Happy Spring! Please see below for a list of our upcoming events in the Spring quarter. 

（Events’ times and locations could change; please check our website or individual event emails for the most current information.）

Between Tradition andModernity：“Leftover” Women in Shanghai Tuesday, April 23, 2019 2:00 PM - 3:30 PM Bunche Hall 10383 Talk by Yingchun Ji, Shanghai University In recent years, single, educated women who are not yet married by their late 20s in China’s major cities have been increasingly castigated as “leftover” women. After more than 3 decades of rapid socioeconomic development, marriage remains near universal and early in China. In the meantime, there has been a resurgence of patriarchal traditions. Using semistructured interviews, in this qualitative research the author sought to understand the motivations of these women and their efforts to negotiate the contradictions regarding marriage formation and career development. Six themes emerged from the women’s narratives：（a）parental pressure,（b）a gender double standard of aging,（c）forced socioeconomic hypergamy,（d）the importance of compatible family backgrounds,（e）efforts to balance women’s independence with support for family and men, and（f）conflicting gender ideologies. The author contextualizes these themes by analyzing how women weave traditional expectations with modern life in a transitioning China, where tradition and modernity alternately clash and converge to constitute a somewhat uneasy mosaic society. Dr. Yingchun Ji is the Eastern Scholar Professor at the School of Sociology and Political Science at the Shanghai University. Dr. Ji obtained her PhD degree in Sociology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, MA in Sociology from the University of Victoria, and BA in Sociology from Nanjing University. She conducted her post-doctoral research at the School of Nursing at UNC-CH. Her research interests include social demography, family sociology and medical sociology.

What Is Real in Chinese Science Fiction? Toward a Poetics of the Invisibility Thursday, April 25, 2019 4:00 PM - 5:30 PM Bunche Hall 10383 Talk by Mingwei Song, Wellesley College   The contemporary new wave of Chinese science fiction began to emerge around the turn of the twenty-first century. This lecture explores the cutting-edge literary experiments that characterize the new wave, which evoke sensations ranging from the uncanny to the sublime, from the corporeal to the virtual, and from the post-human to the transcendent. I will discuss several important science fiction novels and stories such as Han Song’s “The Regenerated Bricks”（2011）, Subway（2010）and The Hospital Trilogy（2016-18）, Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Trilogy（2006-10）and “Micro-Era”（Liu Cixin, 2001）, Chi Hui’s “Rainforest”（2007）and 2030：Terminus（2017）, as well as Chen Qiufan’s “Balin”（2015）and The Waste Tide（2013）.  The new wave has a dark and subversive side that speaks either to the “invisible” dimensions of the reality, or simply the impossibility of representing a certain “reality” dictated by the mainstream realism. Making the “invisible” visible in scientific and political terms has enabled sf to cut sharply into the popular imagination and intellectual thinking of those who are, even faintly, aware of the alterity. On its most radical side, the new wave of Chinese sf has been thriving on an avant-garde cultural spirit that encourages one to think beyond the conventional ways of perceiving reality and challenge the commonly accepted ideas about what constitutes the “real.”  Mingwei Song is an Associate Professor of Chinese Literature at Wellesley College. His research interests include modern Chinese literature, cinema studies, youth culture, and science fiction. He served as the jury for numerous major Chinese science fiction awards, and he has been frequently interviewed by newspapers, radio and TV stations from the United States, United Kingdom, China, Australia, and Germany. He is currently completing a monograph Posthuman China：Poetics and Politics of Science Fiction.