OCT. 13 

Lecture Series on Japan Kimihiko Nomura, Foreign Languages, on the history of karaoke singing. Sponsored by JFusion and the Humanities Center.

5:00 pm Trinity 100.

A lecture series on Japan is being offered in order to continue the positive momentum that was generated during the successful fundraising efforts for Japan in March and April by the Chico Japan Friendship Club (CJFC) and JFusion at CSU, Chico. The series will run from September to December. JFusion is a support group to the Japanese language program, Foreign Languages, CSU, Chico. CJFC is a voluntary group consisting of members who are interested in and about Japan.

OCT. 19 
Tim Tatton-Brown, Archaeological Consultant to Salisbury Cathedral, "The Making of a Medieval Masterpiece: Construction of Salisbury Cathedral (1220–1258)"

Public Lecture 7:00 pm, PAC 134

Tim Tatton-Brown has written an authoritative book on the constructional history of Salisbury Cathedral, beautifully illustrated with color photographs by John Crook of Winchester. His public lecture will focus on the construction of the main parts of this great cathedral, one of the most beloved and visited cathedrals in England. Tim will discuss how this attractive cathedral was built in less than 40 years for the main structure, one of the fastest constructions in medieval architecture, dispelling the notion that medieval cathedrals took centuries to complete. His informal session will follow up with the addition of tower and spire on the completed cathedral, which required an engineering feat for the lower structure.

OCT. 20
Tim Tatton-Brown, Archaeological Consultant to Salisbury Cathedral, "On the Construction of the Tower and Spire of Salisbury Cathedral"

Humanities Center Lecture, 7:00 pm, Trinity 100

The spire is the tallest in England at a little over 400' in height, built from the second half of the 13th century to the 15th century. For more Tim Tatton-Brown's association with Salisbury Cathedral and his monographic publication, refer to the website: http://tinyurl.com/44qu5aeLincoln.

OCT. 20 

Chunyan Song, Sociology, "Feeding China's Little Emperors in the Age of Globalization"

Humanities Center Lecture, 4 PM, Trinity 100*

Dr. Chunyan Song has been teaching in the Sociology Department since 2005. Her research interests include sociology of education, family, and demography. Since 2009, Dr. Song has been working with a global multi-disciplinary team on a research project to compare the social and cultural factors affecting child feeding practices in four cultures: China, Japan, Germany, and the U.S. Food is a matter that profoundly affects children all over the world. The food children eat has a wide range of health consequences as well as cultural, political, and socioeconomic ramifications. In China, feeding the "single-child" generation has experienced a major transformation with the onslaught of globalization and economic boom. Drawing on to her most recent research on the subject, Dr. Chunyan Song will discuss the social and cultural factors that affect the child feeding practices in China.

OCT. 27

Lecture Series on Japan. Katie Post, Public Affairs and Publications and CJFC, on mental and philosophical dimensions of the art of "Budo".

Sponsored by JFusion and the Humanities Center. 5:00 PM Trinity 100.

NOV. 2
Xiaoze Xie, Paul L. & Phyllis Wattis Professor of Art at Stanford University, will visit campus to speak on Chinese contemporary art.*

Xiaoze Xie received his Master of Fine Art degrees from the Central Academy of Arts & Design in Beijing and the University of North Texas. He has had solo exhibitions at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, AZ; Dallas Visual Art Center, TX; Modern Chinese Art Foundation, Gent, Belgium; Charles Cowles Gallery, New York; Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco; Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto; China Art Archives and Warehouse, Beijing; Gaain Gallery, Seoul; Devin Borden Hiram Butler Gallery, Houston, TX; among others.

He has participated in numerous group exhibitions including Shu: Reinventing Books in Contemporary Chinese Art at the China Institute Gallery in New York and Seattle Asian Art Museum, and the traveling exhibition Regeneration: Contemporary Chinese Art from China and the US. His 2004 solo at Charles Cowles was reviewed in "The New York Times", "Art in America" and "Art Asia Pacific". More recent shows have been reviewed in "Chicago Tribune", "The Globe and Mail" and "San Francisco Chronicle".

His work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art and the Arizona State University Art Museum. Xie received the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2003) and artist awards from Phoenix Art Museum (1999) and Dallas Museum of Art (1996).

Nov. 3 

Buddhism in Japan

Lecture Series on Japan with Jason Clower, Religious Studies.

5:00 pm Trinity 100.

Nov. 4

"Demystifying Chinese Kung Fu"*

Wai-hung Wong, Philosophy, Humanities Center lecture

4–5:30 pm, Trinity 100

Ever since the TV series Kung Fu and Bruce Lee's movies made Chinese Kung Fu well-known to the West, Chinese martial arts have been mystified and their power exaggerated. In this presentation, Prof. Wai-hung Wong of the philosophy department, who has been practicing Chen style Tai Chi for more than twenty years, will talk about the history, styles, and unique features of Chinese martial arts, explain why they have been mystified, and try to tell the facts from the myths about them.

Nov. 9 

Writer's Voice Reading: George Keithley

7:30 pm Trinity 100

George Keithley's epic poem The Donner Party, a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, received the Wrangler Award from the Western Heritage Center and has been adapted as a stage play and an opera. A collection of poems, Song in a Strange Land, received the Di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America. The Starry Messenger, a sequence of poems about Galileo, has been highly praised by Jane Hirshfield, Marvin Bell, Daniel Hoffman, and X. J. Kennedy, among others. His latest collection is Night's Body. His poems, stories, and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Harper's, Triquarterly, The Sewanee Review, The North American Review, New Letters, and American Poetry Review, and have earned such prestigious prizes as the Pushcart Prize, the Allen Tate Poetry Prize, and a Raymond Carver Short Story Award.

Nov. 17 

Reading Culture of Edo Japan.

Lecture Series on Japan with Sandra Collins, History

5:00 pm Trinity 100.

Dec. 1 

The Art of Tea as an Aesthetic Experience.

Lecture Series on Japan with Yoshio Kusaba, Emeritus, Art History

5:00 pm Trinity 100.

Dec. 8 

Writer's Voice

7:30 pm Trinity 100

February 23

Writer’s Voice Reading. Steve Edwards.

7:30 pm Trinity 100

Steve Edwards is author of the memoir Breaking into the Backcountry (U of Nebraska-Bison Books, 2010), the story of his seven months of solitude as caretaker of a remote mountain homestead along the Rogue River in Oregon. He is working on a new nonfiction book about his grandfather’s appearance on the cover of LIFE magazine in 1942. Born and raised in Indiana, educated at Purdue University and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, he is now an assistant Professor of English Studies at Fitchburg State University in Fitchburg, Massachusetts.

March 1

Writer’s Voice Reading. Troy Jollimore.

7:30 pm Trinity 100

Troy Jollimore is the author of two collections of poetry, At Lake Scugog (Princeton University Press, 2011) and Tom Thomson in Purgatory (MARGIE/Intuit House), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry in 2006, as well as a chapbook (The Solipsist, Bear Star Press 2008).  As a philosopher, he has authored Love’s Vision (Princeton UP, 2011) and On Loyalty (Routledge, forthcoming 2012). Currently he is Professor of Philosophy at California State University, Chico.

March 8

“China and the West” featured visiting speaker, writer Yiyun Li

7:30 in Trinity 100, followed by a reception*

Yiyun Li grew up in Beijing and emigrated to the United States after university to study medical science. She started writing in English, her second language, in her late twenties, and has since published three books to critical acclaim. Her debut collection, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, the Guardian First Book Award, the PEN/Hemingway Award, among others. Her novel, The Vagrants, was shortlisted for IMPAC Dublin Award. Her recent collection, Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, was shortlisted for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award and was a finalist of the Story Prize. She was selected by Granta as one of the 21 Best Young American Novelists under 35, and was named by the New Yorker as one of the top 20 US writers under 40. The MacArthur Foundation named her a 2010 fellow.

Critical praise for her 2010 book, Gold Boy, Emerald Girl:

“A stellar assortment of stories about struggles to escape and connect in contemporary China. ... Further proof that Li deserves to be considered among the best living fiction writers.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“The nine brilliant stories in Li's collection offer a frighteningly lucid vision of human fate.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Li is extraordinary ... a storyteller of the first order ... each tale in this collection is as wild and beautiful and thorny as a heart ... Li inhabits the lives of her characters with such force and compassion that one one cannot help but marvel at her remarkable talents.”
—Junot Díaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

April 5

Writer's Voice Reading Camille T. Dungy

7:30 pm Trinity 100

2011 American Book Award winner Camille T. Dungy is the author of Smith Blue (Southern Illinois University Press: 2011), Suck on the Marrow (Red Hen Press: 2010), and What to Eat, What to Drink, and What to Leave for Poison (Red Hen Press: 2006). She is the editor of Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (University of Georgia Press: 2009), and co-editor of From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great (Persea Books: 2009). Professor in the Creative Writing Department at San Francisco State University, Dungy's honors include an NEA fellowship, two NACCP Image Award nominations, and two Northern California Book Awards. Dungy's recent work has been published in Poetry, Callaloo, on Verse Daily, and in many other journals and anthologies

April 5

The Rise of the Christian Movement in Modern China, China and the West

Guest speaker Xi Lian, Research Associate at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University

7:30 pm in Glenn 212 *

In the course of the twentieth century, Protestant Christianity in China underwent a historic transformation—from a beleaguered alien faith presided over by Western missionaries into a vibrant, indigenous religion of the masses. This new religion initially took the form of sectarian groups and independent preachers arising outside the missionary establishment. It endured decades of repression by the Communist state after 1949 and has since blossomed into an underground church movement with tens of millions of followers. The homegrown Christianity of the Chinese masses has been characterized, as a whole, by a potent mix of evangelistic zeal, charismatic ecstasies, and a fiery eschatology frequently tinged with nationalistic self-assurance. As both a religious and a social movement, it has emerged amidst the upheavals of modern China; with a current membership that rivals that of the Chinese Communist Party. Despite its foreign origin, this development signals an evolution of popular religion in modern China in which Christianity joined local beliefs in supplying the core ideology of millenarian movements.

Xi Lian is professor of history at Hanover College and is currently an associate in research at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University. He is the author of Redeemed by Fire: The Rise of Popular Christianity in Modern China (Yale University Press, 2010, winner of "Christianity Today 2011 Book Award" and Chinese Historians in the United States "Award for Academic Excellence [2010]"). His other works include The Conversion of Missionaries: Liberalism in American Protestant Missions in China, 1907–1932 (1997).

April 18

Acupuncture in Chinese Culture: From Prehistory to the Present, Michel Czehatowski 

5:00 pm in Trinity 100*

Acupuncture is a medical therapy that is unique to China. From the neolithic "bian" stones to the surgical stainless steel disposable needles of modern times acupuncture's sole purpose has been to treat sickness and pain. Acupuncturist Michel Czehatowski will present an introduction to acupuncture and Chinese medicine and reveal some of the secrets surrounding this mysterious system of medicine.

Michel Czehatowski, L.Ac. is a graduate of the San Francisco College of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine and has been licensed to practice acupuncture since 1984. Prior to studying acupuncture he obtained a Bachelor of Science degree in Anthropology from the University of Idaho.

April 19 

Joyce Grimm, Listen, respond, invent…repeat 

5–6 pm Trinity 100

Joyce Grimm is the guest juror for the University Art Gallery's 57th Annual Juried Student Exhibition, April 30–May 13, 2012. Grimm is a San Francisco writer, curator, and art consultant. She was the co-owner/ director of Triple Base Gallery (2005–11) and currently teaches in the MFA program at California College of the Arts. Located in San Francisco's Mission district, Triple Base Gallery was an experimental exhibition space that encouraged ambitious and dedicated artists to take their work a creative step further and challenge themselves in their artistic practice.

May 3 
Writer's Voice Reading: Rob Davidson (English)

7:30 pm Trinity 100

Rob Davidson was born in 1967 in Duluth, Minnesota, and was educated at Beloit College and Purdue University. From 1990-1992, he served in the U.S. Peace Corps in the Eastern Caribbean, where he taught secondary-level English language and literature. He is the author of The Farther Shore: Stories (Bear Star, 2012), The Master and the Dean: The Literary Criticism of Henry James and William Dean Howells (University of Missouri Press, 2005), and Field Observations: Stories (University of Missouri Press, 2001). Davidson's honors include winning the 2009 Camber Press Fiction Award; a 1997 AWP Intro Journals Project Award; a Pushcart Prize nomination; and having twice been selected Artist-in-Residence at the Byrdcliffe Arts Colony in Woodstock, New York. His fiction, essays and interviews have appeared in ZYZZYVA, Hayden's Ferry Review, Indiana Review, The Normal School, New Delta Review, and elsewhere.

*The Humanities Center's theme for this year is "China and the West."