Humanities Lectures

In this conversation, panellists Claire Carey, Gregor Morgan and Allan Cumming join Professor Kevin Clements to discuss the role of nonviolence in the Save Aramoana Campaign and the lessons for other communities around the world. 20 October 2014

In Aotearoa New Zealand many Quakers have been involved in supporting, in diverse ways, the achievement of Maori self-determination, or tino rangatiratanga, as guaranteed by Te Tiriti o Waitangi. In this lecture David James, Jillian Wychel, Murray Short and Linda Wilson, reflect on their own experiences working as allies with Maori. The term working as allies has been used by author Jen Margaret to describe ways that non-indigenous persons work for and support justice for indigenous peoples. Together these four Quakers explore opportunities for Pakeha to work for justice for indigenous people through political and social change in very different ways on a day-to-day basis. 17 October 2014

Professor Haun Saussy, from the University of Chicago and a leading scholar of Chinese and comparative literature, delivers the fourth and final lecture in the 2014 De Carle Lecture series, Compared to What? The basic argument is that comparative literature grew from interdisciplinarity in the late eighteenth/early nineteenth centuries, struggled to become an autonomous field and in the process lost its interdisciplinary dimensions, then has been recovering them on new bases, but in an academic environment that is slow to reward risk-taking, unlike the moment immediately after the French Revolution when the gesture of sweeping the slate clean and inventing new sciences came naturally to so many of our predecessors. 10 October 2014

Through discussion of the conceptual metaphor of facing a crossroads, Professor Zhang Longxi of City University of Hong Kong will first establish the necessity of comparison in a general sense, and then will use another conceptual metaphor of killing a Chinese mandarin to explore the ethics of comparison, the issue of the relationship with one’s own group versus relationship, or the lack of it, with outsiders and strangers. As the world becomes increasingly globalized, the physical and psychological distance of human beings from one another is shrinking, and so is the possibility of moral indifference toward others outside one’s own group. This talk is sponsored by the University of Otago Research Theme for Cross-Cultural and Comparative Studies. 10 October 2014

Through discussion of the conceptual metaphor of facing a crossroads, Professor Zhang Longxi of City University of Hong Kong will first establish the necessity of comparison in a general sense, and then will use another conceptual metaphor of killing a Chinese mandarin to explore the ethics of comparison, the issue of the relationship with one’s own group versus relationship, or the lack of it, with outsiders and strangers. As the world becomes increasingly globalized, the physical and psychological distance of human beings from one another is shrinking, and so is the possibility of moral indifference toward others outside one’s own group. This talk is sponsored by the University of Otago Research Theme for Cross-Cultural and Comparative Studies. 10 October 2014

Professor Haun Saussy, from the University of Chicago and a leading scholar of Chinese and comparative literature, delivers the fourth and final lecture in the 2014 De Carle Lecture series, Compared to What? The basic argument is that comparative literature grew from interdisciplinarity in the late eighteenth/early nineteenth centuries, struggled to become an autonomous field and in the process lost its interdisciplinary dimensions, then has been recovering them on new bases, but in an academic environment that is slow to reward risk-taking, unlike the moment immediately after the French Revolution when the gesture of sweeping the slate clean and inventing new sciences came naturally to so many of our predecessors. 10 October 2014

Through discussion of the conceptual metaphor of facing a crossroads, Professor Zhang Longxi of City University of Hong Kong will first establish the necessity of comparison in a general sense, and then will use another conceptual metaphor of killing a Chinese mandarin to explore the ethics of comparison, the issue of the relationship with one’s own group versus relationship, or the lack of it, with outsiders and strangers. As the world becomes increasingly globalized, the physical and psychological distance of human beings from one another is shrinking, and so is the possibility of moral indifference toward others outside one’s own group. This talk is sponsored by the University of Otago Research Theme for Cross-Cultural and Comparative Studies. 10 October 2014

Professor Haun Saussy, from the University of Chicago and a leading scholar of Chinese and comparative literature, delivers the fourth and final lecture in the 2014 De Carle Lecture series, Compared to What? The basic argument is that comparative literature grew from interdisciplinarity in the late eighteenth/early nineteenth centuries, struggled to become an autonomous field and in the process lost its interdisciplinary dimensions, then has been recovering them on new bases, but in an academic environment that is slow to reward risk-taking, unlike the moment immediately after the French Revolution when the gesture of sweeping the slate clean and inventing new sciences came naturally to so many of our predecessors. 10 October 2014

Professor Haun Saussy, from the University of Chicago and a leading scholar of Chinese and comparative literature, delivers the third lecture in the 2014 De Carle Lecture series, History-Writing and Moral Community in China. The Chinese claim, seen with increasing frequency in current soft-power propaganda campaigns, of "5000 years of history" needs to be read in light of a process, over 2000 years long itself, of consensus-building by, of and for historians. How does such a thing as the Chinese Empire become, first an imaginary solution, then an inescapable reality, for a large part of humanity? The arts of rhetorical reading help us to see the successive articulations of what we now know as "China" or "Zhongguo." 2 October 2014

Professor Haun Saussy, from the University of Chicago and a leading scholar of Chinese and comparative literature, delivers the third lecture in the 2014 De Carle Lecture series, History-Writing and Moral Community in China. The Chinese claim, seen with increasing frequency in current soft-power propaganda campaigns, of "5000 years of history" needs to be read in light of a process, over 2000 years long itself, of consensus-building by, of and for historians. How does such a thing as the Chinese Empire become, first an imaginary solution, then an inescapable reality, for a large part of humanity? The arts of rhetorical reading help us to see the successive articulations of what we now know as "China" or "Zhongguo." 2 October 2014