Lunar New Year Celebration
Category: Event
Lunar New Year Cultural Potluck
Where: @ SRB MPR
When: January 29th
Time: 7:00pm – 10:00pm
Exploring Taiwan with Miss Chizuru: The Fictional Craft of Taiwan Travelogue
Date: February 20, 2025
Time: 3:30–4:50pm
Location: Harold Frank Hall 1104
Description:
How can a Taiwanese novel incorporate historical materials from its decades under
Japanese colonial rule? How does two women’s travelogue become a work of fiction?
This talk will examine Taiwan Travelogue’s use of a “Shōwa Taiwan Railway
Gourmet Tour” as its storytelling framework, covering the novel’s early inspirations,
conceptual development, research, fieldwork, archives-building, story conception, and
writing process.
How can historical documents from the Japanese colonial period be material for novel
writing? How do women’s travels in history become the subject of fictional
storytelling? Using Taiwan Travelogue as an example, this lecture will cover the
journey of creating the “Shōwa period Taiwan Railway Gourmet Tour,” from initial
inspiration, concept development, research, and fieldwork to organization, story
structure, and the final writing process.
The Author: Yáng Shuang-zi
Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, whose real name is Yang Jo-Tzu, is a versatile writer from Taichung,
Taiwan. She dabbles in various forms, including fiction, essays, manga scripts, and
literary criticism.
In 2020, she was named one of the Rising Stars of the Twenty-First Century by
Wenshun magazine and was selected by Unitas magazine as one of the Twenty Most
Promising Young Novelists. In 2021, she became the youngest-ever nominee for the
United Daily News Literary Award. In 2022, Wenshun magazine again recognized
Yáng as a Representative Author of Twenty-First Century Taiwanese Popular
Literature.
Her notable works include the novel The Season When Flowers Bloom (花開時節) in
2017, the short story collection Blossoming Girls of Gorgeous Island (花開少女華麗
島) in 2018, and the novel Taiwan Travelogue (臺灣漫遊錄) in 2020. Taiwan
Travelogue received Taiwan’s highest literary honor—the Golden Tripod Award. In
2024, its Japanese translation won Japan’s Best Translation Award, while the English
version earned the National Book Award for Translated Literature in the United
States.
CARE: Archives & Bodies Reading Group
We’re forwarding information about a new reading group initiative, “The Archives & Bodies Reading Group.” It critically examines and reimagines the roles archives play in humanities research and explores intersections between archival practices, embodiment, and marginalized histories – topics that may be of interest to many in our research community. It is part of an event series organized by the Collective for Archival Research of Embodiment (CARE), a UC-wide multicampus graduate student working group, which includes our colleagues Yiming, Uudam (RG ST), Diandian (MUSIC), Tinghao (FAMST), and other UC grad students. Other CARE events include archival writing workshops and an end-of-year performative exhibition. For more information, please take a look at the attached flyer and reach out to the contact people.
The inaugural session details are below:
Theme: “Mnemonic Bodies: Affective Archives, Memory, and Care”
Date&Time: Saturday, November 9, 6:30 PM (PST)
Platform: Zoom
Reading Materials:
- Jacques Derrida, “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression”
- Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power (chs. 1&4)
- Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire (ch. 3)
Registration: https://tinyurl.
Access to readings: https://tinyurl.com/
This open-to-all reading group is organized by the Collective for Archival Research of Embodiment (CARE), a UC-wide graduate student working group. It’s sponsored by the UC Humanities Research Institute, the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, and the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies at UCSB.
For questions, please contact: Yiming Ma (UCSB): yimingma@ucsb.edu; Tianyun Hua (UCD): tyhua@ucdavis.edu
Event: Animism Today on 10/21-22
Next Monday and Tuesday (October 21 and 22) four prominent scholars from Japan will come to UCSB to address the topic of “Animism Today” in popular culture, traditional culture, and contemporary arts, also in conversation with members of the UCSB community. The term “animism” is used in Japan with positive connotations as a way to describe widespread forms of Japanese religiosity and, to an extent, Japanese cultural identity.
For full information, please see the event page on the Religious Studies website.
At Rob Gym Room 1005 (in the low building to the left before the entrance to Rob Gym).
Monday afternoon features four papers addressing various aspects of animism by Hirafuji Kikuko, MInato Chihiro, Koizumi Bon, and Matsumura Kazuo. See the program below for more information.
On Tuesday, there will be eight brief presentations by UCSB colleagues:
9:30–12:00 Roundtable Rethinking “Animism” and Related Phenomena (“paganism,” polytheism, idolatry, materiality of religion, secularization, etc.)
We will have presentations from Claudia Moser (History of Art and Architecture), Amit Shilo (Classics), Ranjani Atur (Ph.D., Religious Studies UCSB; Classics, University of Minnesota); and Rudy Busto, Thomas Carlson, Will Ellison, Fabio Rambelli, and Christine Thomas (all from Religious Studies)
Organized by Kikuko Hirafuji (Kokugakuin University), Fabio Rambelli, and Christine Thomas (UCSB).
Sponsors:
Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology Open Laboratory for Emergence Strategies (ROLES), The University of Tokyo
Kokugakuin University (Tokyo)
UCSB Virgil Cordano OFM Chair in Catholic Studies
UCSB International Shinto Foundation Chair in Shinto Studies
UCSB Department of Religious Studies
Prof. Frühstück Speaks on the Value of Foreign Language Study at Recent Event
Prof. Sabine Frühstück recently spoke at the “For the Love of Language” event for the College of Humanities and Fine Arts. You can read about the event here or watch a recording of it below.
