China scholars meet at Brown for two-day research and translation workshop

Brown researchers Kaijun Chen (East Asian Studies) and Brian Lander (History, IBES), hosted distinguished scholars from across the US and beyond at a two-day series of related workshops.
On Thursday, September 21st, a “Workshop on Environment and Industry in Socialist China” featured research presentations by Jacob Eyferth (University of Chicago), Arunabh Ghosh
(Harvard University), Jennifer Altehenger (Oxford University), and Kaijun Chen (Brown) with commentary by Sigrid Schmalzer (U. Mass., Amhearst), Xiangli Ding (RISD), Jeffrey Moser
(Brown), and Jacob Eyferth. The afternoon’s events were capped by a public lecture, "From TheWaste Tide to AI2041: the Forking Paths to the Future of Technology" by noted Chinese Science
Fiction author Stanley Qiufan Chen (The Waste Tide, AI 2041), who is currently a visiting fellow at Yale. On Friday, September 22, those scholars was joined by roughly two dozen more colleagues from across New England, including faculty and graduate students from Brown’s East Asian Studies and History departments, for an “Environmental History Reading Workshop.” The group spent the day workshopping new translations of documents on the environment from pre-modern and modern Chinese History. The translations will ultimately become part of a documentary collection edited by Brown’s Brian Lander and Peter Lavelle of University of Connecticut.

The two-day event was sponsored by the New England Humanities Consortium; the Cogut Humanities Institute; the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs; the Swearer Center; the Salomon Center; the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society; and the Departments of History and East Asian Studies.