Tuesday, November 9, 2021; 2PM – 3:30PM PST
Location: Zoom and Humanities Gateway 1030
RSVP HERE
On November 9th, the Forum for the Academy and the Public will host the second “Book Slam” event of the Fall. This event features an eclectic range of topics in the China field, from surveillance in Xinjiang to transcultural sci-fi, united by a rather counterintuitive thread: despite China’s vast size and long history, these books are all delightfully short.
New Small Works on a Big Country will feature four exciting book launches, The Shortest History of China: From the Ancient Dynasties to a Modern Superpower—A Retelling of Our Times by Linda Jaivin, For the Love of Hong Kong: A Memoir from my City Under Siege by Hana Meihan Davis, Found in Translation: New People in 20th Century Chinese Science Fiction by Jing Jiang, and In the Camps: China’s High-Tech Penal Colony by Darren Byler.
The event will begin with book introductions by the featured authors Linda Jaivin, author, translator, and essayist, Hana Meihan Davis, journalist, Jing Jiang, Associate Professor of Chinese and Humanities at Reeds College, and Darren Byler, anthropologist and Assistant Professor of International Studies at Simon Fraser University. Guest commentary will be provided by Sabina Knight, Rana Mitter, Thomas Mullaney, and Xiaowei Wang.
Introductions by authors and commentators will be short, as the event will emphasize discussion and dialogue between participants as well as audience Q&A, with Jeff Wasserstrom, Chancellor’s Professor of History at UC Irvine, moderating discussion.
This event will be a hybrid, held live at UCI and streamed online via Zoom. All are welcome to attend.
This event is sponsored by the UCI Forum for the Academy and the Public and the Long U.S.-China Institute.
Darren Byler, Ph.D. Assistant Professor, School for International Studies, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver BC
Anthropologist Darren Byler is an Assistant Professor of International Studies at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia. He is the author of In the Camps: China’s High-Tech Penal Colony and Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City. His current research is focused on infrastructure development and global China in the context of Xinjiang and Malaysia.
Linda Jaivin, Australian author, translator, essayist, novelist and specialist writer on China
Linda Jaivin is the author of twelve books, including The Shortest History of China, Beijing,The Monkey and the Dragon, and the longform essay Found in Translation, as well as seven novels. She is also translates Chinese film subtitles and co-edits The China Story Yearbook published by the Centre on China in the World at the Australian National University. She lives in Sydney, Australia.
Jing Jiang, Associate Professor of Chinese and Humanities, Reed College
Jing Jiang is Associate Professor of Chinese and Humanities at Reed College (Portland Oregon). She teaches courses on Chinese language and culture, with particular focus on modern Chinese literature, film, and comparative literature. Aside from her book on twentieth century Chinese science fiction, she also authored articles that appeared in Asian Cinema, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, Cultural Critique, and positions. She won the ACLS Pauline Yu Fellowship in 2020, and is currently working on a new book project tentatively titled The World Embedded in Modern Chinese Literary Imagination.
Sabina Knight 桑稟華, Professor of Chinese and Comparative Literature, Program in World Literatures, Smith College
Sabina Knight 桑稟華 is author of The Heart of Time: Moral Agency in Twentieth-Century Chinese Fiction (2006), Chinese Literature: A Very Short Introduction (2012, translated into three languages), and essays in The National Interest, 翻译家的对话 [Translators’ Dialogues], and journals of literature, Chinese studies, and medical humanities. Since 1998 Knight has taught Chinese and comparative literature at Smith College. She is also a translator, a speaker on Chinese-English literary and cultural translation, and a fellow in the Public Intellectuals Program of the National Committee on US-China Relations.
Rana Mitter, Professor of the History and Politics of Modern China at St Cross College
Rana Mitter is Professor of the History and Politics of Modern China, and a Fellow of St Cross College at the University of Oxford. He is the author of several books, including China’s War with Japan: The Struggle for Survival, 1937-1945 (Penguin, 2013), [US title: Forgotten Ally] which won the 2014 RUSI/Duke of Westminster’s Medal for Military Literature, and was named a Book of the Year in the Financial Times and Economist. His latest book is China’s Good War: How World War II is Shaping a New Nationalism (Harvard, 2020). His writing on contemporary China has appeared recently in Foreign Affairs, the Harvard Business Review, The Spectator, The Critic, and The Guardian.
Tom Mullaney, Professor of Chinese History at Stanford University
Tom Mullaney is a professor of Chinese history of Stanford University, a Guggenheim fellow, and the Kluge Chair in Technology and Society at the Library of Congress. He is the author or lead editor of six books, including The Chinese Typewriter, Your Computer is on Fire, and the forthcoming The Chinese Computer—the first comprehensive history of Chinese-language computing.
Hana Meihan Davis, journalist and architect
Hana Meihan Davis is the author of ‘For the Love of Hong Kong: Memoir from My City Under Siege’. She is a journalist and aspiring architect whose work has been featured in The Washington Post, South China Morning Post and the Yale Daily News. Born and raised in the aftermath of Hong Kong’s 1997 handover, Hana comes from a long line of democracy activists in Hong Kong — many of whom are in exile or facing arrest. She is a class of 2020 graduate from Yale University.
Xiaowei R. Wang, artist, writer, organizer and coder
Xiaowei R. Wang is an artist, writer, organizer and coder. Their collaborative project FLOAT Beijing created air quality-sensing kites to challenge censorship and was an Index Design Awards finalist. Other projects have been featured by the New York Times, BBC, CNN, VICE and elsewhere. Their most recent project, The Future of Memory, was a recipient of the Mozilla Creative Media Award. They are the author of the book Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech In China’s Countryside and one of the lead facilitators of Logic School, an organizing community for tech workers.