Steven Pinker, Harvard University

See the Mahindra Humanities website for more information. 

Please join Jelani Cobb, Professor of History and Director of the Institute for African American Studies at the University of Connecticut, contributor to The New Yorker, and recipient of the 2016 Jay College of Criminal Justice Trailblazer award, along with Thomas Abt, Senior Research Fellow and Adjunct Lecturer with the Harvard Kennedy School and former Deputy Secretary for Public Safety for New York State, for a wide-ranging dialogue on new pathways for addressing the some of the most sensitive and polarizing issues in criminal justice today. Leah Wright Rigueur, Assistant...

The Story of Iraq: Past, Present, and Insights into the Future

Please join us for a conversation between Amb. Lukman Faily, Iraq's Ambassador to the US, and Meghan O'Sullivan, Jeane Kirkpatrick Professor of the Practice of International Affairs and Director of the Geopolitics of Energy Project. This event is open to the public, and is co-sponsored by the Belfer Center's Geopolitics of Energy Project and the Middle East Initiative. RSVPs are welcomed but not required: (Nikoleta_Sremac@hks.harvard.edu).

Presenter: Christian Henriot, professor of modern Chinese history at Aix-Marseille University and a Senior Research Fellow at the Institut Universitaire de France (2007-2012)

The issue of death loomed large in Chinese cities in the modern era. Despite its intrinsic importance in any society and its particular importance in the historical experience of Chinese cities, however, death is basically absent from the field of Chinese urban history. Based on a study of Shanghai between 1865 and 1965, Christian Henriot explores what death meant and represented in China...

Zhichen Cong, Lecturer, Party School of the Central Committee of CPC

Gulazat Tuerxun, Professor of Law, Law School of Xinjiang University

Boon Eng Khor, Associate Professor of Chinese Studies, University Tunku Abdul Rahman, Malaysia

Fan Shitao, Lecturer, Beijing Normal University

Presenters: 

Bruce Chen, Deputy Director General, Taipei Economic and Cultural Office

Kazuko Kojima, Associate Professor of Law, Keio University

Kai Guan, Professor of Anthropology, Minzu University of China

Directed by Xie Jin. With Shi Jianlan, Wang Fuli, Shi Weijian

China 1980, 35mm, color, 127 min. Mandarin with English subtitles

Xie Jin traces the vicissitudes of political upheaval in the People’s Republic from the 1950s to the end of the 1970s by mapping them onto the shifting relations between two friends from college and the man they both fall for. Rather than schematic allegory, Xie fashions a moving, intimate look at lives ruined by purges and ideological revision.Legend of Tianyun Mountain was among the first films to...

Following passage of Senate Resolution 201 on October 2011 and House Resolution 683 in June 2012, expressing regret for the Chinese exclusion laws, Covington & Burling LLP’s Martin Gold penned Forbidden Citizens: Chinese Exclusion and the U.S. Congress: A Legislative History, a book that for the first time traces the timeline and background of those laws. Acting pro bono on behalf of the Chinese-American community, Covington helped to secure adoption of the resolution. In Forbidden Citizens, Mr. Gold documents the legislative debates and actual texts of the nine exclusion measures,...

The CMES Director's Series presents

Yann Richard
Professor Emeritus, director, l’Institut d’études iraniennes, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris

Iranian sources do not come readily available when a major political change brings about a return to authoritarian rule, as was the case in February 1921 or August 1953. The nationalistic discourse provides misleading answers by blaming foreign interference. A close analysis dismantles conspiracy theories. Where is the truth? This talk will present newly published documents to...

Sohbet-i Osmani presents

Ali Yaycioglu
Ali Yaycioglu is a historian of the Ottoman Empire intersecting Early-Modern Europe and the Muslim World. His book, Partners of the Empire: Crisis of the Ottoman Order in the Age of Revolutions (Stanford University Press, 2016) is an attempt to rethink the Ottoman experience within the global context of the revolutionary age in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The book examines institutional transformations, political crises and settlements for reform in the Ottoman Empire. His current book...