Director's Welcome
continued from home page

We look forward to welcoming friends and colleagues to the many talks, workshops, and special events that the Center hosts. This year our annual Charles Neuhauser Memorial Lecture will take place on Monday, October 19, with a presentation by Thomas Fingar, who brings an academic eye to work of national intelligence on East Asia. In spring, the annual Edwin O. Reischauer Lectures will be delivered by Timothy Brook, a historian of China whose work has helped us understand global history since the seventeenth century. New on the calendar this year will be the China Politics and Foreign Policy Workshop, organized by Joseph Fewsmith and Robert Ross. Also, look for the Emergent Visions series of independent Chinese documentary screenings and discussions. In March, we welcome a world of humanists, in the international symposium on “Humanistic International: Humanism, China, Globalism” co-organized by David Wang and Lindsay Waters. For details of these and other exciting offerings, please check the Fairbank Center events calendar.

Also in March, and across the world in Shanghai, we will be part of the formal opening of the new Harvard Shanghai Center, a joint venture led by Harvard Business School and the Harvard China Fund. Serving as a bridge between Cambridge and China, the Harvard Shanghai Center will promote faculty research, facilitate meaningful engagement for students, and support university partnerships in China. It is the largest international center established by Harvard since the 1960s, when the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies at Villa I Tatti was created in Florence.

Back home, our ever-busy schedule of seminars and special events will introduce new research on topics in literature and the arts, religion, gender studies, history, politics, and business. These activities will continue to mobilize faculty, research associates, and students throughout the coming year, not to mention the cadre of scholars from afar who will join us as An Wang Postdoctoral Fellows, China and the World Postdoctoral Fellows, and Visiting Scholars.

To all, I bid you welcome, and I wish you a productive and enlightening year.

--William C. Kirby