As part of Japan Week, East Asian Studies invites you to “A History of Japan in Six Chapters and Twelve Objects”.

Abstract: Japan has many assets. Arguably, none are more valuable than its distinctive brand, evident in the global admiration for Japanese design and the increasing numbers of tourists at iconic Japanese sites. But what if the brand obscures more than it reveals? What if Japanese objects have other stories to tell? This talk will draw on a new book, based on the collection of the British Museum, to suggest that Japan has always been more connected, dynamic, and diverse than we might expect.

Speaker: Angus Lockyer taught Japanese, East Asian, and global history at SOAS University of London, where he collaborated with colleagues at the British Museum on a number of projects, including a 2017 special exhibition on Katsushika Hokusai. He is the author of Exhibitionist Japan: The Spectacle of Modern Development (Cambridge, 2025) and Japan: A History in Objects (Thames and Hudson, 2026). He currently teaches at the Rhode Island School of Design.

What does it mean to build an archive for Classics? How do archives contribute to discipline formation? In this interactive workshop, postdoctoral research associate in Critical Classical Studies Lisa Kraege invites participants to investigate how archival collections create and solidify historical narratives. Using archival materials drawn from research connecting the rise of British neoclassicism to the colonial Atlantic world, we will explore how different combinations of documents and sources can result in vastly different narratives. The challenges and obscurities posed by the archive present an opportunity to rethink our own work and the narratives we deploy.

Lisa Kraege is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Critical Classical Studies. She received her PhD in English from Princeton University in 2024. She studies how ancient models of aesthetic perception and experience were received and deployed in eighteenth-century and Romantic Britain, and the geopolitical and ideological stakes of such interactions. She is at work on a book project that considers the rise of aesthetics in eighteenth-century Britain through a comparison of classical and colonial landscapes. She is also a freelance editor. 

Abstract:

Early East-West exchange was anchored by China and the Western Asian powers of Persia and the Caliphates. While often termed the “Silk Road,” the maritime route is more accurately described as the Ceramic Road, as pottery served as the primary medium for both economic trade and the transfer of cultural techniques. Due to the scarcity of Tang and Song dynasty written records, maritime archaeological data from the last forty years is indispensable. This report focuses on ceramic evidence from three pivotal Southeast Asian shipwrecks: the 9th-century Belitung (Batu Hitam), the 10th-century Cirebon, and the 12th-century Nanhai No. 1. By analyzing these finds, this study explores trade dynamics from the 9th to 13th centuries and their impact on Chinese ceramic evolution. Specifically, it examines why blue-and-white porcelain emerged during the 9th-century Tang dynasty, ceased production for three centuries, and finally flourished in 14th-century Jingdezhen.

Speaker Biography:

Born in Jiangxi in 1962, Professor Cao Jianwen is a leading authority on Chinese ceramics with a Ph.D. in Art Studies. Since 1985, he has taught at the Jingdezhen Ceramic Institute, where he serves as a doctoral supervisor and Executive President of the Jingdezhen Oriental Ancient Ceramics Research Association.

With forty years of experience, Professor Cao has supervised over 100 students and lectured globally across Europe and Southeast Asia. His prolific academic output includes over seventy papers and major works such as The Artistic History of Jingdezhen Blue-and-White Porcelain. He has led numerous national research projects focusing on the Silk Road and ceramic artistic exchange.

A dedicated researcher and collector, he has donated significant artifacts to prestigious institutions, including the Shanghai Museum and Peking University’s Sackler Museum. His leadership roles extend to presiding over the Qingbai Porcelain Professional Committee and advising international collector associations in the UK and Europe.

Join us for this information session to learn more about study abroad opportunities in Armenia, China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Kazakhstan, Nepal, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam.

Armenia: Advanced Russian Language & Area Studies Program (RLASP) - Yerevan, Armenia

China: CET Beijing; IFSA Shanghai (including International Business, Social Sciences, and Intensive Chinese Language tracks)

Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong

India: USAC India—Bengaluru (Semester/Yearlong) - Culture, Society, and Global Perspectives

Japan: Keio University; Kyoto Consortium for Japanese Studies (KCJS)

Kazakstan: Middlebury Russian Program in Kazakhstan

Nepal: Rangjung Yeshe Institute (RYI); SIT Study Abroad—Nepal: Development, Gender, and Social Change in the Himalaya; SIT Study Abroad—Nepal: Tibetan and Himalayan Peoples

South Korea: CIEE: Arts + Sciences (Yonsei Univ.) in Seoul, South Korea; Ewha University

Taiwan: CET Taiwan

Thailand: WorldStrides—Semester at Mahidol University; USAC Thailand: Chiang Mai (Semester/Yearlong)—Southeast Asian Culture, Politics, and Business

Vietnam: SIT Study Abroad—Vietnam: Culture, Social Change, and Development

Join us for this information session to learn more about study abroad opportunities in Armenia, China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Kazakhstan, Nepal, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam.

Armenia: Advanced Russian Language & Area Studies Program (RLASP) - Yerevan, Armenia

China: CET Beijing; IFSA Shanghai (including International Business, Social Sciences, and Intensive Chinese Language tracks)

Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong

India: USAC India—Bengaluru (Semester/Yearlong) - Culture, Society, and Global Perspectives

Japan: Keio University; Kyoto Consortium for Japanese Studies (KCJS)

Kazakstan: Middlebury Russian Program in Kazakhstan

Nepal: Rangjung Yeshe Institute (RYI); SIT Study Abroad—Nepal: Development, Gender, and Social Change in the Himalaya; SIT Study Abroad—Nepal: Tibetan and Himalayan Peoples

South Korea: CIEE: Arts + Sciences (Yonsei Univ.) in Seoul, South Korea; Ewha University

Taiwan: CET Taiwan

Thailand: WorldStrides—Semester at Mahidol University; USAC Thailand: Chiang Mai (Semester/Yearlong)—Southeast Asian Culture, Politics, and Business

Vietnam: SIT Study Abroad—Vietnam: Culture, Social Change, and Development

differences, a journal of feminist cultural studies housed at the Pembroke Center, will host its third annual Limits of Legibility colloquium on Friday, March 6, 2026. Work presented will address questions such as: How does critical history address the impasse between conventional history, on the one hand, and aggressive authoritarian rewriting of history, on the other? Given critical history’s theoretical critique of the positivist understanding of facts, what is its response to the assertion of “alternative facts”? And what impact, if any, can it have on current battles as to what counts as history?

Guest speakers will include:

• Joan Wallach Scott (Institute for Advanced Study)
• Omnia El Shakry (Yale University)
• Korey Williams (University of Chicago)
• Gary Wilder (City University of New York)

This event is free and open to the public.

The Pre-modern China Initiative welcomes Professor Maram Epstein from University of Oregon.

This talk explores the prevalence of Daoist imagery in novels by late imperial Chinese women. I expand Susan Stryker’s concept of “transing” as “movement across a socially-imposed boundary away from an unchosen starting point” to explore the many ways that Qing-dynasty women authors enable their female protagonists to transcend the social and embodied limits of their cloistered existences. Primarily drawing from the corpus of Qing tanci novels, a prosimetric form favored by women as authors and audiences, I explore how various women writers deployed the interrelated themes of crossdressing (presenting as a woman in male dress), transing (a woman presenting as male), and metaphysical transcendence (through reincarnation, lifelike painted images, and transformation into a Daoist immortal or other transcendent being). These processes of transing enable the female protagonists to actualize “true” identities that exceed the limits of gendered guixiu propriety, particularly the limits placed on women’s ambitions for greatness. As always in my work, I am interested in identifying the ways that women authors rework the dominant narrative conventions of China’s literary culture.

Performance

East Asian Studies and the Japanese Language Program welcome Satoko Takemoto, shihan (master) of the Japanese 13-string koto. The performance will take place at the International House of RI, 8 Stimson Ave, Providence, RI 02906, 4-5:30pm. The performance will include a discussion on the role of this important instrument in Japan’s soundscape.

Free and open to the public.

Introduction to the Koto

Preceding the performance will be a small workshop for Brown students with Satoko Takemoto facilitated by ethnomusicologist, Garrett Groesbeck.

Workshop times

Tuesday, February 10, 2026, 11:30am-12:30pm & 1:30pm-3:00pm

Gerard House, room 103

Open to students in all concentrations

Brown University’s 109th Annual Service of Lessons and Carols will take place on Sunday, December 7th at 4 pm in Sayles Hall on the Main Green. Doors open at 3:30 pm.

Performances will include music from:

• Mark Steinbach, University Organist
• Brown Brass Ensemble
• The University Chorus
• Harmonizing Grace Gospel Choir

This year, we will be holding a food drive to benefit the Rhode Island Community Food Bank. We would be grateful for your donation of nonperishable food, which we will be accepting at the entrance. A list of most-need foods can be found here: https://rifoodbank.org/donate-food/

Lessons and Carols is sponsored by the Office of the Chaplains & Religious Life and the Department of Music.

All are welcome. Admission is free. This event is wheelchair accessible.

Can’t attend in person? Livestream here!

The Comparative Literature Department cordially invites you to join us for Deracinated Grammar: Non-Sequitur and Negativity, a lecture presented by Joseph Albernaz from Columbia University. This event will take place Friday, December 5th, at 5 PM in Rhode Island Hall 108.

This talk proposes to develop some critical postulates regarding poetics and negativity, with a particular interest in the figure of zero and the practice of non-sequitur, the latter of which is read not simply as a particular blockage of linguistic meaning, but as a more general posture. Taking the poetry of Will Alexander, with its catalogue of “bizarre infractions” and insistence on the “zero field,” as a prime object, the lecture will also discuss works of Friedrich Hölderlin, María Zambrano, and the Francophone Lebanese poet and essayist Salah Stétié to explore forms of disrupting succession and inhabiting language’s capacities for both negativity and generativity. It will attempt to say something about poetry in relation to the theme of “disembodied grammars,” particularly those disturbing disembodied languages imposed upon our screens and our lives of late.

As always, this event is free and open to the public and a reception will follow. You can find more information on the Comparative Literature website and Comparative Literature Facebook page. We hope to see you there!

The Comparative Literature Department cordially invites you to join us for a screening event of the Chinese documentary Miners, Groom, Pneumoconiosis (2019), presented by award-winning independent filmmaker Nengjie Jiang. This event will take place Nov 10, from 6-8 at Rhode Island Hall 108.

Miners, Groom, Pneumoconiosis (2019) takes viewers deep into the artisanal mining sites of contemporary southwestern China, offering a striking lens through which to understand extractivism, bodily vulnerability, atmospheric toxicity, and precarious labor in today’s China.

The local economy in the southwest of Hunan province is not active. Therefore, the people either go out to work or work as miners in the mountains. As a result of mining accidents, the government has tried to regulate, but many people still mine illegally in order to make a living. Miners often go down mines without protection, and after many years, many of them develop pneumoconiosis.

Later, with prices plummeting and the government overhauling them, the need for survival is no longer met by illegal mining. Many people have to find other jobs, either farming at home or working south. The miners, suffering from pneumoconiosis, are on their way to misery.

Director’s Bio:

Nengjie Jiang is an independent filmmaker, documentary worker, and director. Born in 1985, he graduated from university in 2008. Originally from Hunan, he has been residing in Guangzhou since 2017. Founder of “Cotton Sand” Video Studio and “Cotton Sand” Village Library. Winner of the Phoenix Television Top Ten Public Welfare Figures Award. German Blue Study House Foundation 2024 Visiting Scholar. His works focus on topics such as left-behind children, war veterans, pneumoconiosis, intellectual disabilities, and sexual minorities. Representative works include “The Children of Village School,” “Grade Nine,” “Shorty,” “Miners, the Horsekeeper, and Pneumoconiosis,” “Anti-Japanese War Veteran,” “We Will Have Everything,” “General’s Attendant Guard,” “Rainbow Cruise,” and “Fen.” His works have been shortlisted at the Shanghai International Film Festival, the Warsaw International Film Festival, the Beijing International Film Festival, and the Phoenix Documentary Awards, among other domestic and international film festivals. Both the individual and their film works have received exclusive interviews and coverage from renowned media outlets such as The Economist (UK) and Le Monde (France).

As always, this event is free and open to the public. A conversation between Jiang and Comp Lit graduate student Tianren Luo will follow. You can find more information on the Comparative Literature website and Comparative Literature Facebook page. We hope to see you there!

Pembroke Center Publics Lecture

Shauna M. Stark ’76, P’10 Out of the Archive event

Students: learn more about grant funding for your research!

This is an info session for undergrad and grad students to learn more about this year’s Pembroke Center student research grants and how to apply. Pizza and soft drinks provided.

For more information, contact Helis Sikk (helis_sikk@brown.edu) or Wendy Lee (wendy_lee@brown.edu). Applications for the 2025-26 academic year will be due on Monday, October 13, 2025. Applications open to current Brown students conducting research related to women, gender, and/or sexuality.

Canton Enamel (广珐琅), one of the most iconic handicrafts of Lingnan since the
18th century, emerged and thrived against the backdrop of intensifying economic
and cultural exchanges between East and West during the Kangxi reign of the
Qing Dynasty. Its creation and widespread popularity epitomize the profound
integration of Chinese and Western artistic traditions and craftsmanship. Yet,
despite its status as a Lingnan masterpiece born of shared Eastern and Western
ingenuity, the early developmental stages of this craft remain enigmatic.

This presentation builds on revelations about Canton Enamel’s formative period
to focus on three key themes: the fusion of European enameling techniques with
indigenous Chinese artistry, the craft’s role in shaping early Canton Famille
Rose (广彩) porcelain, and its adaptation of the "Nuremberg model"—a
production framework inspired by 18th-century German enameling practices.
Through these lenses, we explore how cross-cultural dialogue dynamically
sculpted the identity of this groundbreaking art form.

Join us for music, dance, and laughter as we learn Israeli Folk Dancing with Pazit Lahav.

Religious Studies is pleased to announce the final lecture in the Spring 2025 Lecture Series, Religious Environments in East Asia: “Ports, Ships & Pagodas” with Hsueh-man Shen, Ehrenkranz Associate Professor in World Art, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University on Thursday, April 17th at 5pm in RI Hall 108.

Please join us for a lecture by Dr. Nozomi Tomita, expert in linguistics and Japanese Sign Language, Harvard University.

This talk on linguistics in Japan is hosted by the Japanese Language Program as part of Japan Week.

Join this hand-on workshop with expert in linguistics and JSL, Dr. Nozomi Tomita, Harvard University.

Learn how to introduce oneself as well as adjectives used to describe a person’s character.

This event is hosted by the Japanese Language Program as part of Japan Week.

Bill Porter was born in Los Angeles in 1943. While attending graduate school at Columbia University, he became interested in Buddhism and moved to Taiwan, where he began translating Chinese poetry and spiritual texts under the name Red Pine. Since returning to America in 1993, he has worked as an independent scholar. Among the awards his books have received are the Thornton Wilder Prize for Translation and the Special Book Award of China.

Organized by the Data Science Institute and the Data Science DUG, this panel will feature faculty from across various disciplines at Brown who will talk about their career trajectories and how data and data science have become important to their work.

This event is open to all and will be of interest to students who are curious about computational research and how data science, machine learning, and AI play a role across fields. 

Please register in advance for this event.

Featuring:

Baylor Fox-Kemper (Professor of Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences). Baylor studies the physics of the ocean and how the ocean fits into the Earth’s climate system, using climate models, satellites, and autonomous observations. His research group studies the physics of the ocean and how the ocean fits into the Earth’s climate system, using models that range from the global scale to focused process models that apply universally. They seek mathematically interesting problems with practical uses. Baylor is presently co-chair of a World Climate Research Program Core Project on Earth System Modelling and Observations.

Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo (David S. Josephson Assistant Professor of Music). SAMMUS aka Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo is a first-gen black feminist rapper, producer, and scholar. Since Fall 2021 she has been a member of the steering committee for Brown’s science, technology, and society program. She is also serving as the Director of Audio at Glow Up Games, the first women-of-color led game studio, and she is a member of theKEEPERS, a Hip Hop collective that is currently developing the most comprehensive digital archive to map the international contributions of womxn and girls across Hip Hop’s 50-year history. Her doctoral research focused on the sociotechnical dynamics that shape the development and use of “community-studios”—recording studios that provide high-quality recording tools, professional sound engineering services, and audio training to communities that often lack financial or social access to these resources.

Brenda Rubenstein (Associate Professor of Chemistry & Physics). Brenda is the incoming Director of the Data Science Institute. Brenda’s research group is focused on developing electronic structure methods that are at once highly accurate and scale well with system size to help bridge this divide and enable theory-driven materials design. The Rubenstein group also actively conducts research in the areas of molecular/quantum computing and computational biophysics.  While the focus of Brenda’s work is on developing new electronic structure methods, she is also deeply engaged in rethinking computing architectures and computational biophysics.

Matt LeBlanc (Assistant Professor of Physics). Matt has lead physics analyses at the LHC on a broad range of topics, including both precision measurements and searches for new physics. His work particularly focuses on the use of hadronic objects and final states to extract new information about the Standard Model and to search for signs of new particles. Beyond searches and measurements, Matt has also held coordination-level positions within ATLAS related to the reconstruction and calibration of hadronic objects.

Diana Freed (Assistant Professor of Data Science and Computer Science). Diana’s research interests are in human-computer interaction (HCI), computer security, privacy, inclusive design, technology policy, and digital health. She works on designing, building, and evaluating sociotechnical systems in the context of youth interpersonal relationships, intimate partner violence, and caregiving systems. She also develops resources to improve digital literacy to enable individuals to make informed choices regarding technology use and to improve understanding of digital risks and harms. She uses qualitative and computational social science methods to develop new tools, technologies, and theories to detect and mitigate digital harms and inequities, facilitate safety, and inform policy.

Elizabeth Chen (Interim Director of the Center for Biomedical Informatics, Associate Professor of Medical Science & Health Services, Policy and Practice). Elizabeth’s research involves involves leveraging electronic health data along with health information and communications technology to support biomedical discovery and healthcare delivery. Specific research interests include clinical documentation, clinical decision support, health information needs, standards and interoperability, natural language processing (NLP), and data mining and machine learning.

A reception with the panelists and Data Science DUG will follow this event. 

THIS IS EVENT IS SOLD OUT

Talk title: “The Evolution of Asian Fusion Cuisine: Where Tradition Meets Innovation”

Kazu Kondo, chef/owner of Wara Wara in Providence, will give a talk on the evolution of Asian cuisine. A hands-on food making workshop to follow.

Hosted by the Japanese Language Program. Registration requested but not required.

Professor Wen-shing Chou, Hunter College & CUNY Graduate Center presents “Reincarnation Time in the Qing” as part of the Spring 2025 Lecture Series, Religious Environments in East Asia, sponsored by the Department of Religious Studies.

This lecture examines the Qing court’s promotion of key Tibetan Buddhist concepts of emanation and reincarnation during the Qianlong reign. In texts and images created by imperial workshops, the Manchu emperor and his Tibetan Buddhist allies were portrayed as embodiments of Buddhist deities and reincarnations of royal and scholastic luminaries from ancient India, imperial Tibet, the Mongol empire, and beyond. By narrating a transhistorical and trans-geographical spiritual genealogy outside Chinese dynastic succession, these objects invite a rethinking of how time and history were envisioned in the Qing Dynasty.

Beginning over 200 years ago, traditional Lakotan pictorial calendars, called “winter counts,” recorded events that members of each community experienced and considered important. These included interactions within the community here on earth as well as celestial events such as eclipses, comets, and the famous Leonid meteor shower in November 1833 that were visible in the Northern Plains skies. The touchstone of this presentation is a Lakotan winter count that records events from 1798 to 1919. Its event “glyphs” provide engaging origin points to explore Lakotan history and traditional narratives related to cosmology and star constellations visible in tonight’s sky.

Speaker Bio: Craig Howe, founder and Director of the Center for American Indian Research and Native Studies (CAIRNS), earned a Ph.D. in architecture and anthropology from the University of Michigan. He served as Deputy Assistant Director for Cultural Resources at the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, and Director of the D’Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian History at the Newberry Library in Chicago. Howe has authored articles and book chapters on numerous topics, including tribal histories, Native studies, museum exhibitions, and community collaborations. He has developed innovative tribal histories projects and creative museum exhibitions, lectures on American Indian topics across the U.S., and provides professional development and cultural awareness training to schools and organizations. Howe was raised and lives on his family’s cattle ranch in the Lacreek District of the Pine Ridge Reservation where he is designing and building Wingsprings, an architecturally unique retreat and conference center that is featured in New Architecture on Indigenous Lands. He is a citizen of the Oglala Sioux Tribe.

Talk title: “An Equine Metric for Climate Change? Using Horse Records to Understand the Medieval Climate Anomaly-Little Ice Age Transition in Inner Asian Borderlands”

Can records of horses provide a more detailed picture of the impact of climate change in the Inner Asian steppe? Climate history has increasingly gained traction as a way to understand moments of political rise and decline in Inner Asian history. Increases or decreases in temperature and precipitation, either aggregate or anomalous, have been listed as causes of the fall of the Uyghur Empire, the rise of the Mongol Empire or the declining fortunes of both the Yuan and Ming states in China. The horse was central to Inner Asian political and economic power. Horses were key to transportation, political power projection, pastoral practice, and the making of war. Yet, in climate histories, the horse has troublingly remained a less scrutinized factor: many scholars have assumed that climate variations that are good for grasslands create an animal abundance underpinning military and political success, whereas variation that handicap vegetation produces the opposite. How did warmer or cooler, drier or wetter climes impact horses in Inner Asia attempts by states to manage that change? The political transition from the Mongol Yuan to the Ming Empires stood at the crossroads of a climate transition between the Medieval Climate Anomaly and the Little Ice Age from the 13th to 15th centuries. By combining paleoclimatic data for this transition in the Inner Asian steppe borderlands between China and Mongolia with dynastic and official records regarding the horse, I argue this climate transition stressed horse populations, informed southward migration, as well as impelled changes in horse policy that saw animal aid sent north into the steppe, relocated government pastures to more southerly steppe environments, and forced stricter legal regulation of equine bodies. I aim to demonstrate that these changes and policy adaptations exhibited remarkable continuity between the Yuan and Ming, challenging the idea of dynastic disjuncture between Mongol and Chinese states. Last, I suggest that continuity in climate stress on equine populations contributed to more intensive interactions along the Mongol-Ming borderlands.

Aaron Molnar is an Environmental Fellow at Harvard, working on Koryo/Mongol era climate history.

Are you interested in studying abroad in Korea, either during regular semesters or summer?

Stop by!

The Vietnamese Program Guest Spearker series welcomes Xuân-Lam Nguyễn. This talk, From Folk to Future: Crafting New Histories and Identity, explores Xuân-Lam’s journey in revitalizing forgotten Vietnamese folk paintings and his diverse art projects in Vietnam and provides a glimpse into his current body of work. Xuân-Lam will discuss how he integrates traditional Vietnamese art forms with contemporary approaches to address present-day concerns. The talk will delve into his creative process, his engagement with local and global contexts, and how his evolving practice reimagines the past while opening new possibilities for the future.

Xuân-Lam Nguyễn (b. 1993, Hanoi, Vietnam) is a visual artist and Fulbright scholar pursuing an MFA in Painting at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD Class of 2025). He is known for revitalizing and reintroducing forgotten Vietnamese folk paintings to the new generation. Interplaying between painting, drawing, digital art, and printmaking, Xuân-Lam’s approach fuses the practices of an archaeologist and a disc jockey, characterized by exuberant gradients and maximalism. His current series investigates 19th- and 20th-century colonial photographs, displaced cultural artifacts, and autobiographical elements, exploring the intricate intersections of queer identity and glitchy historical narratives, transforming archival references drawn from the past, and rebuilding new potentials for the future.

Before coming to the US in 2023, Xuân-Lam’s solo show Rendezvous between the Old & the New was co-organized by the Vietnam National Museum of History and the Vietnamese Women’s Museum. He has participated in group exhibitions at the Vietnam Pavilion, World Expo 2020 in Dubai, UAE, and various public art projects in Vietnam. Xuân-Lam won first prize in the art competition commemorating 45 years of Vietnam-Germany diplomatic relations, XVI Giornata del Contemporaneo, and has created several public art projects in Hanoi. In 2023, the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands commissioned him to create artwork marking the 50th anniversary of diplomatic relations between the Netherlands and Vietnam. The following year, the French Development Agency invited him to design a public artwork for the inauguration of the Hanoi Metro Line 3, symbolizing the Vietnam-France relationship in the 21st century. His work is part of the art collections of the German Embassy, the Italian Embassy, the Netherlands Embassy, and the National Assembly of Vietnam.

Join NAISI for its final Indigenous Artist in Residence events! 

A generative creative writing gathering that will explore attendees’ creative written work in a supportive environment, focusing on how we commonly, and uncommonly, document stories of survival. Participants will collectively explore and uncover their personal and/or researched accounts of survival within themselves, their families, or friends. 

Attendees, please bring the following: 

• • Pen/pencil 
  • Notebook of choice
  • 3 typed and printed hardcopies of their creative writing piece (6 page max)

RSVP below!

Artist Bio: Jacob L. Camacho is a CHamoru writer, educator, and activist. Originally from Guåhan (Guam) in the Mariana Islands, he is currently an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Stockton University in New Jersey. He received his MFA from Rutgers University, Camden and his BA in English Literature from the University of Guam. His work has appeared in University of Hawaii’s Indigenous Literatures From Micronesia, TrailOff, Moonstone’s Featured Poets Anthology 2022, UOG’s
StoryBoard 18, and MadHouse Magazine. He is currently writing his manuscript, Talkboy, in which a CHamoru boy travels the world collecting stories in his talkboy recorder which was gifted by his grandmother. Unbeknownst to him, one of his tapes holds incriminating evidence that may alter a presidential election.

Learn more about the Critical Native American and Indigenous Studies (CNAIS) concentration with DUS Mack Scott, supported by NAISI Executive Director Rae Gould. This info session will provide an overview of concentration requirements and an opportunity to ask questions about how CNAIS can complement other concentrations. Join us for PIZZA and information!

Join NAISI for its final Indigenous Artist in Residence events! 

Event description:

With much of our core memories and/or experiences surrounding survival, we often associate it with a particular point of view. Since point of view and tone are two literary devices of figurative language which separate one story from another, it forces the question: What happens when this discourse is disrupted and how willing are we (as the audience) to listen, or in some instances, change our point of view and tone? Relearning a story from another point of view, especially one which resides in tension, can sometimes be refreshing, humbling, or scary. And if there is anything storytelling teaches – it’s to continue learning.

Food provided!

Artist Bio: Jacob L. Camacho is a CHamoru writer, educator, and activist. Originally from Guåhan (Guam) in the Mariana Islands, he is currently an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Stockton University in New Jersey. He received his MFA from Rutgers University, Camden and his BA in English Literature from the University of Guam. His work has appeared in University of Hawaii’s Indigenous Literatures From Micronesia, TrailOff, Moonstone’s Featured Poets Anthology 2022, UOG’s
StoryBoard 18, and MadHouse Magazine. He is currently writing his manuscript, Talkboy, in which a CHamoru boy travels the world collecting stories in his talkboy recorder which was gifted by his grandmother. Unbeknownst to him, one of his tapes holds incriminating evidence that may alter a presidential election.

This student-centric workshop is an opportunity for students to hear tribal leaders from various sectors share stories of leadership, career and life paths, and experiences. We hope the ensuing conversations will inspire and encourage students to understand their own leadership styles, to learn new ways to lead, and consider the value of occasional detours on courses already charted. Our guests include elected tribal First Councilman Cassius Spears, Jr. (Narragansett), Dr. Bryan Brayboy (Lumbee), higher education thought leader and dean of Northwestern University’s School of Education and Social Policy, and Dr. Cedric Woods (Lumbee), director of the Institute for New England Native American Studies at UMass Boston.

Dinner from Kabob and Curry will be provided!

This event is limited to Brown students. 

The first Brown China Summit event of the year will be a screening of the Chinese-language horror film Incantation (咒). Following the screening, a Brown China Summit leader will be facilitating a discussion with East Asian Studies Professor, Chuanhui Meng, on the legacy and cultural impact of Chinese horror cinema.

While the main summit will take place in March, Brown China Summit is committed to fostering learning about China, the Chinese language, and Chinese culture throughout the year. 

In the light of current domestic and international events, we are at a moment at which political discourse in and about the academic classroom is both particularly pressing and particularly fraught. Classroom discussions may become unusually heated, or, to the contrary, students may already seem politically exhausted and disaffected—both of which pose challenges for teachers hoping to engage their students in academic and civic life. And not only are there challenges around the emergence of politics in the classroom; the academic classroom itself has emerged as a political issue, with partisan debates about what should be taught and how—and with those debates having especially significant implications for pedagogy and scholarship regarding gender, sexuality, race, and ongoing imperialist violences. How should we best negotiate the complexities of politics inthe classroom, politics aboutthe classroom, and the politics ofthe classroom itself?

This event from the Pembroke Center’s “LGBTQIA+ Thinking Initiative” is designed to provide a space for participants actively to engage with these questions. While we will be spurred by an introduction (Lynne Joyrich, LGBTQIA+ Thinking Initiative Director and Professor of Modern Culture and Media) and by brief opening reflections by members of the Brown community—Nadje Al-Ali (Robert Family Professor of International Studies and Professor of Anthropology and Middle East Studies), Isaac Essex (PhD Student in American Studies), Katie Rieser (Director of Teacher Education and Senior Lecturer in Education), and Andre Willis (Associate Professor of Religious Studies)—all attendees are encouraged to participate in open discussion.

All interested Brown and RISD faculty, teaching staff, and teaching graduate students are invited to register. RSVP https://www.eventbrite.com/e/politics-and-pedagogy-political-discourse-in-and-of-the-classroom-tickets-999629838757. 

The Comparative Literature Department cordially invites you to join us for A Poetry Reading by Ahmad Almallah. This event will take place Friday, April 12, at 4:00 PM at the Brown Bookstore. This is the final public event of the Translation in Comparative Literature conference taking place on April 11 and April 12.

Ahmad Almallah is a poet from Palestine. His first book of poems Bitter English is now available in the Phoenix Poets Series from the University of Chicago Press. His new book Border Wisdom is now available from Winter Editions. He received the Edith Goldberg Paulson Memorial Prize for Creative Writing, and his set of poems “Recourse,” won the Blanche Colton Williams Fellowship. Some of his poems and other writing appeared in Jacket2, Track//Four, All Roads will lead You Home, Apiary, Supplement, SAND, Michigan Quarterly Review, Making Mirrors: Righting/Writing by Refugees, Cordite Poetry Review,Birmingham Poetry Review, Great River Review, Kenyon Review, Poetry and American Poetry Review. Some of his work in Arabic has appeared in Al-Arabi Al-Jadid and Al-Quds Al-Arabi. His English works have been translated into Arabic, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Telugu. He is currently Artist in Residence in Creative Writing at the University of Pennsylvania.

This event is free and open to the public. We hope to see you there!

The Comparative Literature Department cordially invites you to join us for Making Sense in Poetry: Arabic in Translation, Robyn Creswell in conversation with Emma Ramadan. This event will take place Thursday, April 11, at 5:30 PM at the Brown Faculty Club.

Robyn Creswell is an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Yale and the author of City of Beginnings: Poetic Modernism in Beirut (Princeton). His most recent translation is Iman Mersal’s The Threshold (FSG), winner of the National Translation Award for poetry.

Emma Ramadan is an educator and literary translator from French. She is the recipient of the PEN Translation Prize, the Albertine Prize, two NEA Fellowships, and a Fulbright. Her translations include Anne Garréta’s Sphinx, Abdellah Taïa’s A Country for Dying, Marguerite Duras’s The Easy Life, and Barbara Molinard’s Panics.

As always, this event is free and open to the public and a reception will follow. We hope to see you there!

48 hours after the solar eclipse, join together for an opportunity to reflect and consider the cosmos as scientific and spiritual people! Ben Eden, Physics ’24, will moderate a panel with Professor Sam Birch, Reverend Janet Cooper Nelson, Father Edmund McCullough, and Rabbi Jonah Winer.

The Comparative Literature Department cordially invites you to join us for Graphs, Numbers, and Narrative: The Making of Fictional Realism in Modern China, a lecture presented by Anatoly Detwyler, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This event will take place Thursday, March 7, at 5:30 PM at the Rhode Island Hall, room 108.

The spread of social sciences during China’s Republican period (1911–1949) brought with it new forms of data literacy, epitomized by the spread of graphs, charts, and diagrams in the print culture of the day. Used to research and express quantifiable facts and relationalities, data visualization was even applied to literature by transforming texts into data patterns in search of new knowledge. This talk explores the intersection between datafied abstraction and narrative in the emergence of another important mode of scientific observation of the period: literary realism. I focus on the era’s most influential realist author, Mao Dun, and his socio-literary analysis of capitalism in China. Profoundly inspired by the spectacle of visible numbers on the floor of a Shanghai stock exchange, Mao Dun sought to reconcile the abstractions of finance with the lived experiences and power relations underlying them, ultimately crafting a fictional realism that turns numbers back into narrative and reasserts narrative’s primacy over modern abstraction.

Anatoly Detwyler is Assistant Professor of Modern Chinese Literature in the Dept. of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. As always, this event is free and open to the public and a reception will follow. We hope to see you there!

The Comparative Literature Department cordially invites you to join us for Poets, Patrons, and Translators: Uyghur Literary Canon in Twentieth-Century China, a lecture presented by Joshua Freeman, from Academia Sinica. This event will take place Tuesday, March 5, at 5:30 PM at the Rhode Island Hall, room 108.

Joshua Freeman is an Assistant Research Fellow in the Institute of Modern History at Academia Sinica. As always, this event is free and open to the public and a reception will follow. We hope to see you there!

What do you sing when you feel free? Join Queer Torah for an evening of text study and music midrash! Vegetarian food will be served. No background is necessary!

A panel workshop for Brown and RISD instructors on negotiating complex questions of identity in the classroom at a time when such questions remain both pressing and fraught. Brought to you by the Pembroke Center’s LGBTQIA+ Thinking Initiative.

This workshop invites participants to discuss how best to negotiate the complexities of identities and identifications in the classroom at a time when considering scholarly and pedagogical questions through the prism of these terms remains critically important even as it seems to become ever more fraught. University offices of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and academic disciplines that consider formations of identity, are currently under attack in terms that must be critiqued and resisted. At the same time, bureaucratic, administrative, and regulatory demarcations of identity categories have their own problems and can be inadequate to the multi-dimensional complexities of subjectivity, the historical and cultural formations of community, and the affective texture of selfhood and sociality, and so they perhaps unwittingly participate in some of the very discourses and divisions they seek to combat. How then can we, as scholars and educators, best think through these issues, and thus best address not only academic subject-matter in the classroom but our students as themselves complex subjects who matter in the current political, social, and intellectual (or often anti-intellectual) climate? Such questions will be posed in some initial reflections by fellow teacher-scholars and then in open conversation.

Discussants will include:

• Leon Hilton (Theatre Arts and Performance Studies)
• Emily Owens (History)
• Alexander Weheliye (Modern Culture and Media)
• Tali Hershkovitz (Ph.D. student, Religious Studies)

Free and open to teaching faculty at Brown and RISD. RSVP required.

Event accessibility information: to bypass stairs, visitors may enter via the automatic doors at the rear of the building, where there is a wheelchair-accessible elevator.

Hammershøi’s Shadow

This lecture will explore shadow as a philosophical motif in nineteenth-century Danish culture, from Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales, to Søren Kierkegaard’s philosophy, to Vilhelm Hammershøi’s paintings. Hammershøi’s many paintings of the apartments he shared with his wife and primary model/collaborator, Ida, are austere, proto-abstract interiors that respond to a long tradition of “artist’s studio” scenes. Alsdorf argues that shadow in these works is more than a shape-shifting element of design or realist detail; it is a metaphor for the pairings vital to understanding Hammershøi’s work.

Bridget Alsdorf is Professor in the Department of Art & Archaeology and Old Dominion Research Professor in the Humanities Council at Princeton University, where she teaches European art from the seventeenth to the mid-twentieth century. Her work explores the central role played by artists in illuminating problems of broad philosophical import; the social nature of artistic creation and form; and the cross-fertilization of artistic media, including literature, theater, and film. 

RSVP is strongly encouraged, but not required.

This lecture is a part of The History of Art & Architecture’s 23-24 Lecture Series: Light in Theory & Practice, which is a part of the Brown Arts IGNITE series.

“Acting Like Buddha: Ritual, Literature and Authority in Song-Dynasty in Chan Buddhism,” a lecture with Kevin Buckelew, Northwestern University.  Kevin Buckelew is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Northwestern University.  He specializes in the study of Chinese Buddhism. His research focuses on Buddhism in premodern China, with special attention to the rise of the Chan (Zen) Buddhist tradition and to interactions between Chinese Buddhists and Daoists

The Graduate Students’ Association for East Asian Studies cordially invites you to a guest lecture by Professor Gregory Levine, Department of History of Art in UC Berkeley. 

Buddhist Icons have been carved into living trees in Japan for centuries.  In such icons we find dense and lively convergences: numinous trees and arboreal material, plant physiology and human presencing of the divine, ritual and soteriology, and human and more-than-human lives, inter-relationships, and contingencies.  We find worlds brought into contact at blade’s edge in visualization, wounding, and healing.  A sharp politics, if you will, of human incisions into biota and in the religious and visual-material systems that constitute the iconic.  What might such trees carved alive, and trees-as-trees, disclose to us as we (re)imagine the ecological arts and humanities, Buddhist iconicity, and Buddhist environmentalism? 

Greg Levine is Professor and recent Chair (Fall 2020-2023) of the Department of History of Art, UC Berkeley.  His current book project is, A Tree and A Buddha: Imagining an Arboreal Humanism, and he is at work on a projected trilogy: Long Strange Journey: On Modern Zen, Zen Art, and Other Predicaments (2017); Buddha Heads: Fragments and Landscapes; and other Buddhas: White Supremacy and Buddhist Visual Culture.  The recipient of a Guggenheim and other fellowships, he is an editorial board member of Artibus Asiae and the Journal of Art Historiography.  His courses introduce global Buddhist visual cultures; eco art history; plunder, iconoclasm, and forgery; and the fragment in visual-material culture. 

Considering a future term studying abroad with DIS? Join DIS staff for a virtual info session with staff and student voices from Copenhagen, Stockholm*, and the U.S. They’ll share things you should be thinking about as you shape your study abroad future, and you have the opportunity to ask questions.

*NB: Only the DIS Copenhagen program is approved for Brown students.

This session is held on Zoom and will be led by DIS; please contact DIS directly with questions.

Please register in advance for the July 19th session.

Please visit the DIS website for other virtual information session dates.

Are you looking for one-on-one advising? Call the DIS North American Office (612 301 7200) to speak to a DIS staff member (Mon-Fri 8:30 a.m.-4:30 p.m. CST).

Or, schedule a 20-minute advising session with a DIS staff member through this link.

Dr. Lerone A. Martin, Faculty Director for the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute & Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Stanford University presents the 2023 K. Brooke Anderson Lecture.  

The K. Brooke Anderson Lecture was established in 1975 in honor of K. Brooke Anderson, distinguished alumnus and Executive Secretary for the Brown Christian Association from 1928-1957.  The lecture is shared by the Department of Religious Studies and the Office of the Chaplains and Religious Life, and is devoted to topics of interfaith relations (especially Christian, Muslim, and Jewish relations), race relations, and world peace.

Dr. Lerone A. Martin is a historian of religion in the twentieth century. His books and scholarship provide critical context for the forces of religion, politics, and race that have shaped the contemporary American political and social landscape. He is the author of Preaching on Wax: The Phonograph and the Making of Modern African American Religion, which tracks the role of the phonograph in the shaping of African American religion, culture, and politics during the first half of the twentieth century; and most recently, The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover: How the FBI Aided and Abetted the Rise of White Christian Nationalism, the shocking untold story of how the FBI partnered with white evangelicals to champion a vision of America as a white Christian nation

This year’s lecture is co-sponsored by the K. Brooke Anderson Lecture Fund, the Department of Religious Studies, the Office of the Chaplains and Religious Life, the Center for Race & Ethnicity in America, the Office of Institutional Equity and Diversity, the Office of the Dean of the Faculty, and the Bruce M. Bigelow Class of 1955 Lecture Series. 

The Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative (NAISI) is a cross-disciplinary initiative focused on teaching, research and engagement to increase understanding of the cultural traditions, histories, political experiences, and contemporary experiences and knowledges of Native American and Indigenous peoples.

Brown University undergraduate and graduate students (in any discipline or department) engaged with NAIS are invited to share their research, community-based projects, internship experiences, or other creative works related to Indigenous peoples and/or communities in this Symposium. 

Join us for dinner at 4:30 before the symposium!

The Reverend Dr. Liz Theoharis is Director of the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice at Union Theological Seminary and Co-Chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival with the Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II. She is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA) and teaches at Union Theological Seminary in New York City.

Rev. Dr. Theoharis is the editor of We Cry Justice: Reading the Bible with the Poor People’s Campaign (Broadleaf Press, 2021). She is the author of Always with Us?: What Jesus Really Said about the Poor (Eerdmans, 2017) and co-author of Revive Us Again: Vision and Action in Moral Organizing (Beacon, 2018). She has been published in The New York Times, Washington Post, Time Magazine, Newsweek, Politico, The Hill, The Guardian, The Nation, Boston Review, CNN, Religion News Service, Sojourners, Religion Dispatches, the Grio, La Jornada, Salon, Slate, and elsewhere.

Rev. Dr. Theoharis has been organizing among poor and low-income communities for thirty years with organizations such as the National Union of the Homeless, the National Welfare Rights Union, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, Domestic Workers United and many more. Raised in a family committed to social justice, civil liberties and human rights, she has been involved in the movement for her whole life.

Rev. Dr. Theoharis was awarded the Children’s HealthWatch Champion Award in 2022, the 30th Annual Freedom Award by the National Civil Rights Museum, the Hunger Leadership Award from the Congressional Hunger Center, and Villanova Peace Award in 2021, each along with the Rev. Dr. William Barber II for their work with the Poor People’s Campaign. In 2020 she was named one of 15 Faith Leaders to Watch by the Center for American Progress. In 2019, she was a Selma “Bridge” Award recipient and named one of 11 Women Shaping the Church by Sojourners. In 2018, she gave the “Building a Moral Movement” TEDtalk at TEDWomen, was named one of the Politico 50 “thinkers, doers and visionaries whose ideas are driving politics”, and was also named a Women of Faith Award recipient by the Presbyterian Church (USA).

Rev. Dr. Theoharis received her BA in Urban Studies from the University of Pennsylvania; her M.Div. from Union Theological Seminary in 2004 where she was the first William Sloane Coffin Scholar; and her PhD from Union in New Testament and Christian Origins.

MAKING RIGHT CHOICES: A Contemplative Ignatian approach to decision making

Sunday 04/23 Experiential Workshop at Manning Chapel, 2 pm to 3:30 pm. Bring a journal or notebook and something to write with!

–

Saturday 04/22 Movie Night at the Catholic Center, 51 Prospect Street, 6pm - 8:30 pm. Food and drinks will be provided.

MAKING RIGHT CHOICES: A Contemplative Ignatian approach to decision making

Saturday 04/22 Movie Night at the Catholic Center, 51 Prospect Street, 6pm - 8:30 pm.  “Ignacio de Loyola” (2016), view the trailer here! Food and drinks will be provided.

Sunday 04/23 Experiential Workshop at Manning Chapel, 2 pm to 3:30 pm.

Prof. Norifumi Sakai, Keio University, presents “Travel to Daoist Sacred Sites in Southern Song China.” Prof. Sakai is an Associate Professor at Keio University, Japan, and currently in residence at Harvard’s Yenching Institute.  His research interests include Daoist rituals, Daoist Abbeys, and Daoist sacred sites from Song to Ming China.  He is currently research Daoist liturgical manuals in the Harvard-Yenching Library, and conducting a comparative study of pre-modern and modern Daoist rituals. 

About the lecture: As a new Jewish culture, the rabbinic edifice is conspicuously distinct in content and scope from the postbiblical Jewish library created over the preceding centuries. Indeed, the rabbis consistently silenced, and almost entirely ignored the extensive literature created in the land of Israel and the Diaspora during the Second Temple period. On the other hand, no set of values, nor any literary work, emerges in a vacuum. Religious civilizations always share overt and covert connections with previous traditions, and rabbinic literature is no exception.

This lecture explores the presence of typical Second Temple period themes and ideas in rabbinic literature. It surveys several examples of pre- and non-rabbinic texts and concepts that survived and infiltrated rabbinic literature, and examines the sophisticated fashion in which they were censored, adapted, and “rabbinized” in the process of incorporation in their new ideological context.

About the speaker: Professor Vered Noam is a BJS Visiting Scholar.  She teaches in the Department of Jewish Philosophy and Talmud at Tel Aviv University. She is the author of Shifting Images of the Hasmoneans: Second Temple Legends and Their Reception in Josephus and Rabbinic Literature (Oxford University Press, 2018). She was a winner of both The Michael Bruno Memorial Award and the Israel Prize in Talmud. 

A lecture by Tulasi Srinivas, Emerson College. Tulasi Srinivas is a Professor of Anthropology, Religion and Transnational Studies at the Marlboro Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies at Emerson College.  Her research interests include the anthropology of religion, anthropology of globalization, food and gender, secularism and violence, transnational processes, economy, money and indignity, ritual studies, anthropology of wonder, ecology, life and flourishing, food and drink, materiality, visual culture, and post colonialism.  Her books include Winged Faith: Rethinking Globalization and Religious Pluralism (Columbia University Press, 2010); Curried Cultures: Food Globalization and South Asia (University of California Press, 2013; Aleph Press, 2017, Indian Edition); The Cow in the Elevator: An Anthropology of Wonder (Duke University Press, 2018); and Wonder in South Asia: Politics, Aesthetics, Ethics (SUNY Press, forthcoming). 

Brown University’s 106th Annual Service of Lessons and Carols will take place on Sunday, December 4th at 4 pm in Sayles Hall on the Main Green. Doors open at 3:30 pm.

Performances will include music from:

• Mark Steinbach, University Organist
• Brown Brass Ensemble
• The University Chorus, directed by Frederick Jodry, Director of Choral Activities
• Harmonizing Grace Gospel Choir, directed by Donnell Best
• Saleem Abboud Ashkar, Director of Applied Music Keyboard

This year’s free-will offering will be collected on behalf of the Rhode Island Community Food Bank. Lessons and Carols is sponsored by the Office of the Chaplains and Religious Life and the Department of Music. 

All are welcome. Admission is free. This event is fully accessible.

Please use the button below to link to a Livestream of the Service. For those participating from home, we invite you to view the program for the evening using the “Related Content” link, on the left-side of this event page. 

Marso, who has served on the boards of several journals (including Simone de Beauvoir Studies, theory&event, Contemporary Political Theory, and Political Theory), and Fitzpatrick, who is a co-editor of World Picture, editor-at-large at Bright Wall/Dark Room, and cohost of The Bright Wall/Dark Room Podcast, will, in our second hour, discuss the challenges and opportunities for professional, scholarly, and/or public writing now.

Professor Bonnie Honig (MCM and Political Science) will chair the session, the first in a series on Politics and Culture by the Democracy Project at Brown Center for Philosophy, Politics, and Economics.

Those wanting to read for this event may find the following short pieces to be of interest:

Lori Marso, “Feeling Like a Feminist with Audrey Diwan’s Happening” at https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/feeling-like-a-feminist-with-audrey-diwans-happening/ and “How Do You Solve a Problem like Titane?” at https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/how-do-you-solve-a-problem-like-titane/

And “Unbecoming Woman”
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/unbecoming-women/

Veronica Fitzpatrick, “Face Value: Persona” at https://www.brightwalldarkroom.com/2018/11/27/face-value-persona-1966/ and “Can I F**k This?”: Alex Garland’s Ex Machina at http://cleojournal.com/2017/04/21/can-i-fuck-this-alex-garlands-ex-machina/

Bonnie Honig, Promising Young Country (on Promising Young Woman) at http://politicsslashletters.org/commentary/promising-young-country-warning-spoilers/

Please join Brown Contemplative Studies for our Autumn Open House on November 3rd from 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm at Horace Mann, Rms. 102 and 103.  Come and meet our faculty and concentrators.  Find out about fall course offerings, upcoming events and practice grant opportunities.  Join us for Kabob and Curry and good
conversation!  To find out more about contemplative studies, please go to https://www.brown.edu/academics/contemplative-studies/ or contact
anne_heyrman-hart@brown.edu. 

Join us via Zoom or in person at the Maddock Alumni Center on November 1^st at 4:30pm for a lecture entitled “Modern Dimensions of Camões’ The Lusiads” by Professor Onésimo T. Almeida, whose book O Século dos Prodígios includes a chapter on The Lusiads and the empirical worldview emerging in the 1500s.

The John Carter Brown Library holds a rare first edition of The Lusiads, and this event will commemorate its 450th publication anniversary. The event, which will be in English, is co-sponsored by Brown University’s Department of Portuguese & Brazilian Studies, the Camões Institute of Lisbon and the Portuguese Embassy in Washington.

A reception will follow with the presence of His Excellency Francisco Duarte Lopes, Ambassador of Portugal in Washington DC. Refreshments will be served.

Please join us for the 2022 Sachs Lecture in Assyriology: Professor Jana Mynářová (Charles University, Prague) will present her lecture entitled “Peace, War, and Violence in the Ancient Near East.” There will be a reception following this lecture.

J. Mynářová is Head of the Institute of Comparative Linguistics at Charles University in Prague. She acquired her PhD. in Philology - Languages of Asia and Africa (Semitic Languages) with her dissertation entitled “Greeting Formulae in Peripheral Akkadian”. She specializes above all in the relationships between Egypt and the Near East in the 2nd millennium B.C., ancient diplomacy, Egyptian history and society in the New Kingdom, Peripheral Akkadian and Ugaritic.

Please join us for a flute Jugalbandi Concert with Steve Gorn, Eric Fraser and Nitin Mitta organized by Srinvas Reddy.

Steve Gorn’s bansuri is featured on the 2011 Grammy winning recording, “Miho – Journey to the Mountain,” with Dhruba Ghosh and the Paul Winter Consort, as well as the Academy Award winning Documentary film, “Born into Brothels.” He has performed Indian Classical Music and new American Music on the bansuri bamboo flute in concerts and festivals throughout the world. His gurus are the late bansuri master Sri Gour Goswami, of Kolkata, and Pt. Raghunath Seth of Mumbai, who he often accompanied in concert. He also studied with the late Ustad Z. M. Dagar. He has often performed in India, appearing at Bharat Bhavan in Bhopal, Habitat Center and Triveni Hall in New Delhi, The Sangeet Research Academy in Kolkata, NCPA, and The Nehru Center in Mumbai, and numerous other venues. His performance with Pandit Ravi Shankar’s disciple, Barun Kumar Pal, at Kolkata’s Rama Krishna Mission, was televised throughout India. In 2013, he was awarded the Pandit Jasraj Rotary Club of Hyderabad Award for Cross Cultural Achievement. His numerous recordings include Luminous Ragas, Rasika, (with tabla by Samir Chatterjee,) Illuminations, (with Nepali bansuri wallah, Manose,) the landmark Indian-Jazz fusion recording, Asian Journal, and Pranam, a jugalbandi with Barun Kumar Pal playing hansaveena, and Samir Chatterjee, tabla.

Eric Fraser, having deeply studied North-Indian classical flute from the late Pandit Gopal Roy, is one of the few exponents of the original “gayaki-ang” or vocal style of bansuri flute. Eric’s bansuri playing rings with authenticity and pure Indian tone, carrying a distinct and masterful sound imbibing a pure Gharana (Lineage). Eric Fraser is also a multi-instrumentalist, educator, composer, and songwriter. Eric’s orientation to Indian classical music serves as an inspiration for melody, and a creative tool for improvisation in original styles that incorporate voice, guitar, keyboard, electronics and looping. Eric is also a Licensed Creative Arts Therapist (LCAT) and Fulbright Senior Research Scholar for Indian music, and brings his extensive musical skills to therapeutic work with children and adults.

Nitin Mitta is one of the most sought after tabla players of his generation. Apart from being a dynamic soloist, he is an accompanist who has performed with some India’s most celebrated Hindustani classical musicians worldwide. He joined forces with 2010 Grammy Nominee Pianist Vijay Iyer and electric guitarist R. Prasanna to produce a studio album titled Tirtha that blends elements of contemporary jazz with the North and South Indian traditional ragas.

Co-sponsored by the Music Department & Contemplative Studies

Students, faculty, and staff, join us for Israeli Folk Dancing guided by Pazit Lahav of Brookline Folk Dancing. No experience necessary.  

The Department of Egyptology & Assyriology is pleased to present the 2022 Neugebauer Lecture on the History of Exact Sciences in Antiquity.

Professor Annette Imhausen (Goethe-Universität) will deliver her lecture entitled, “Don’t Limit the Past by the Present - Glimpses Into Ancient Egyptian Mathematics and its Historiography,” on Thursday, September 29 at 5 PM. The lecture will be in-person, location to be announced. Reception to follow.

About Professor Annette Imhausen:

Annette Imhausen is a German historian of mathematics known for her work on Ancient Egyptian Mathematics. She is Professor for the History of Sciences in the Premodern World at Goethe-University Frankfurt. Imhausen is the author of Mathematics in Ancient Egypt: A Contextual History (Princeton University Press, 2016). She is also featured in the BBC TV series The Story of Maths. Having studied mathematics, history of mathematics, and Egyptology, she is at work on the history of pre-Greek mathematics, specifically contexts, techniques and transmission of ancient Egyptian mathematics from the invention of writing (around 3000 BCE) until the Graeco-Roman period.

About the Neugebauer Lecture Series:

The Neugebauer Lecture is one of three lectures named after the founding members of the Departments of Egyptology and History of Mathematics, which were merged in 2006 to form the current Department of Egyptology & Assyriology: Richard Parker (Egyptology), Otto Neugebauer (History of Exact Science in Antiquity), and Abraham Sachs (Assyriology). Born in Innsbruck in 1899, Otto Neugebauer was a mathematician and historian of science who was known for his groundbreaking research on the history of astronomy and mathematics as
they were practiced in antiquity and the Middle Ages. In 1933, Neugebauer took a principled stand and resigned from his position at the Mathematical Institute in Göttingen following the dismissal of his Jewish colleagues at the Institute. He left Germany and moved initially to the University of Copenhagen, where he spent the next six years until, in 1939, he moved to the United States where there was competition to hire him from Brown University and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Deciding Brown was better suited to his work, Neugebauer took up a position as Professor of Mathematics. In 1947, he was appointed founding chair of the newly created Department of History of Mathematics. Neugebauer remained chair of the department until his retirement in 1969. He remained an extremely active scholar until his death in 1990.

Professor Kathryn Gin Lum (Stanford) discusses her provocative new book, which shows how the religious idea of the heathen in need of salvation has shaped understandings of race throughout American history.  In addition to Gin Lum’s presentation, the event will include brief responses to the book from Tisa Wenger (Yale), Shahzad Bashir (Brown), and Daniel Vaca (Brown). 

As part of its inaugural celebration, the Saxena Center presents Ali Sethi accompanied by Shayna Esther Dunkelman and Grey McMurray live in concert.

Ali Aziz Sethi is a Pakistani singer, songwriter, composer, and author. Sethi rose to prominence with his debut novel, The Wish Maker (2009). In 2012, Sethi began focusing on his musical career and made his film debut as a singer in Mira Nair’s 2012 film, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, with the song Dil Jalane Ki Baat Karte Ho. In recent years, Sethi has released numerous cover singles and has appeared on several seasons of Coke Studio Pakistan. Sethi began releasing original music in 2019 and has collaborated with Grammy-winning producer Noah Georgeson. His most recent single for Coke Studio – Pasoori (2022) – became the first Pakistani song to feature on Spotify’s “Viral 50 - Global” chart, eventually climbing to the top of the chart in May 2022. Sethi is known for combining his live musical performances with historical narrative and critical commentary.

Rain location: Stephen Robert ’62 Hall, 280 Brook St.

Please join the Brown Contemplative Studies Initiative, Department of Music, Department of Religious Studies and the Center for Contemporary South Asia for a Vocal and Sarangi Recital with Nitin Mitta, Matthew Rahaim and Suhail Yusuf Khan on April 22nd from 7 - 8:30 pm in Friedman Hall, Rm. 102.  This concert is free and open to the public. 

Please join Brown Contemplative Studies for our Spring Open House on April 21st from 6:30 - 8 pm in Petteruti Lounge.  Come and meet our faculty and concentrators.  Find out about fall course offerings, upcoming events and practice grant opportunities.  Join us for a bit of Kabob and Curry and a lot of conversation!

From Global to Local: Telling Stories of Home

Join us for International Festival, one of the largest events hosted by the Global Brown Center for International Students! International Festival is a day of celebration of Brown’s vibrant global community, bringing together student organizations and University offices that uplift and enrich the global experience here at Brown. From 12-3pm on Saturday, April 16th, come to the main green to enjoy delicious food, games, and performances! From the cultural organizations serving appetizers and desserts from home, to performance organizations putting on an incredible show, celebrate a diverse set of stories from around the world in many different forms. Participants will be able to buy tickets to purchase food and other items on the day of the event. Please note that this event is cash-only.

This year, the International Festival is co-hosted by Storytellers @ Brown and at each cultural organization booth, we’re featuring a work of literature that the clubs have chosen to represent their group! Get amazing book recommendations and listen to performers from Storytellers and beyond share their personal narratives in a global context. Expect performances from Storytellers, Brown Bhairavi, Brown Lion Dance, Mezcla, and more! 

Special thanks to participating student organizations and University offices:

1. AfriSA
2. Brasa @ Brown
3. Brown/RISD Arab Society
4. Brown Taiwan Society
5. Brown UNICEF
6. Center for Language Studies
7. Chinese Student Association
8. Filipino Alliance (FA)
9. Global Brown
10. Global Health Initiative
11. Hawaiʻi at Brown
12. Hellenic Students Association
13. Himalayan Cultural Association
14. Japanese Cultural Association
15. Latinx Student Union
16. LGBTQ Center
17. Nigerian Students Association
18. Office of International Programs
19. Project Access
20. Sarah Doyle Center for Women and Gender
21. South Asian Students’ Association
22. Storytellers @ Brown
23. Vietnamese Student’s Association

Please join Brown Contemplative Studies and the Office of the Chaplains and Religious Life for a workshop on Cultivating the Compassion Instinct with Professor Judith Simmer-Brown, Naropa University on Saturday, April 9th from 9:30 am - noon and 1:30 - 3:30 pm in Pembroke Hall, Rm. 305.  Please be sure to wear comfortable clothing, bring a meditation cushion or yoga mat and some form of hydration.  This event is free and open to the public. 

The Department of Egyptology & Assyriology cordially invites you to our weekly colloquium on Tuesday, March 22 at 12pm! Christopher Cox will be presenting “Mirroring the Gods: The Symmetrical Lunette Motif on Kushite Royal Stelae.”

A lecture with Maria Heim, Amherst College.

The talk will explore various ways to study “emotions” (a category invented by the modern West) in ancient and classical Indian texts.Prof. Heim focuses on envy, jealousy, spite, and allied experiences in a case study of the fine-grained definitional, narrative, and philosophical practices treating human experience offered by Indian texts.The talk will also engage in some comparative work with Aristotle’s ideas about envy, to sharpen distinctions.

Prof. Heim is the George Lyman Crosby 1896 & Stanley Warfield Crosby Professor in Religion and Chair of Religion at Amherst College.She is the author of numerous books & articles, including the forthcoming Words for the Heart: A Treasury of Emotions from Classical India (Princeton University Press, 2022), and the editor of The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Emotions in Classical Indian Philosophy (London: Bloomsbury, 2021).

Join the CADRE for an upcoming presentation in our Distinguished Visiting Scholar Series by Matthew W. Johnson, entitled “Classic Psychedelics in Addiction Treatment”!

This presentation will review the treatment of substance use disorders with classic psychedelics (5HT2A agonists) including LSD and psilocybin. Early research from the 1950s to 1970s investigated classic psychedelics, primarily LSD, in the treatment of alcohol use disorder and cancer-related distress. Over the last 20 years, research has resumed investigating psychedelics in the treatment of psychiatric disorders, including tobacco and alcohol use disorders.

Matthew W. Johnson, Ph.D., is The Susan Hill Ward Endowed Professor of Psychedelics and Consciousness Research at Johns Hopkins University. Working with psychedelics since 2004, he is one of the world’s most widely published experts on psychedelics. He has published research on psychedelics and mystical experience, personality change, tobacco smoking cessation, cancer distress treatment, and depression treatment. In 2021 he received as principal investigator the first grant in 50 years from the US government for a treatment study with a classic psychedelic, specifically psilocybin in treatment of tobacco addiction. He is also known for his expertise in behavioral economics, addiction, sexual risk behavior, and research with a wide variety of drug classes. He’s been interviewed by Anderson Cooper on 60 Minutes, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, NPR, Fox Business News, BBC and was featured in Michael Pollan’s book How to Change Your Mind.

A lecture with Trent Walker, Ho Center for Buddhist Studies, Stanford University

How do Southeast Asian Buddhists care for the sick, assist the dying, and mark the transition from life to death? What tools, texts, and practices do they weave together for deathbed rites? This talk draws from a unique body of manuscripts from Cambodia—handwritten bark-paper folding books, circulated at the village level from the nineteenth century to the present—to address these questions. The leporello-style manuscripts transmit a distinctive body of Pali and vernacular chants specifically crafted for the terminally ill. Sung in soaring and expressive melodies by both men and women, these chants re-imagine core Buddhist ideas through their focus on releasing karmic debts, articulating final vows, and contemplating the porous boundaries between life and death. The leporellos and the chants they record ultimately serve as scripts for the end of life, orchestrating musical, ritual, and doctrinal support for the dying and those who care for them.

Trent Walker (PhD University of California, Berkeley, 2018) is the Ho Center for Buddhist Studies Postdoctoral Fellow and a lecturer in Religious Studies at Stanford University, where he works on palm-leaf and bark-paper manuscripts in Khmer, Thai, and Tham scripts as well as a variety of printed and oral texts in Pali, Cambodian, Siamese, Lanna, Lao, Vietnamese, and other languages. His first book, Until Nirvana’s Time: Buddhist Songs from Cambodia, will be released by Shambhala Publications in Autumn 2022. Additional publications and resources are available at https://www.trentwalker.org/

What’s Next? Come talk (and eat!) with recent Religious Studies grads!  Talk with former concentrators about how Religious Studies connects to the varied things they’re doing now! 

5:00pm: Meet w/ alums on Zoom

6:30pm: Eat/talk @ 59 George (Shirley Miller House).  

Email vaca@brown.edu for more information! 

Please  join the Program in Early Cultures for The Virgin Mary in Song:  Traditions of Joy and Sorrow From Medieval Europe to the Byzantine Empire on October 27th from 3 - 5:20 pm.  This event is an exploration of music, affect, emotion and religious encounter which features Prof. Anna Song (Linfield University) with audio illustrations by the In Mulieribus vocal ensemble and Dr. Spyridon Antonopoulos (City, University of London) with audio illustrations by the Psaltikon ensemble.

Please join the Brown Contemplative Studies Initiative and the Center for Mindfulness for a lecture by Dr. Eric Garland, Ph.D., LCSW on “Mindfulness-Oriented Recovery Enhancement Heals Opioid Misuse and Chronic Pain by Restructuring Reward:  From Hedonic Pleasure to Self-Transcendent Meaning” on December 1st from 4 - 5:30 pm EST.  This event is free and open to the public.  However, you must register with anne_heyrman-hart@brown.edu to receive the Zoom link. 

Dr. Eric Garland, PhD, LCSW is Distinguished Endowed Chair in Research, Professor and Associate Dean for Research in the University of Utah College of Social Work, and Director of the Center on Mindfulness and Integrative Health Intervention Development (C-MIIND). Dr. Garland is the developer of an innovative mindfulness-based therapy founded on insights derived from cognitive, affective, and neurobiological science, called Mindfulness-Oriented Recovery Enhancement (MORE). As Principal Investigator or Co-Investigator, Dr. Garland has over 175 scientific publications and has received more than $50 million in research grants from the NIH, DOD, and PCORI to conduct translational research on biopsychosocial mechanisms implicated in addiction, emotion dysregulation, and chronic pain, including randomized controlled trials of MORE and other mindfulness-based interventions as treatments for opioid misuse and addiction. To complement his expertise in clinical research, Dr. Garland is a licensed psychotherapist with more than 15 years of clinical experience providing mind-body therapies for persons suffering from addictive behaviors, psychological disorders, and chronic pain. In 2019, he was appointed by NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins to the NIH HEAL Multi-disciplinary Working Group comprised of national experts on pain and addiction research to help guide the $1.1 billion HEAL initiative aimed at using science to halt the opioid crisis.

Please join Brown University Contemplative Studies Initiative for a lecture by Prof. Christopher Ives entitled, “Japanese Zen and Ethics: Historical Patterns and Popular Misconceptions,” on Tuesday, November 17th from 5:30 - 7 pm. 

To register for this event and receive the Zoom link, please contact anne_heyrman-hart@brown.edu.

Christopher Ives is Professor of Religious Studies at Stonehill College. In his
scholarship he focuses on ethics in Zen Buddhism, and currently he is working on
Buddhist approaches to nature and environmental issues. His publications include
Imperial-Way Zen: Ichikawa Hakugen’s Critique and Lingering Questions for
Buddhist Ethics (2009); Zen Awakening and Society (1992); Zen on the Trail:
Hiking as Pilgrimage (2018); a translation of Nishida Kitarō’s An Inquiry into the
Good (co-translated with Abe Masao, 1990); a translation of Hisamatsu Shin’ichi’s
Critical Sermons of the Zen Tradition (co-translated with Tokiwa Gishin, 2002); The
Emptying God (co-edited with John B. Cobb, Jr., 1990); and Divine Emptiness and
Historical Fullness (edited volume, 1995). He serves as a member of the Advisory
Group of the Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology.

Please join Brown’s Contemplative Studies Initiative for the Virtual Fall Open House on Thursday, November 12th from 7 - 9 pm.  Speak with Concentrators, Alumnae and Faculty about this exciting, interdisciplinary concentration with opportunities to attend conferences, workshops and other enlightening events.

To receive the Zoom link for this event, please contact anne_heyrman-hart@brown.edu. 

Please join Brown’s Contemplative Studies Initiative and the Carney Institute for Brain Science for The Catherine Kerr Vital Energy in Health and Healing Series.  Heiner Fruehauf, Ph.D., LAc will present the inaugural lecture in this series entitled, “A Brief History of Qi:  From Ancient Cosmology to Modern Medical Practice,” on November 6th from 5:30 - 7:30 pm. 

Please click here, if you plan to attend this virtual lecture and discussion.

Heiner Fruehauf (Ph.D., University of Chicago, East Asian Languages and
Civilizations) is the Founding Professor of the College of Classical Chinese
Medicine at National University of Natural Medicine in Portland, Oregon. He
researches the cultural history of Chinese medicine, teaches herbal medicine and
Qigong, and practices as a licensed acupuncturist. The lecture will explore the
philosophical concepts surrounding the topic of vital energy in China and their
historical development. Before this cultural background, the practical
applications of qi in the related domains of Chinese medicine, nourishing life
practices and the martial arts will be discussed from a variety of angles.

The Zoom discussion for Contemplation and Social Action - Part 1 will be held on July 2nd from 5 - 6:30 pm and for Contemplation and Social Action - Part 2 on July 16th from 5 - 6:30 pm.

Please join Diana Winston ’88 on Sunday, March 15th from 11 am - 5 pm at the Brown/RISD Hillel, Goldfarb Social Hall (80 Brown St.) for a workshop, “Mindfulness Approaches to Working with Anxiety.” 

Who is not anxious these days? Whether faced with the daily stresses of school, responsibilities, family, or the ongoing anxiety of political events and ecological crisis, most of us are anxious. In the US, anxiety rates have risen to 18% of the population. Mindfulness, while not a cure, offers incredible tools and practices to work with anxiety. A consistent daily practice can create opportunities for self-regulation and self-awareness. We can then learn to approach anxiety and other difficult emotions with compassion and awareness. Mindfulness also offers tools to address catastrophizing and anxiety-provoking distorted thinking. Additionally, we can use mindfulness to “enlist the wisdom mind” to work cognitively with anxiety on the spot, and then cultivate positive states that offset fearful thinking. Finally, we can explore how these practices might take us “beyond fear” and into places of fearlessness.

Diana Winston ’88 is the Director of Mindfulness Education at UCLA’s Mindful Awareness Research Center. She is the author of The Little Book of Being, Wide Awake: A Buddhist Guide for Teens, and the co-author of Fully Present: The Science, Art and Practice of Mindfulness. She has taught mindfulness for health and well-being since 1999 in a range of settings including in healthcare, universities, businesses, non-profits, and schools in the US and internationally. She created the evidence-based Mindful Awareness Practices Program (MAPs), is the founding director of UCLA’s Training in Mindfulness Facilitation, and is a founding board member of the International Mindfulness Teachers Association. The LA Times calls her one of the nation’s best-known teachers of mindfulness.” You can find her on the UCLA Mindful app, the Ten percent happier app, at www.uclahealth.org/marc and www.dianawinston.com

Please join Brown Contemplative Studies for a lecture by Diana Winston, “The Mindfulness Movement:  New Directions in the Field, Meditation Theory and Practice,” on Friday, March 13th from 5:30 - 7 pm at Sidney Frank Hall, Nathan Marcuvitz Auditorium (185 Meeting St.)  This event is free and open to the public. 

Join Diana Winston ’88, Director of Mindfulness Education at UCLA’s Mindful Awareness Research Center for an evening exploring mindfulness. We will learn about the growth of the mindfulness field and Diana will discuss education, research, and teacher training programs at UCLA. We will also explore different approaches to mindfulness techniques, including an emphasis on Natural Awareness, a wide open, spacious, effortless type of mindfulness. Come prepared to try a few practices.

Diana Winston ’88 is the Director of Mindfulness Education at UCLA’s Mindful Awareness Research Center. She is the author of The Little Book of Being, Wide Awake: A Buddhist Guide for Teens, and the co-author of Fully Present: The Science, Art and Practice of Mindfulness. She has taught mindfulness for health and well-being since 1999 in a range of settings including in healthcare, universities, businesses, non-profits, and schools in the US and internationally. She created the evidence-based Mindful Awareness Practices Program (MAPs), is the founding director of UCLA’s Training in Mindfulness Facilitation, and is a founding board member of the International Mindfulness Teachers Association. The LA Times calls her one of the nation’s best-known teachers of mindfulness.” You can find her on the UCLA Mindful app, the Ten percent happier app, at www.uclahealth.org/marc and www.dianawinston.com

Kerry Sonia (Harvard Divinity School) presents “Production and Reproduction in Israelite Family Religion” on Wednesday, March 11, 2020 at 12:00 pm in Hirschfeld House, 163 George Street, seminar room #101. Sponsored by the Program in Judaic Studies.  

ABOUT THE TALK

In ancient West Asia, the close association between the formation of the human and different modes of household production, such as pottery and weaving, points toward the fundamental role of materiality in the construction of social and ritual actors. This role is particularly clear in descriptions of childbirth in the Hebrew Bible, where the formation of humans and bearing of children is often compared to ceramic production. Clay, it seems, is a potent medium for this discourse–it is both malleable and incredibly durable. It is both mundane, coming from the ground itself, and subject to formation and inscription by elite systems of power. In addition, clay is the raw material for the built environment of different social spheres, including the domicile, temple, and palace. Examining the materiality of childbirth ritual, including clay imagery and ritual objects, helps us understand not only the dynamics of Israelite family and household religion but also the ways in which biblical writers leverage these rituals to make broader theological claims about Yahweh and Israel.

ABOUT KERRY SONIA:

Kerry M. Sonia is a Research Associate in the Women in the Study of Religion Program at Harvard Divinity School. She received an A.B. in Religious Studies from Brown University (2007), an M.T.S. in Hebrew Bible from Harvard Divinity School (2009), and a Ph.D. in Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean from Brown University (2017). Her first book, The Enduring Dead: Kinship, Cult, and Death in Ancient Israel (forthcoming with SBL Press), examines the cult of dead kin in the context of Israelite family religion, and her current project focuses on the social and ritual dimensions of childbirth in ancient Israel.

Please join us for an evening with internationally renowned lecturer and author, Mallika Chopra for the 17th Annual Mary Interlandi Memorial Lecture at 85 Waterman St. (formerly BERT), Rm. 130 on Monday, March 2nd from 5:30 - 7 pm.  The lecture is entitled:  Living With Intent: An evening with Mallika Chopra. 

Mallika presents practical ways to integrate techniques for stress management, self reflection, and bringing a sense of peace and intention to every day life. Based on her bestselling book, Living With Intent: My Somewhat Messy Journey to Purpose, Peace and Joy, she will share personal stories and present a path to INTENT (Incubate, Notice, Trust, Express, Nurture, Take Action).

Mallika Chopra is a mom, media entrepreneur, public speaker and published author. She is the author of Just Breathe: Meditation, Mindfulness, Movement and More and Just Feel: How to be Stronger, Healthier, Happier and More - accessible, fun, how-to books filled with full-color illustrations written for 8-12 year olds.

In Living With Intent: My Somewhat Messy Journey to Purpose, Peace and Joy, Mallika shares insights she gained while seeking meaning and balance as a mom and entrepreneur who felt she was overwhelmed by work, family and too many responsibilities.

Mallika has taught meditation to thousands of people, and enjoys speaking to audiences around the world about intention, balance and living a life of purpose.

Please join us for a workshop with internationally renowned lecturer and author, Mallika Chopra, on Sunday, March 1st from 11 am - 4 pm at Brown/RISD Hillel, the Goldfarb Family Social Room.  Mallika’s workshop is entitled:  Just Be You: A Day of Meditation, Self-Reflection, Setting Intentions and Discovering Purpose.

In this workshop, Mallika will teach the basics of mindfulness, breathing, and mantra based meditation in an experiential day of practice. The group will explore the nature of consciousness, and the application of ancient wisdom to modern life. The day will incorporate self-reflection, intention and exercises to assess balance and individual purpose.

Mallika Chopra is a mom, media entrepreneur, public speaker and published author. She is the author of Just Breathe: Meditation, Mindfulness, Movement and More and Just Feel: How to be Stronger, Healthier, Happier and More - accessible, fun, how-to books filled with full-color illustrations written for 8-12 year olds.

In Living With Intent: My Somewhat Messy Journey to Purpose, Peace and Joy, Mallika shares insights she gained while seeking meaning and balance as a mom and entrepreneur who felt she was overwhelmed by work, family and too many responsibilities.

Mallika Chopra has taught meditation to thousands of people, and enjoys speaking to audiences around the world about intention, balance and living a life of purpose.

Romantic Ragas, a Valentine’s Day performance featuring:

• Nitin Mitta on the tabla
• Deven Carmichael on the trombone
• Srinivas Reddy on the sitar

Light refreshments will be served following the performance.

Please join Brown Contemplative Studies for a lecture by Professor Justin McDaniel on “Living Deliberately Through Existential Despair: New Approaches to Embodied Pedagogy in Religious Studies,” Wednesday, February 12th, from 6 - 7:30 pm in Friedman Hall, Rm.101.  This event is free and open to the public.  

Monasticism and asceticism appear to be practices that go against evolution and natural human instinct to seek pleasure, procreate, and consume calories. Why would millions of people in nearly every religious tradition for as far back in history as we have evidence undertake precepts that restrict food and intoxicant intake, often promote or demand celibacy, and demand harsh physical austerities? Nearly every culture has invented some type of ascetic and/or monastic practice, but we are unclear about the motivating forces behind this development and continued practice. In order to answer these questions, I developed two controversial courses – “Living Deliberately” – a course that demands students undertake a month-long vow of silence, food, technology, and dress restrictions, waking up at 5 am every day, and meditative exercises; as well as “Existential Despair” – a course that requires students to come to an eight hour class session once a week (4 pm-midnight) and think about sadness and loneliness through intense reading and discussion. These courses have led to much reflection about the value of asceticism and contemplation as part of university education. This talk will describe these courses and open up a discussion on embodiment and pedagogy in the modern academy.

Justin McDaniel is a professor of Buddhist Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He earned his PhD from Harvard’s Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies in 2003. His research foci include Lao, Thai, Pali and Sanskrit literature, art and architecture, and manuscript studies. His first book, Gathering Leaves and Lifting Words, won the Harry Benda Prize. His second book, The Lovelorn Ghost and the Magic Monk, won the Kahin Prize. His most recent book, Architects of Buddhist Leisure, examines “disengaged Buddhist” activities and spaces across Asia. He has received grants from the NEH, Mellon, Rockefeller, Fulbright, PACRIM, Luce, the SSRC, among others. He is the co-editor of the journals: Buddhism Compass, Journal of Lao Studies, and Associate Editor of the Journal of Asian Studies. He has won teaching and advising awards at Harvard U, Ohio U, the University of California, and the Ludwig Prize for Teaching at Penn. In 2012 he was named a Guggenheim Fellow and in 2014 a fellow of Kyoto University’s Center for Southeast Asian Studies. His forthcoming work includes edited books on Thai Manuscripts, Buddhist Biographies, Monasticism and Contemplation, and Buddhist ritual.

Please join the Department of Anthropology for a talk on, “The Racialized Who Racialize Others: Chinese Baristas and their Racial Projects in Postcolonial Italy,” presented by Postdoctoral Research Associate, Grazia Ting Deng, Brown University. This event will take place on Friday, February 7th at 12pm, Giddings House, room 212.

Lunch will be provided.

MOX EST CELEBRANDUM!

The Department of Classics presents the 72nd Annual Latin Carol Celebration on December 9th at 8 p.m. Seasonal readings by the Classics Department faculty, carols for all, with musical prelude and accompaniment by University Organist Mark Steinbach. Plus, the Chattertocks’ rendition of “The XII Days of Christmas” and a special arrangement by the Brown Madrigal Singers. Conducted entirely in Latin (with a bit of ancient Greek, modern Greek, and Sanskrit). Translations provided for those who are new to the ancient languages.

This popular event begins at 8:00 p.m. in the historic First Baptist Church in America, 75 North Main Street, Providence. The Latin Carol Celebration is free and open to the public. It lasts a little over an hour and street parking is available. 

The Classics Department cordially invites you to join us for Understanding the World: The Geography of Strabo of Amaseia, a lecture presented by Duane Roller from Ohio State University.

Ancient Greeks invented the discipline of geography. But of the many Greek geographical texts, only one survives, that of Strabo of Amaseia, written in the early first century AD. It was the Greeks who first determined that the world was a sphere, the extent of the inhabited world, and how to measure long overland distances. Strabo’s Geography, one of the longest surviving works from classical antiquity, is the source for all this material and more.

Duane W. Roller is Professor Emeritus of Classics at the Ohio State University. He served on and directed archaeological field projects in Greece, Turkey, Italy, Israel and Jordan, and was a four-time Fulbright scholar. He is the author of numerous books and articles on classical studies, most recently Cleopatra’s Daughter and Other Royal Women of the Augustan Age. His latest book, Empire of the Black Sea, will be published by Oxford University Press in spring 2020.

As always, this event is free and open to the public and a light reception will follow. You can find more information on the Classics website and Classics Facebook page. We hope to see you there!

The Program in Modern Greek Studies and the Department of Italian Studies cordially invites you to join us for Writing the Self in Mediterranean History, a lecture presented by Konstantina Zanou from Columbia University.

In this talk, Konstantina Zanou places herself together with the figures of some obscure—and less obscure—intellectuals who lived along the coasts of the Adriatic Sea in the first half of the nineteenth century, in order to understand how she came about to write her recent book Transnational Patriotism in the Mediterranean, 1800-1850: Stammering the Nation (Oxford University Press 2018). In treating herself and her topic as two parallel stories which developed simultaneously, she attempts to answer some questions concerning biography, transnationalism and Mediterranean intellectual history.

Konstantina Zanou is Assistant Professor of Italian, specializing in Mediterranean Studies, in the Italian Department at Columbia University. She is a historian of the long nineteenth century in the Mediterranean. Her research focuses on issues of intellectual and literary history, biography, and microhistory, with a special emphasis on Italy and Greece. She is also a student of modern diasporas and of the trajectories and ideas of people on the move. Her book Transnational Patriotism in the Mediterranean, 1800-1850: Stammering the Nation (Oxford University Press 2018) has won the 2019 Edmund Keeley Book Prize. She has also co-edited (with Maurizio Isabella) the volume Mediterranean Diasporas: Politics and Ideas in the Long Nineteenth Century (Bloomsbury 2016).

As always, this event is free and open to the public and a light reception will follow. You can find more information on the MGS website and Classics Facebook page. We hope to see you there!

Event poster (created by Sophia Papandonatou)

Poster created by Sophia Papandonatou

Please join Brown Contemplative Studies for a lecture by Si Jie Loo entitled, Swirling Spirits:  Memory and Meditation on November 11th from 6 - 7:30 pm in Smith-Buonanno, Rm. 106.  This event is free and open to the public.  

Si Jie Loo is a Malaysian Chinese artist whose artistic process entails regular art pilgrimages to China to learn about its ancient wisdom. She received her BA from Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, USA with an honors in Studio Art and has since exhibited in both US and Malaysia.

www.sijieloo.com

Terence Keel from UCLA’s Institute for Society and Genetics and Associate Professor Department of Africana Studies will give a talk, entitled “Ghost in the Race Machine: How Religious thought Haunts the Biomedical Sciences.” The talk draws on his engaging new book Divine Variations: How Christian Thought Became Racial Science, 2018.

Light refreshments will be served. RSVP for the lecture here!

Please join Brown Contemplative Studies for a Bazantar Recital by Mark Deutsch on October 30th in Grant Recital Hall from 6 - 7:30 pm.  This event is free and open to the public. 

Please join Brown Contemplative Studies for a lecture by Mark Deutsch entitled, Exploring Resonance, Harmonics and Vibrational Effects on Consciousness on October 30th, from noon - 1:30 pm in Orwig Music Building, Rm. 112. This event is free and open to the public. 

Please join Brown Contemplative Studies for a workshop with Pir Zia Inayat Khan entitled, Concentration, Contemplation, Meditation and Realization, on Saturday, October 26th from 10 am -1 pm at the Crystal Room, Alumnae Hall.  This event is free and open to the public. 

Pir Zia Inayat-Khan is a teacher of Sufism in the lineage of his grandfather, Hazrat Inayat Khan. He received his Ph.D. in Religion from Duke University. His books include Saracen Chivalry: Counsels on Valor, Generosity, and the Mystical Quest and Mingled Waters: Sufism and the Mystical Unity of Religions. Pir Zia is president of The Inayati Order and founder of Suluk Academy. Now based in Richmond, Virginia, Pir Zia frequently travels. www.inayatiorder.org

Please join Brown Contemplative Studies for a lecture by Pir Zia Inayat Khan entitled, The Sufi Teaching of Hazrat Inayat Khan, on Friday, October 25th from 5:30 -7 pm at Kassar House, Foxboro Auditorium.  This event is free and open to the public. 

Pir Zia Inayat-Khan is a teacher of Sufism in the lineage of his grandfather, Hazrat Inayat Khan. He received his Ph.D. in Religion from Duke University. His books include Saracen Chivalry: Counsels on Valor, Generosity, and the Mystical Quest and Mingled Waters: Sufism and the Mystical Unity of Religions. Pir Zia is president of The Inayati Order and founder of Suluk Academy. Now based in Richmond, Virginia, Pir Zia frequently travels. www.inayatiorder.org

“When the Lotus Went Underground: The Nichiren Buddhist Fuju Fuse Movement & Its Persecution in Early Modern Japan,” presented by Professor Jacqueline Stone, Princeton University.  

Japan’s political leaders in the late 16th century and early 17th century sought to break the independent power of Buddhist temples and subsume them within their new administrative order.  This policy particularly threatened the Nichiren sect, whose teaching place the Lotus Sutra above the authority of worldly rulers.  Forced to choose between doctrinal compromise to ensure institutional survival or principled resistance and martyrdom, the sect split, and the hardline fuju fuse (“neither receiving nor giving”) faction was outlawed and driven underground.  Their story illuminates major shifts in religion-state relations at the start of Japan’s early modern period.

Please join Brown Contemplative Studies for our Concentration Open House on Thursday, October 17th from 6 - 8 pm in the Goldfarb Social Hall, Brown/RISD Hillel. Come and meet our faculty and students, share some pizza and find out more about more about this interdisciplinary concentration.

Please join Brown Contemplative Studies for a Qigong and Tai Chi Workshop with Master Wen-Ching Wu on Sunday, October 13th from 10 am - 12 pm at Brown/RISD Hillel, Goldfarb Social Hall.  This event is $10 for general admission and $5 for Brown and RISD faculty, staff and students.  To register online please go to: https://tinyurl.com/y5a9me9w

Wen-Ching Wu is an internationally recognized instructor Chinese martial arts. He has owned and operated the Way of the Dragon School for Health Healing and Martial Arts in East Providence since 1990 where he teaches classes in Tai Chi, Qigong, Kung Fu and other styles of martial arts. In this
workshop he will lead participants through an introduction to Qigong and Tai Chi, giving them an opportunity to experience how these practices function as both exercise and as forms of
contemplative practice.

The Classics DUG invites you to join us for a Movie Night featuring the 2000 Touchstone Pictures film, O Brother, Where Art Thou?

The film is set in rural Mississippi during the Great Depression and is a modern satire loosely based on Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey that incorporates mythology from the American South.

Come out for some popcorn, soda, and a good movie with the Classics DUG.  We hope to see you there!

This event was made possible by the generous funding of the Bruce Elliott Donovan Memorial Endowment.

Please join the Department of Anthropology for a talk on, “Precarious Hope: Migration and the Limits of Belonging in Turkey,” presented by Assistant Professor, Ayse Parla, Boston University. This event will take place on Friday, October 11th at 12pm, Giddings House, room 212.

Lunch will be provided.

Please join Brown University Contemplative Studies for “Is Meditation Secular?  An Open Forum with faculty member, Jared Lindahl and student, Cameron McCartin on October 9th from 5 - 7:30 pm in Friedman Hall, Rm. 108.  This event is free and open to the public. 

Please join Brown Contemplative Studies for a Worshop with Professor Daniel Hirshberg on Contemplating the Smartphone Dis/Connect from 10 am - 12 pm in the Crystal Room, Alumnae Hall on Tuesday, October 1, 2019.  This event is free and open to the public. 

Daniel A. Hirshberg, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Mary Washington, where he serves as Director of the Contemplative Studies program and Associate Director of the Leidecker Center for Asian Studies. Specializing in historiography, hagiography, textual revelation (gter), and cultural memory, he received his doctorate in Tibetan studies from Harvard University in 2012. His first book, Remembering the Lotus-Born: Padmasambhava in the History of Tibet’s Golden Age (Wisdom Publications, 2016), won Honorable Mention for the E. Gene Smith Book Prize from the Association for Asian Studies in 2018. He has also published in Revue d’Etudes Tibétaine and Marginalia, among other academic and popular forums. He teaches several courses in Asian religions and Contemplative Studies, and leads study abroad programs in Nepal and Japan.

Please join Brown University Contemplative Studies for a lecture by Professor Daniel Hirshberg on The Rhetoric of Secularism in Contemplative Pedagogy, from 6 - 7:30 pm in Smith-Buonanno, Rm. 106 on Monday, September 30, 2019.  This lecture is free and open to the public. 

Daniel A. Hirshberg, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Mary Washington, where he serves as Director of the Contemplative Studies program and Associate Director of the Leidecker Center for Asian Studies. Specializing in historiography, hagiography, textual revelation (gter), and cultural memory, he received his doctorate in Tibetan studies from Harvard University in 2012. His first book, Remembering the Lotus-Born: Padmasambhava in the History of Tibet’s Golden Age (Wisdom Publications, 2016), won Honorable Mention for the E. Gene Smith Book Prize from the Association for Asian Studies in 2018. He has also published in Revue d’Etudes Tibétaine and Marginalia, among other academic and popular forums. He teaches several courses in Asian religions and Contemplative Studies, and leads study abroad programs in Nepal and Japan.

Memory Dishes highlights the cooking practices of six Rhode Island families: Alcantara, Aubourg, Malabre, da Graça, Jones, and Powell. They follow along tradition of women of African descent who reimagined culinary practices in the New World, blending traditional West and Central African recipes with Indigenous and European staples.

Today mothers, grandmothers, and aunts continue this tradition, passing recipes mixed with family histories to daughters, granddaughters, and nieces in kitchens throughout the Americas. The smells of the cachupasimmering on the stove, the sound of the concónscraped from the bottom of the pot, the rhythm of the pilon, and the heat of the scotch bonnet pepper are central to African diasporic life. Everyday food and cooking become complex forms of culinary art and rituals of remembrance and independence. This exhibition pays homage to female cooks, both seen and unseen, and the ways their labor connects vast and diverse diasporic peoples across generations.

Please join us for the opening reception of Memory Disheson Friday May 24, 2019 from 4:00-6:00 PM.

The graduate students of the Department of Classics cordially invite you to join us for the tenth annual Grimshaw-Gudewicz lecture, Translation as a “Contact Zone”: The Case of Translating Ovid’s “Tristia” into Chinese, presented by Jinyu Liu of Depauw University.

Jinyu Liu is the principal investigator of a multi-year project that aims to translate all of Ovid’s works into Chinese with commentaries. As the translator of Ovid’s Tristia, Liu has found the late Arif Dirlik’s conceptualization of translation as a “contact zone” particularly illuminating for omnipresent comparisons, discourses concerning cultural specifics, and negotiation of meaning within her project. More importantly, by seeing translation as a “contact zone” rather than a product or even a process, she explores how Classics can benefit from cross-cultural translations. 

Liu is a Professor of Classics at Depauw University as well as a Distinguished Guest Professor at Shanghai Normal University. She has published on Latin inscriptions, ancient associations, the non-elite in the Roman Empire, and reception of the Greco-Roman classics in China.

 As always, this event is free and open to the public. You can find more information on the Classics website and Classics Facebook page. We hope to see you there!

Event Poster by Eliza Chen

Abstract

Native Americans have higher rates than whites of contracting, experiencing complications from, and death due to diabetes and other diseases. As stress may exacerbate the effects of many diseases in Native communities, research is beginning to explore how stress reduction interventions may affect long-term health in these communities. However, psychological stress in these communities needs to be understood within the complex intersection of daily stress compounded by historical stress. Further, a distrust of western medicine in Native communities and poor understanding in psychology and medicine of Native communities is often an obstacle to effective communication and treatment.

Dr. Proulx’s presentation explores the development of mindfulness-based programs that were designed to address diabetes in Native communities in Oregon and California. His approach addresses the intersectionality of cultural trauma, daily stress, and poor health behaviors with the hope that 8 weeks of practicing the Native mindfulness class will reduce the physiologic risk that stress contributes to diabetes outcomes as well as reduce the psychological stress of managing diabetes. In particular, he explores the long process of trust building and community engagement that allowed us to gain community buy-in and commitment to the mindfulness programs. Further, he discusses how community members were invited to guide the years-long research study and adapt the current models of stress reduction and mindfulness to include Native traditions that are also inherently mindful. He will also discuss the challenges of engaging in psychosocial and medical research in rural Native communities and will provide opportunity for discussion on these topics.

About Dr. Jeffrey Proulx

Dr. Jeffrey Proulx’s primary research focuses on developmental health psychology and integrative health. He is particularly interested in the relationship between psychological stress and long-term physical health. Further, he is interested in the development of stress reduction programs, particularly those that are contemplative-based, as a means to protect health across the lifespan. He is a Native American with a strong interest in the study of health in underserved communities and much of his recent work has centered on culturally-specific stress reduction programs. To this end, he is currently funded by a K99/R00 award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health to study the effects of mindfulness in Native American communities as a means to address diabetes. His professional activities include participation on the OHSU School of Medicine Wellness Committee (with a focus on physician/nurse burnout) and he serves on the Spiritual Care Team for patients at the hospital. He is also currently working with researchers at Oregon State University on research exploring the effects of meditation in Native communities in Oregon and on other stress and coping-related projects. All of this is tied into his long-term effort to understand the extent to which integrative stress reduction methods can lower stress-related diseases among individuals and the practitioners who care for them.

The Mindfulness Center at Brown welcomes you to a lunchtime mindfulness practice. Join us for a guided sitting meditation and discussion on mindfulness.

Free and open to the public.

Thursday, March 28, 2019, 12:00–12:45pm.

South Street Landing, Room 498

Please RSVP here.

About the Mindfulness Center at Brown: Mindfulness Research, Education and Training

The Mindfulness Center at Brown University has educational programs for newcomers and seasoned practitioners.

The Mindfulness Center at Brown brings together top academics in mindfulness research with leading educators in the field.

We are dedicated to rigorous research, student-centered education, and a global presence to share mindfulness practices that improve individual lives and organizational effectiveness.

http://www.brown.edu/mindfulnesscenter

“Gospel Thrillers: The Bible and Conspiracy in U.S. Popular Culture.” a lecture with Andrew S. Jacobs, Mary W. and J. Stanley Johnson Professor of Humanities & Professor of Religious Studies, Scripps College

Since the 1960s, dozens of novels have appeared in the U.S. with a common plot: a newly discovered first-century gospel threatens to challenge everything we thought we knew about Jesus and Christian origins and a determined hero faces off against dangerous enemies (often Vatican assassins or Nazis or both) to discover the truth. What can these novels tell us about the particular fears and desires surrounding the authority and vulnerability of the Bible in the U.S.?

Finnian Moore Gerety works on texts, rituals, and the senses in South Asian religions, with a focus on Hindu traditions of India. He is especially interested in Sanskrit mantras: how they are performed, textualized, and passed on; how they are embodied and sensed; how they are reflected upon and interpreted; how they are transformed in the digital age; and how they influence identity, community, and heritage within religious traditions.

South Asia Seminar

The 2019 K. Brooke Anderson Lecture: “Call it Grace: Breath, Justice, Love” with Rev. Doctor Serene Jones, President, Union Theological Seminary

A highly respected scholar and public intellectual, the Rev. Dr. Serene Jones is the 16th President of the historic Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York. The first woman to head the 182-year-old institution, Jones occupies the Johnston Family Chair for Religion and Democracy. She is a Past President of the American Academy of Religion, which annually hosts the world’s largest gathering of scholars of religion. Jones came to Union after seventeen years at Yale University, where she was the Titus Street Professor of Theology at the Divinity School, and Chair of the University’s Program in Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies. The author of several books including Trauma and Grace, Jones, a popular public speaker, is sought by media to comment on major issues impacting society because of her deep grounding in theology, politics, women’s studies, economics, race studies, history, and ethics.

“The Missing Link: Siṁha Bhikṣu and Zongmi’s Revisioning of Chan History.” with Peter Gregory, Professor Emeritus, Smith College

Peter N. Gregory taught at Smith College from 1999 until 2014. After receiving his doctorate in East Asian languages and civilizations from Harvard University in 1981, he taught in the Program for the Study of Religion at the University of Illinois for 15 years. He has also served as the president and executive director of the Kuroda Institute for the Study of Buddhism and Human Values since 1984, and in that capacity he has directed two publication series with the University of Hawaii Press: “Studies in East Asian Buddhism” and “Classics in East Asian Buddhism.”

Gregory’s research has focused on medieval Chinese Buddhism, especially the Chan and Huayan traditions during the Tang and Song dynasties, on which he has written or edited seven books, including Tsung-mi and the Sinification of Buddhism (1991). He is currently completing a translation of a ninth-century Chinese Buddhist text on the historical and doctrinal origins of the Chan tradition.

After coming to Smith, Gregory’s research and teaching became increasingly concerned with Buddhism in America, on which he produced a film, The Gate of Sweet Nectar: Feeding Hungry Spirits in an American Zen Community (2004), and co-edited a book, Women Practicing Buddhism: American Experiences (Wisdom Publications, 2007).