經濟日報》 等。喜風花雪月與故人故事。
LI Qing Writing under the pen name “Yi Ba Qing”. Graduated from the Department of Chinese Language and Literature at East China Normal University, and later completed a postgraduate programme in Gender Studies at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. She works in financial media and writes film criticism and columns as a personal pursuit, with contributions to Beijing News Book Review Weekly, Southern People Weekly, Wen Wei Po, INK Literary Monthly, HK01, Hong Kong Economic Times and other publications. She has a fondness for vintage romance and good old days.
This event is held as part of the New Directions in Eileen Chang Studies Lecture Series | 張愛玲研究新方向講座系列 Co-hosted by School of Chinese and Department of Comparative Literature, HKU Co-sponsored by Louis Cha Fund for Chinese studies & East/West studies in the Faculty & Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures (CSGC)
For updates on future events hosted by the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures, please visit https://www.csgc.hku.hk/
Speaker: Kirk Sides, Assistant Professor in English, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Moderator: Daniel Elam, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Date: Wednesday, April 22, 2026 Time: 10:00 am Hong Kong Time Venue: On Zoom
Reading African literatures as environmental literatures, Environmental Entanglements offers an interventional step back beyond the mid-twentieth-century moment of political independence. Thinking about ‘entanglement’ as a way to represent relations ecologically, the book explores a form that it argues is an ecological imaginary animating many African literary and cultural repertoires. This ecological form gives story to experiences of transversal of (colonial and apartheid) boundaries, the movement of peoples, and the cultural and social relations enacted upon land. Focusing on literary and filmic texts, from the writers such as Thomas Mofolo and Sol Plaatje in the early twentieth century, to contemporary science and speculative fiction producers like Nnedi Okorafor and Wanuri Kahiu, Environmental Entanglements argues that cultural archives from the African continent display a history of ecological awareness that predates the moment of mid-twentieth-century decolonization.
Kirk Sides is an Assistant Professor in English and an Affiliate Faculty Member of African Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Kirk has worked at academic institutions in the US, the UK, and South Africa. His book, Environmental Entanglements: African Literature’s Ecological Imaginary (2025) from Oxford University Press, charts a long history of ecological thinking in African literatures from the start of twentieth century up to the present. He has recently begun a new research project, Narrative on the Edge, which looks at the relationship between environmental change and storytelling practices.
For updates on future events hosted by the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures, please visit https://www.csgc.hku.hk/
Speaker: Arnika Fuhrmann, Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Discussant:Elmo Gonzaga, Associate Professor, Department of Cultural and Religious Studies, CUHK
Moderator:Daniel Elam, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Date: Tuesday, April 14, 2026 Time: 5:00 pm Hong Kong Time Venue: Faculty Lounge (Room 430), 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU
In the Mood for Texture considers the revival of Chinese pasts and the aesthetics of colonial modernity in contemporary Southeast Asian cultural production, both virtual and material. Examining contemporary Bangkok’s architecture, design, fashion, and nightlife, the book shows how Chinese pasts are redeployed in contemporary film, literature, and hospitality venues to shape present visions of Asia. Attending to the textures of built environments and agentive female subjects, it demonstrates how Southeast Asian imaginations can challenge both domestic and regional narratives of identity and collectivity.
Arnika Fuhrmann is an interdisciplinary scholar of Southeast Asia, working at the intersections of the region’s aesthetic, religious, and political modernities. She is the author of Ghostly Desires:Queer Sexuality and Vernacular Buddhism in Contemporary Thai Cinema (Duke University Press, 2016), Teardrops of Time:Buddhist Aesthetics in the Poetry of Angkarn Kallayanapong (SUNY Press, 2020), and In the Mood for Texture: The Revival of Bangkok as a Chinese City (Duke University Press, 2026).
For updates on future events hosted by the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures, please visit https://www.csgc.hku.hk/
(Speculative Archival Reconstruction of a Latent Film)
Speaker: Pavle Levi, Osgood Hooker Professor of Fine Arts and Chair, Department of Art & Art History, Stanford University
Moderator: Jean Ma, Mr. and Mrs. Hung Hing-Ying Professor in the Arts, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Date: Thursday, April 9, 2026 Time: 4:00 pm Hong Kong Time Venue: Room 436, 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU
This presentation, based on recent archival discoveries, will introduce the never-before-seen material pertaining to Dušan Makavejev’s 1990s idea for a film about the war of Yugoslav disintegration. Bringing together visual and written threads pertaining to documentary war-photography, Agatha Christie’s murder mysteries, human-animal relations, techniques of montage, and computer-generated imagery, the talk will aim to reconstruct a peculiar cinematic concept, which encapsulates the late phase of Makavejev’s work and deepens our understanding of socialist Yugoslavia’s break up in unorthodox ways.
Pavle Levi is Osgood Hooker Professor of Fine Arts and chair of the Department of Art & Art History at Stanford University. He is the author of a number of books about film, including: Cinema by Other Means (2012), Jolted Images (2018), Miniatures: On the Politics of Film Form (2021), and Hypnos in Cineland (2022).
For updates on future events hosted by the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures, please visit https://www.csgc.hku.hk/
Speaker:Winter Jade Werner, Associate Professor of English, Wheaton College
Moderator:Daniel Elam, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Date: Wednesday, April 8, 2026 Time: 4:00 pm Hong Kong Time Venue: Faculty Lounge (Room 430), 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU
How do we see more clearly the non-Western intellectual labor embedded in popular Victorian fiction? This talk proposes “citation chaining” as an archival methodology for that project, tracing how the penanggalan—a Malay vampiric figure—traveled from Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir’s 1819 description in a missionary periodical through colonial print networks to Bram Stoker’s research notes for Dracula, unattributed.
Winter Jade Werner is Associate Professor of English at Wheaton College and Visiting Scholar at Universiti Malaya. She is the author of Missionary Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (Ohio State UP, 2020), and her book in progress traces the entanglements of British missionary print culture and Victorian ideas of “world literature.” Her work is forthcoming or appears in ELH, Victorian Studies, Comparative Literature, and MLQ.
For updates on future events hosted by the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures, please visit https://www.csgc.hku.hk/
Speaker:Christina Bezari, Senior Post-doctoral Fellow, University of Brussels
Moderator:Daniel Elam, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Date: Wednesday, April 8, 2026 Time: 12 noon Hong Kong Time Venue: Faculty Lounge (Room 430), 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU
Recent studies have theorized the Mediterranean as a privileged site for the study of literary and geopolitical interactions in the twentieth century. Despite these advances, Southern Europe and the Maghreb have often been studied in isolation and have occupied a “peripheral” position with regard to the more “dominant” centers of political power. The main objective of this lecture is to shed light on Southern European and Maghrebi women’s participation in transnational anti-colonial and anti-fascist movements by analyzing their contributions as writers, journalists and editors of periodicals. Long regarded as “marginal actors” in the public sphere, women’s participation in the press and in transnational networks of solidarity has been obscured due to a long history of censorship, colonial domination and dictatorial rule on both sides of the Mediterranean. By considering women as cultural mediators and agents of resistance within a comparative, trans-Mediterranean framework, this lecture aims to challenge traditional Eurocentric narratives and examine women’s texts as sites of political engagement.
Christina Bezari is a senior post-doctoral fellow at the University of Brussels (ULB). Her research is located at the intersection of comparative literature, Mediterranean studies and women’s history. She is the author of Transnational Modernity in Southern Europe: Women’s Periodicals and Salon Culture (Routledge, 2023) and the co-editor of the special issue “Latinity and Modernity: Cultural Identities and Transnational Exchange in a Globalizing World” (2025). Her research focuses on transnational networks of writers, editors, translators and cultural mediators in Southern Europe and the Maghreb. She has previously co-directed an international project on the “imaginaries of translation” at Sorbonne University (Paris-IV).
For updates on future events hosted by the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures, please visit https://www.csgc.hku.hk/
Eileen Chang’s fiction is often characterized by a tone of bleakness, and she herself frequently gives the impression of being cold, pessimistic, and lonely. Yet she deeply loved comedy. From childhood, she was fascinated by Hollywood feature and animation films, even fantasizing about learning animation production. She regarded the cinematic medium as a luminous solace amidst chaotic era. She wrote about 20 screenplays for MP&GI, mostly romantic comedies, with elements of Hollywood screwball comedy. These works injected lively energy into Hong Kong’s Mandarin films of the 1950s and 1960s, gaining popularity throughout the Chinese-speaking world. Eileen Chang’s comedy scripts deliberately avoided the bleakness found in her fiction, using instead witty dialogues and happy endings that fully revealed the playful, optimistic, and endearing side of her inner self. In a letter to her close friends Stephen and Mae Soong, she wrote: “I’m so glad you laughed at it,” showing pure joy. This unexpected aspect of her work not only comes from her personal passion for cinema, but also challenges the traditional Chinese cultural emphasis on tragedy. The comedies written by Eileen Chang allow us to rediscover her multifaceted charm.
講者簡介 About the Speaker: 河本美紀 日本大阪大學語言文化學博士，現任教於九州大學、福岡大學。主要研究領域為華語文學與華語電影。著有《張愛玲的電影史》（印刻出版社，2025）、《張愛玲的映畫史》（關西學院大學出版會，2023）。學術論文曾收錄於林幸謙主編《張愛玲：傳奇・性別・系譜》、陳子善編《重讀張愛玲》等專書。目前從事香港文學研究，論文包括〈香港中的日本：近年香港文學中的集體記憶〉（刊載於《野草 增刊號 香港文學特集》，2026）。譯有麥樹堅〈千年獸與千年詞〉（收錄於青野繁治監修《擴散的語言：當代華語文學選集》，朋友書店，2025）。
Dr. Miki KAWAMOTO obtained her Ph.D. in Language and Culture, Osaka University, Japan. Currently, she is teaching at Kyushu University and Fukuoka University. Her main research areas include Sinophone literature and film. Her published works include Film History of Eileen Chang (INK, 2025), Film History of Eileen Chang (Japanese edition) (Kwansei Gakuin University Press, 2023). Her academic contributions include papers in Lim Chin Chown (ed.), Eileen Chang: Legend, Gender, Genealogy, and Chen Zishan (ed.), Rereading Eileen Chang, among others. Currently she is engaged with research on Hong Kong literature. Publications in this area include “Japan Inside Hong Kong: Collective Memory in Contemporary Hong Kong Literature” (Yaso, Special Issue: Hong Kong Literature Feature, 2006), and a translation of Mak Shu-kin’s “The 1000 Beasts and the 1000 Words” (in Spreading Words: A Modern Sinophone Literature Anthology, supervised by Shigeharu Aono, Hoyu Shoten, 2025).
This event is held as part of the New Directions in Eileen Chang Studies Lecture Series | 張愛玲研究新方向講座系列 Co-hosted by School of Chinese and Department of Comparative Literature, HKU Co-sponsored by Louis Cha Fund for Chinese studies & East/West studies in the Faculty & Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures (CSGC)
For updates on future events hosted by the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures, please visit https://www.csgc.hku.hk/
Speaker: Tamara Chin, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, Brown University
Moderator: Daniel Elam, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Date: Thursday, March 26, 2026 Time: 4:00 pm Hong Kong Time Venue: Faculty Lounge (Room 430), 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU
The study of language contact lacked prestige in traditional Philology. In China and Europe, philologists partitioned the past into distinct national languages. This talk asks how historical interactions across languages became a recognized modern research object. It revisits the discovery in Dunhuang of a multilingual cave library of ancient texts, and examines the post-Opium War and Cold War politics through which linguistic experts made language contact meaningful.
Tamara Chin is an associate professor of comparative literature at Brown University and author of Savage Exchange: Han Imperialism, Chinese Literary Style, and the Economic Imagination (Harvard 2014; trans. 野蛮交换：汉帝国的扩张、文学风格与经济想象 forthcoming); and The Silk Road Idea: Ancient Contact in the Modern Human Sciences, 1870-1970 (forthcoming 2026).
For updates on future events hosted by the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures, please visit https://www.csgc.hku.hk/
Discussants: Georgios Halkias, Glorious Sun Professor in Buddhist Studies & Director, Centre of Buddhist Studies, HKU Catherine Hardie, Assistant Professor in Buddhist Studies, Centre of Buddhist Studies, HKU Crystal Kwok, Lecturer and Filmmaker, Department of History, HKU
Moderator:Ji Li, Associate professor, Department of History, HKU
Date: Friday, March 20, 2026 Time: 2:30-5:00 pm Hong Kong Time Venue: LE1, (Library Extension), Main Campus, The University of Hong Kong
The award-winning 2023 documentary Ani Bond: Choying Drolma follows the inspirational journey of the “rock-star” Nepali nun Ani Choying Drolma. Fleeing an abusive father, the thirteen-year-old Ani sought refuge in a Tibetan Buddhist monastery where the nuns taught her to sing. Her stunning voice captured the attention of a visiting American musician who brought her singing to global attention. Ani Choying Drolma has used her international fame to campaign for girls’ education and, in 2000, she established a modern school for novice nuns, Arya Tara, in Kathmandu. Several of the girls, who come from some of the poorest and most remote areas of Nepal, share their stories in the documentary. Despite her achievements, the trauma of Ani Choying’s past continues to haunt her and, in an effort to confront it, the film sees her fulfill her father’s dying wish and travel to his hometown in Qinghai, China.
Directors Fen Jennifer Lin and Shan Bai spent seven years bringing Ani Choying Drolma’s astounding story to the screen. The documentary won the NETPAC Award for the Best Asian/Pacific Film and the Audience Award for Documentary at the 39th Warsaw International Film Festival, as well as Best Documentary Feature and Best Music and Sound at the 13th China Academy Awards of Documentary Film. Bai Shan is an independent director and producer. Fen Jennifer Lin is a media sociologist and a documentary filmmaker. She is Professor of Media and Communication and serves as Associate Vice President (Global Strategies) and Director of ArtX Hong Kong Institute at the City University of Hong Kong. She has written extensively and bilingually on media and political communication, information governance, state-society relations, China’s technology and innovation system, and social and cultural change. She obtained her BA in Economics from Peking University, MS in Statistics, and PhD in Sociology from the University of Chicago. For more on the film, visit https://youtube.com/@f.jenniferlin5671?si=9gMhkL1v_rQN942Q
This event is held as part of the course GLAS2141: Women and Gender in Asia, with the support of the Department of History, the Committee on Gender Equity and Diversity (CGED), the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures (CSGC), and the Centre of Buddhist Studies in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Hong Kong.
For updates on future events hosted by the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures, please visit https://www.csgc.hku.hk/
