Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and the Wat Endowment and hosted by the Department of Asian Studies. Yip So Man Wat Memorial Lecture. David Der-wei Wang is Edward C. Henderson Professor of Chinese Literature and Director of the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation Inter-University Center for Sinological Studies at Harvard University. The world’s leading scholar of modern Chinese fiction, his research specialties include modern and contemporary Chinese literature, late Qing fiction and drama, and comparative literary theory. Wang received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and has taught at National Taiwan University and Columbia University. His many honors include an honorary doctorate from Lingnan University (Hong Kong), and his appointments as an Academician of the Academia Sinica (Taiwan) and as a Yangtze River Scholar affiliated with Fudan University (Shanghai). Writing at a time when History has collapsed and Revolution has lost its mandate, writers cannot take up the two subjects without pondering their inherent intelligibility. Drawing upon theories on “post-history” as developed by scholars such as Jacques Derrida, Li Zehou and Liu Zaifu, and contemporary fictional works as created by writers such as Mo Yan, Yan Lianke and Wang Anyi, this lecture will address the following three issues: History after Post-History, Enlightenment versus Enchantment and Socialist Utopia and “the Best of all Best Possible Worlds”.
Mike Church – Drivers of environmental change: the case of the world's rivers
Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and hosted by St. John’s College. Michael Church is a Professor Emeritus at UBC. Church’s research interests focus on the morphodynamics of rivers at all scales from steepland streams to large rivers. He is currently involved in long-term studies of sediment transport and stability in Fraser, Peace and Mackenzie rivers. The Fraser River Study is concerned with finding a way to manage the river to maintain or improve the existing flood protection while maintaining the ecological character of the river. The Sediment transport is also studied in an experimental program conducted in our environmental hydraulics laboratory. Church has been recognized as a world leader in fluvial sediment transport and the interpretation of river channel changes. In addition, he is interested in fluvial landscape evolution over intermediate time scales (order 10,000 years), history, and methodology of geomorphology.
Relevant Books and Articles at UBC Library
Church, M., & Moore, D. (1989). Appreciation. Atmospheric Environment (1967), 23(6), i-i. doi:10.1016/0004-6981(89)90143-1 [Link]
Jakob, M., & Church, M. (2011). The trouble with floods. Canadian Water Resources Journal, 36(4), 287-292. doi:10.4296/cwrj3604928 [Link]
Dugmore, A., Borthwick, D. M., & Church, M. J. (2007). The role of climate in settlement and landscape change in the north atlantic islands: An assessment of cumulative deviations in high-resolution proxy climate records. Human Ecology [H.W.Wilson – SSA], 35(2), 169. [Link]
UBC Library Research Guides
David Owen – Why Manhattan is the Greenest City in North America
Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and presented by the Global Civic Policy Society and the School of Architecture + Landscape Architecture at UBC. David Owen has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1991. Before joining The New Yorker, he was a contributing editor at The Atlantic Monthly and, prior to that, a senior writer at Harper’s. He is also a contributing editor at Golf Digest. He is the author of more than a dozen books: High School, about the four months he spent pretending to be a high-school student; None of the Above, an exposé of the standardized-testing industry; The Man Who Invented Saturday Morning, a collection of his pieces from Harper’s and The Atlantic Monthly; The Walls Around Us: A Thinking Person’s Guide to How a House Works; Around the House, a collection of essays about domestic life; The First National Bank of Dad: The Best Way to Teach Kids About Money; Copies in Seconds, about the invention of the Xerox machine; and Sheetrock & Shellac, a sequel to The Walls Around Us. In addition, he has written four books about golf—My Usual Game, The Making of the Masters, The Chosen One: Tiger Woods and the Dilemma of Greatness, and Hit & Hope—and he co-edited a collection of golf stories entitled Lure of the Links. His most recent book is Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less are the Keys to Sustainability, which grew out of a widely discussed 2004 New Yorker essay called “Green Manhattan.” He lives in Washington, Connecticut, with his wife, the writer Ann Hodgman.
Relevant Books and Articles at UBC Library
Response strong to new, green Manhattan project. (2006). Waste News, 11(27), 5. [Link]
Berenholtz, R., & Reynolds, D. M. (1988). Manhattan architecture (1st ed.). New York; London; Toronto: Prentice Hall Press.
Macdonald, E. C. (1994). Manhattan oasis. Architectural Review, 194(1170), 45-47. [Link]
UBC Library Research Guides
Larry Goldenberg's Men's Health: Connecting the Dots Webcast Online
Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and UBC Woodward Library as part of the “Health Information Series.” Dr. Larry Goldenberg is an award-winning Canadian researcher, pioneer in the treatment of prostate cancer and world-renowned advocate of patient education. Dr. Goldenberg authored one of the first books to explain prostate cancer treatment options in layman’s terms. Prostate Cancer: All You Need to Know to Take an Active Part in Your Treatment, now in its third edition, is widely considered to be one of the best resources available to men diagnosed with the disease. Dr. Goldenberg talks about how the 21st century will be a century of aging, and how the Men’s Health Initiative will help people not only live long, but live healthy.
Kate Hennessy – Repatriation, Digital Media, and Culture in the Virtual Museum
Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and hosted by the School of Library, Archival, and Information Studies (SLAIS). Many Canadian First Nations and Aboriginal organizations are using digital media to revitalize their languages and assert control over the representation of their cultures. At the same time, museums, academic institutions, and individuals are digitizing their ethnographic collections to make them accessible to originating communities. In this presentation I will explore how the term “virtual repatriation” is being applied to the digitization and return of heritage to Aboriginal communities, and draw attention to the opportunities, challenges, and critiques associated with digitization, circulation, and remix of Aboriginal cultural heritage. I will discuss recent projects including the collaborative production of a Virtual Museum of Canada exhibit with the Doig River First Nation, a Dane-zaa community in northeastern British Columbia, and a current collaborative production of a virtual exhibit with members of the Inuvialuit community in the western Arctic and curators at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. I will show that while access to cultural heritage in digital collections can facilitate the articulation of intellectual property rights to digital cultural heritage—-including the right to restrict circulation—-it also amplifies the difficulty of enforcing those rights. Kate Hennessy is an Assistant Professor specializing in Media at Simon Fraser University’s School of Interactive Arts and Technology (SIAT). She has a PhD in Anthropology from the University of British Columbia and an MA in the Anthropology of Media from the University of London, School of Oriental and African Studies. As the director of the Making Culture Lab at SIAT, her research explores the role of digital technology in the documentation and safeguarding of cultural heritage, and in the mediation of culture, history, objects, and subjects in new forms. Her video and multimedia works investigate documentary methodologies to address Indigenous and settler histories of place and space. She is a founding member of the Ethnographic Terminalia Curatorial Collective, an international group exploring the borders of anthropological, curatorial, and artistic practice (http://ethnographicterminalia.org). As assistant editor of the journal Visual Anthropology Review, she designed its first multimedia volume. Her work has been published in journals such as American Indian Quarterly, Museum Anthropology Review, and Visual Anthropology Review. She was a Trudeau Foundation Scholar from 2006-2010, a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Graduate Scholar from 2005-2009, a Canadian Polar Commission Scholar in 2006-2007, and a Commonwealth Scholar in 2001-2002.
Select Articles Available at UBC Library
Hennessy, K. (2012). Cultural heritage on the web: Applied digital visual anthropology and local cultural property rights discourse. International Journal of Cultural Property, 19(3), 345-369. doi:10.1017/S0940739112000288. [Link]
Hennessy, K. (2009). Virtual repatriation and digital cultural heritage: The ethics of managing online collections. Anthropology News, 50(4), 5-6. doi:10.1111/j.1556-3502.2009.50405.x. [Link]
Hennessy, K., & Moore, P. (2006). New technologies and contested ideologies: The tagish FirstVoices project. The American Indian Quarterly, 30(1), 119-137. doi:10.1353/aiq.2006.0006. [Link]
UBC Library Research Guides
Kevin Laland – The Evolution of Culture
Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and hosted by Green College. Both demographically and ecologically, humans are a remarkably successful species. This success is generally attributed to our capacity for culture. But how did our species’ extraordinary cultural capabilities evolve from its roots in animal social learning and tradition? In this seminar, Laland will provide a provisional answer. After characterizing contemporary research into animal social learning, he will focus in on a case study of stickleback learning that illustrates the strategic nature of animal copying. Laland will go on to describe the findings of an international competition (the “social learning strategies tournament”) that he organized to investigate the best way to learn. Laland will suggest that the tournament sheds light on why copying is widespread in nature, and why humans happen to be so good at it. Finally, he will end by describing some other theoretical and experimental projects suggesting feedback mechanisms that may have been instrumental to the evolution of Culture.
UBC Library Resources
Laland, K. (2004). Social learning strategies. Learning & Behaviour, 32(1), 4-14. [Link]
Reader, S. M., & Laland, K. N. (2002). Social intelligence, innovation, and enhanced brain size in primates. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 99(7), 4436-4441. doi:10.1073/pnas.062041299. [Link]
Hoppitt, W., Laland, K. N., & ebrary eBooks. (2013). Social learning: An introduction to mechanisms, methods, and models. Princeton: Princeton University Press. [Link]
Laland, K. N., & Brown, G. R. (2011). Sense and nonsense: Evolutionary perspectives on human behaviour. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.
UBC Research Guides
Faisal Devji – The Meaning of Global Jihad
Global Islam: Past, Present and Future is presented by UBC Continuing Studies, the Department of Asian Studies at UBC, the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and the Laurier Institution. It is part of UBC Continuing Studies’ Lifelong Learning Series. Faisal Devji is a historian who specializes in studies of Islam, globalization, violence and ethics. His multidisciplinary work grounds empirical historical issues in philosophical questions. He has taught at The New School in New York City. Since 2009, Devji is Reader in Modern South Asian History, Oxford University. He also is a senior fellow at the Institute for Public Knowledge (New York University). Now a Canadian citizen, Devji is Zanzibari, having been born in Dar es Salaam in 1964 to a family of Indian ethnicity. His undergraduate education was at the University of British Columbia, where he received double honors in history and anthropology. He received his PhD from the University of Chicago with his dissertation Muslim Nationalism: Founding Identity in Colonial India and was chosen to be a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. He has taught at Yale University and also served as Head of Graduate Studies at The Institute of Ismaili Studies in London. He knows English, French, Gujarati, Hindi, Kutchi, Khojki, Swahili, Persian, Sindhi and Urdu. In 2005, Cornell University Press published his Landscapes of the Jihad: Militancy, Morality, Modernity, exploring the ethical content of jihad as opposed to its more widely-studied purported political content. The book draws a distinction between the majority of Islamic fundamentalist organizations concerned with the establishing of states and al-Qaeda with its decentralized structure and emphasis on moral rather than political action. His next book was The Terrorist in Search of Humanity: Militant Islam and Global Politics, published by Columbia University Press in October 2008. Devji is also a regular contributor to the scholarly journal Public Culture and serves on its Editorial Committee. Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre.
Select Articles Available at UBC Library
Devji, F. (2013). Muslim Zion. Harvard University Press. [Link]
Devji, F. (2012). The impossible Indian: Gandhi and the temptation of violence. London: Hurst & Co.
Khan, N. (2014). Faisal Devji. Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a political idea. The American Historical Review, 119(5), 1663-1664. doi:10.1093/ahr/119.5.1663. [Link]
Devji, F. (2013). Communities of violence. International Journal of Middle East Studies, 45(4), 801-803. doi:10.1017/S0020743813000949. [Link]
UBC Library Research Guides
Digitization project/program in the Abbotsford News
An article about the digitization of photo archives from the Reach Gallery Museum appears in the Abbotsford News. This project received funding from the BC History Digitization Program, an initiative of the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre.
You can view the article here, and find out more about the BC History Digitization Program here.
David Der-wei Wang – Writing History after "Post-History": On Contemporary Chinese Fiction
Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and sponsored by the Wat Endowment and hosted by the Department of Asian Studies. Yip So Man Wat Memorial Lecture. David Der-wei Wang is Edward C. Henderson Professor of Chinese Literature and Director of the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation Inter-University Center for Sinological Studies at Harvard University. The world’s leading scholar of modern Chinese fiction, his research specialties include modern and contemporary Chinese literature, late Qing fiction and drama, and comparative literary theory. Wang received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and has taught at National Taiwan University and Columbia University. His many honors include an honorary doctorate from Lingnan University (Hong Kong), and his appointments as an Academician of the Academia Sinica (Taiwan) and as a Yangtze River Scholar affiliated with Fudan University (Shanghai). Writing at a time when History has collapsed and Revolution has lost its mandate, writers cannot take up the two subjects without pondering their inherent intelligibility. Drawing upon theories on “post-history” as developed by scholars such as Jacques Derrida, Li Zehou and Liu Zaifu, and contemporary fictional works as created by writers such as Mo Yan, Yan Lianke and Wang Anyi, this lecture will address the following three issues: History after Post-History, Enlightenment versus Enchantment and Socialist Utopia and “the Best of all Best Possible Worlds”.
Author’s Titles at UBC Library
Wang, D. (1999). Under the soviet shadow: The Yining incident; ethnic conflicts and international rivalry in Xinjiang, 1944-1949. Wantage: Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. [Link]
Wang, D., & Rojas, C. (2007). Writing Taiwan: A new literary history. Durham: Duke University Press. [Link]
Wang, D., & Shang, W. (2005). Dynastic crisis and cultural innovation: From the late Ming to the late Qing and beyond. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Asia Center. [Link]
UBC Library Research Guides
Book, Theatre and Film Reviews