Category: Upcoming Events

Interactive Seminar

Speaker: Professor Matthew H. Sommer, Bowman Family Professor of History, Stanford University

Moderators:
Christine Walker, Associate Professor, Department of History, HKU
Alvin K. Wong, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU

Date: Friday, September 5, 2025
Time: 2:00 to 4:00 pm Hong Kong Time
Venue: Faculty Lounge (Room 430) 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower
Language: English. The legal texts discussed during the seminar are available in Chinese only.
In-person event for HKU students.
Registration is required: https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_hdetail.aspx?ueid=102322

During this interactive seminar, Professor Sommer will introduce three texts that illustrate different aspects of the Qing judicial system. The texts will be shared prior to the event to encourage questions and discussion.

Matthew H. Sommer (BA Swarthmore, MA U. of Washington, PHD UCLA) is the Bowman Family Professor of History at Stanford University. A social and legal historian of Qing dynasty China (1644–1912), his research uses original legal case records from local and central archives to explore gender, sexuality, and family. He is the author of Sex, Law, and Society in Late Imperial China (Stanford 2000) and Polyandry and Wife-Selling in Qing Dynasty China (California 2015), which was the inaugural winner of the American Society for Legal History’s Peter Gonville Stein Book Award. His latest book, The Fox Spirit, the Stone Maiden, and Other Transgender Histories from Late Imperial China (Columbia 2024) won the John Boswell Prize from the LGBTQ+ History Association.

This seminar is co-organised by the Philip K.H. Wong Centre for Chinese Law in the Faculty of Law, and the Department of History and Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures (CSGC) in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Hong Kong.

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Speaker: Professor Matthew H. Sommer, Bowman Family Professor of History, Stanford University

Discussant: Professor Bin Bin Yang, Associate Professor, School of Chinese, HKU

Chair: Professor Weilin Xiao, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Law, HKU

Date & Time: September 4, 2025 (Thursday) 16:00-18:00
Venue: Academic Conference Room, 11/F Cheng Yu Tung Tower, The University of Hong Kong
Language: English
(In-person event)
Registration Link: http://bit.ly/3GGgBat

Matthew Sommer’s new book The Fox Spirit, the Stone Maiden, and Other Transgender Histories from Late Imperial China(Columbia UP 2024)considers a range of transgender experiences in Ming-Qing China, illuminating how certain forms of gender transgression were sanctioned in particular contexts and penalized in others.  This talk focuses on the crime of “a male masquerading in female attire” (男扮女裝), which was prosecuted by applying the statute against “using deviant ways and heterodox principles to incite and deceive the common people” (左道異端煽惑人民).  Anatomical males who presented as women sometimes took a conventionally female occupation such as midwife, faith healer, or even medium to a fox spirit — yet, suspected of sexual predation, they risked death if they came to official attention, even when they had lived peacefully in their communities for years.  

Matthew H. Sommer (BA Swarthmore, MA U. of Washington, PHD UCLA) is the Bowman Family Professor of History at Stanford University. A social and legal historian of Qing dynasty China (1644-1912), his research uses original legal case records from local and central archives to explore gender, sexuality, and family. He is the author of Sex, Law, and Society in Late Imperial China (Stanford 2000) and Polyandry and Wife-Selling in Qing Dynasty China (California 2015), which was the inaugural winner of the American Society for Legal History’s Peter Gonville Stein Book Award. His latest book, The Fox Spirit, the Stone Maiden, and Other Transgender Histories from Late Imperial China (Columbia 2024) won the Boswell Prize from the LGBTQ+ History Association.

This seminar is co-organised by the Philip K.H. Wong Centre for Chinese Law in the Faculty of Law, and the Department of History and Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures (CSGC) 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://csgchku.wordpress.com/

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Professor Dan Vukovich (胡德)
The New Global Conjuncture After the Rise of China and the Global South: Problems of Method & Interpretation

Professor Li Haimo (李海默)
The Global South from a Burkean Perspective

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Speaker: Ani Maitra, Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies, Colgate University

Moderator: Alvin K. Wong, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU

Date: Tuesday, September 10, 2024
Time: 4:00 pm Hong Kong Time
Venue: Room 1069, 10/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU

This talk examines Priya Sen’s film Yeh Freedom Life (2018) as an experimental ethnography of sexual subalternity in contemporary India. The talk focuses on the film’s grounding of female same-sex desire in postcolonial working-class Delhi, specifically its representation of that desire at a critical distance from the discourse of queer rights and identity politics. Completed the same year that the Indian Supreme Court decriminalized homosexuality emphasizing the individual’s “right to privacy,” Sen’s film captures the complex socioeconomic dynamics shaping the lives of its protagonists and reveals the limits of normative distinctions between the public and the private, straight and queer. The talk argues that it is the film’s “non-liberal” representation of the sexual subaltern–a figure that at once inhabits and subverts North Indian Hindu normativity on the fringes of liberal Anglophone activism–that makes it a timely decolonial feminist and queer intervention.

Ani Maitra is an associate professor of film and media studies at Colgate University in Hamilton, NY. His research and teaching fall at the intersections of postcolonial and diaspora studies, gender and sexuality studies, and global media studies. Maitra is the author of Identity, Mediation, and the Cunning of Capital (Northwestern UP, 2020).

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紀曉嵐在烏魯木齊

講者 Speaker: 羅新 教授 Professor Luo Xin (Peking U)

主持人 Moderator: 徐國琦 教授 Professor Xu Guoqi (HKU)

日期時間 Date & Time: May 6, 2014 (Mon) 16:30-18:00pm
語言 Language: 普通話 Putonghua
地點 Venue: Room 328, 3/F, The Jockey Club Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU
Registration: https://bit.ly/CSGC6May2024

摘要 Abstract:
紀曉嵐一生仕途最大的挫折在乾隆三十三年 (1768)，因向捲入兩淮鹽政虧空案的姻親盧見曾通風報信，被貶戍烏魯木齊，乾隆三十六年夏才回北京，滯留烏魯木齊兩年多，可能是近千年間中原頂級文人最早有長期西域生活經驗的。這出乎意料的經驗對他的學問有不小的影響，他晚年所著《閱微草堂筆記》有多條涉及西域，我們可藉以了解他在烏魯木齊的經歷和感想聞見。

The Qing writer, official, and intellectual Ji Yun (Ji Xiaolan, 1724-1805) was demoted and exiled to Urumqi in 1768 and lived there for over two years. Though a major setback in Ji’s illustrious political career, the experience shaped his scholarship. This talk will focus on many accounts of the Western Regions included in Ji’s influential collection of notes and sketches titled Perceptions from a Thatched Hut, which he completed in his later years.

講者簡介 About the Speaker:
羅新，北京大學中國古代史研究中心暨歷史學系教授，主要研究領域為中國中古史與北方民族史，學術代表作《內亞淵源》、《黑氈上的北魏皇帝》與《王化與山險 》，近年出版旅行文學《從大都到上都》《月亮照在阿姆河上》和學術隨筆《有所不為的反叛者》，以及歷史非虛構作品《漫長的餘生》。

Luo Xin is Professor of History at Peking University. He has published extensively on Chinese medieval history and the history of northern ethnicities. Major scholarly monographs include The Origins of Inner Asia, The Northern Wei Emperor on the Black Felt, and Within or Beyond: An Anthology on Medieval Marches. Luo’s recent books have worked to bridge the boundaries between scholarship and travelogue, and between history and non-fiction.

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Thinking China and Circulation:
Beyond Borders / In Translation / Across Adaptation

Abstract submission: September 1, 2022
Paper submission: October 3, 2022

Dates of Workshop: October 20-22, 2022 (Thu-Sat)
Venue: Zoom

Circulations are at the core of globalization and speak to all fields, periods, and regions. They can be political, economic, cultural, geographical, social, communal, familial, or personal. They may involve the relocation of objects and images; translation, adaptation, and appropriation of texts; or trajectories of individuals. They may be influenced by diverse forms of media. They may be imposed and experienced by individuals, groups, or institutions. They may take place on an equal footing or reinforce power relationships. They may bring about understanding, transformations, creativities, or else misunderstanding, prejudice, and defiance. Circulations also entail a historical process of images, texts, and ideas changing over time.

This historical moment – global pandemic, changing geopolitics, the threat of economic sanctions, and renewed racism against the Chinese diaspora – is a good time to reflect on real-life and virtual circulations in the context of China.

The Department of Comparative Literature and the Centre for the Study of Globalisation and Cultures at the University of Hong Kong invite graduate students working on China and the Sinophone world of the twentieth century to submit paper abstracts on the theme of “CIRCULATION”. We encourage people to interpret the theme in the broadest possible terms. We particularly welcome proposals that discuss circulations in relation to China in/and the world (in any language or across multiple languages). We hope to bring together early-career scholars working across disciplines, including literature, history, philosophy, film and media studies, etc.

Please submit your abstract (up to 250 words) with a working title, and your CV to conf.complit.hku@gmail.com by September 1, 2022. Selected participants will be notified of their acceptance by September 5 and should submit the full paper by October 3. There are no fees to attend the workshop.

The graduate workshop will be held on Zoom October 20-22 HKT. Papers will be circulated in advance among all the participants. Attendees are expected to read the papers of their panel before the workshop and give feedback during the panels. Participants in Hong Kong are welcome for a dinner after the workshop.

Three faculty members will also give advice on each paper during the three-day workshop:

David Der-wei Wang is Edward C. Henderson Professor in Chinese Literature and Comparative Literature at Harvard University. Wang’s specialties are Modern and Contemporary Chinese and Sinophone Literature, Late Qing fiction and drama, and Comparative Literary Theory.

Alvin K. Wong is Assistant Professor in Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. His research spans across the fields of Hong Kong literature and cinema, Chinese literary and cultural studies, Sinophone studies, queer theory, transnational feminism, and the environmental humanities.

Peng Hsiao-yen is research fellow at the Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy, Academia Sinica. Her publications include Dandyism and Transcultural Modernity: The Dandy, the Flâneur, and the Translator in 1930s Shanghai, Tokyo, and Paris (Routledge, 2010).

If you have any queries, please kindly email Junlin Ma (jlma@connect.hku.hk), Ying Xing (yingxing@connect.hku.hk), or J. Daniel Elam (jdelam@hku.hk).

This conference is organized by Junlin Ma, Ying Xing, and J. Daniel Elam under the auspices of the Department of Comparative Literature and the Centre for the Study of Globalization and Cultures at HKU.

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