Modern History Seminars

Friday, January 30, 2009 4:00 pm
Modern History Seminar
Frontier Heterodoxies: Ma Zhu and Qing Dominion in Yunnan
Jonathan N. Lipman, Felicia Gressitt Bock Professor of Asian Studies and Professor of History, Mount Holyoke College; Visiting Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations,
Harvard University.

About the talk: Ma Zhu, a late seventeenth-century Muslim gentryman and author from Yunnan, served the last Ming pretender then studied Islam in Beijing. When he returned to Yunnan, he encountered some Qalandars–wild Sufis–from over the frontier who, in Ma's view, were disrupting the proper order of society by practicing both Confucian and Islamic heterodoxy. Professor Lipman narrated Ma's case and discussed coverging notions of roles as a Sino-Muslim gentryman.

About the speaker: Trained as an historian of modern China at Stanford (PhD,1981), Professor Lipman has taught widely on China, Korea, and Japan in the Five Colleges, at Yale, and at the University of Washington. His research deals with the interactions between the Muslim world and East Asia, especially the long-term residence and acculturation of Muslims in China. His book on that subject, Familiar Strangers: A History of Muslims in Northwest China (University of Washington Press,1998), narrates the 1,300-year story of Chinese-speaking Muslims in a frontier region. He is currently writing a textbook of modern East Asian history and a biography of Ma Zhu, Yunnanese Sino-Muslim gentryman and author of "The Compass of Islam" (Qingzhen Zhinan). He will be teaching two courses on Islam in China at Harvard this spring.

Thursday, April 23, 2009 4:00 pm
Modern History Seminar
Spider Manchu: Duanfang and the Fiscal Priorities in New Qing China, 1900-1911
Elya Zhang, Assistant Professor of History, Fordham University; An Wang Postdoctoral Fellow, Fairbank Center, Harvard University
Location: CGIS South Building, 1730 Cambridge Street, Room S153, Cambridge

About the Talk: The 1900 Boxer debacle in China caused a political earthquake that forced the government to take on a new set of fiscal priorities. Professor Zhang used a case study of flood relief in Jiangsu Province in 1906-1907 to demonstrate Governor Duanfang’s spending choices and how he arrived at the cold logic of keeping peasants at the level of bare survival while prioritizing resources for public-relations spending.

About the Speaker: Elya Zhang is Assistant Professor of History at Fordham University. She received her BA from Renmin University of China and her PhD from University of California, San Diego. She is currently an An Wang Postdoctoral Fellow at the Fairbank Center.

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