2014 Events

Tuesday March 25, 5:15-7:00PM (Bartlett Hall 316, UMass)

“From World History to World Literature: A Proposal for a New Comparative Method” a lecture-seminar with Professor Shu-mei Shih (UCLA), co-sponsored with LLC, the Five College A/P/A, and a Mellon Mutual Mentoring Grant Professor Shih’s lecture will explore and invite discussion on the question of world literature from the perspective of world history and, in the process, propose a new theory of comparison.

Shu-mei Shih is professor of Comparative Literature, of Asian Languages and Cultures, and of Asian American Studies, and co-director of the Mellon Postdoctoral Program, “Cultures in Transnational Perspective,” at UCLA. Her publications include Sinophone Studies: A Critical Reader (co-edited with Chien-hsin Tsai and Brian Bernards); Creolization of Theory (co-edited with Françoise Lionnet); Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations across the Pacific; Minor Transnationalism (co-edited with Françoise Lionnet); and The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917-1937.

Thursday, April 17, 4:30-6:30 (Bartlett Hall 316, UMass)

Please click here to access a PDF of Professor Mathew’s work-in-progress, “Disarming Commerce” (password protected).
A work-in-progress seminar with our colleague Johan Mathew (UMass-Amherst), Assistant Professor of Economics and History. Johan is completing a manuscript entitled Margins of the Market: Trafficking and Capitalism across the Arabian Sea, which examines the central role of trafficking in the structuring of colonial economies from the 1870s until the 1950s. He will be presenting the third chapter from the manuscript which details the illicit arms trade across the Arabian Sea and how it capitalized on the slippages in the colonial regime of property rights. The chapter, titled “Disarming Commerce: Gun-Running and the Security of Property across the Arabian Sea,” draws on state archives in India and the United Kingdom, British business records and merchant correspondence from the Persian Gulf.