• Saying and Renunciation in Chang Chung-yuan’s Commentary to the Dao De Jing

    Room CRT-7.45, 7/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU

    Dr. Johan Siebers - Religious Studies Unit, Middlesex University London (https://www.mdx.ac.uk/about-us/our-people/staff-directory/profile/siebers-johan) Abstract One of the most conspicuous aspects of the Dao De Jing is its negative view of language. Language is unable to express the full nature of being, the Dao, which is, rather, open only to an intuitive, direct and ineffable, spontaneous and creative […]

  • International Colloquium: Philosophies of Communication – East and West

    Seminar Room 745, 7/F Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, The University of Hong Kong

    Additional Content Organizers: Adrian Pablé (HKU) and Johan Siebers (Middlesex University) This international colloquium explores aspects of language philosophy with a focus on the relation between Eastern and Western paradigms. Contributions can be historical, philosophical, literary, linguistic, or related to media/communication, but all in one way or another connected to the question if and how the […]

  • Literary Realism in the Anthropocene

    Room CRT-7.45, 7/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU

    Dr. Adeline Johns-Putra - School of Literature and Languages, University of Surrey (https://www.surrey.ac.uk/englishandlanguages/staff_list/complete_staff_list/adeline_johnsputra/) Abstract Some have recently argued that the age we now call the Anthropocene demands new understandings of human ontology and thus of history. I ask what such a renewed sense of history might mean for literary realism, invested as it is in […]

  • Transitive Cultures: Anglophone Literature of the Transpacific

    Room CRT-7.45, 7/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU

    Dr. Chris Patterson - Department of Humanities and Creative Writing, Hong Kong Baptist University (http://hum.hkbu.edu.hk/staff.php?staff_class=ts&staff_id=41) Abstract This presentation will discuss the major concepts of Dr. Patterson’s book Transitive Cultures: Anglophone Literature of the Transpacific, which traces forms of racial governance from colonial-era racial pluralism to contemporary global multiculturalism through an exploration of Asian migrant narratives […]

  • Bermuda on the Move: Origins and Typological Affinities of Bermudian English

    Room CRT-7.45, 7/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU

    Dr. des. Nicole Eberle - School of English, The University of Hong Kong (https://english.hku.hk/staff/neberle.htm) Abstract In this presentation, I discuss results from both a qualitative and quantitative analysis of Bermudian English, which form part of a research project on the origins, dialect contact history and typological relationships of this “lesser-known variety of English” (Schreier et […]

  • Samoan ghost stories: John Kneubuhl and oral history

    Room CRT-7.45, 7/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU

    Dr. Otto Heim - School of English, The University of Hong Kong Abstract Hailed as "the spiritual father of Pacific Island theatre" (Balme 2007: 194), John Kneubuhl is best known as a playwright and a Hollywood scriptwriter. Less well known is that after his return to Samoa in 1968 he also devoted much of his […]

  • Building Memory: Digital Place-Making in Zuni Icosahedron’s Architecture of the City

    Room CRT-7.45, 7/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU

    Dr. Joanna Mansbridge - Department of English, City University of Hong Kong (https://scholars.cityu.edu.hk/en/persons/joanna-gwen-mansbridge(976997ed-c96f-4ba4-9053-ed96c55ff62c).html) Abstract This talk emerges from two central questions: How do performance and performance technologies participate in constructing alternative spaces and building collective memory? How does the city itself – its architecture, interactions, artefacts – perform? With Zuni Icosahedron’s two recent productions, The Architecture of the City (Dec. 2017) […]

  • ‘An act of welcome’: writing as hospitality in Refugee Tales (2016)

    Room CRT-7.45, 7/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU

    Dr. Harriet Hulme - Society of Fellows in the Humanities, The University of Hong Kong (https://englishhkuhk.foarts.hku.hk/people/Faculty/90/Dr%20Harriet%20Hulme) Abstract In Refugee Tales, its editor David Herd suggests that the asylum process symbolically dehumanises asylum seekers by restricting their ability to narrate their story on, and in, their own terms. Refugee Tales is itself an attempt to remedy this situation: mimicking […]

  • “At Last It Arrested Her”: The Historical Portrait in Pride and Prejudice

    Room CRT-7.45, 7/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU

    Ms. Xu Lingyi, Olivia - School of English, The University of Hong Kong Abstract When characters pause to look at portraits in nineteenth-century English novels, they often learn key information about the depicted subjects. One of the most memorable examples is Elizabeth’s encounter of Mr. Darcy’s portrait at Pemberley in Pride and Prejudice. The painting softens […]