Videos of Past Events

Tarryn Li-Min Chun, Assistant Professor, Department of Film, Television and Theatre, University of Notre Dame

In this talk, Dr. Chun will draw on her recently published book, "Revolutionary Stagecraft: Theater, Technology, and Politics in Modern China" (University of Michigan Press, 2024) to discuss deep entanglements among technological modernization, political agendas, and the performing arts in China from the 1920s to the early 1980s. By examining both iconic performances and little-known plays from the perspective of the stage technologies involved, this talk reveals the complex and at times surprising ways in which Chinese theater artists and technicians of the 20th century envisioned and enacted their own political and artistic revolutions through the materiality of the theater apparatus.

Tarryn Li-Min Chun is Assistant Professor in the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre at the University of Notre Dame. Her research focuses on intersections of performance, technology, and media in modern and contemporary Sinophone theatre. She is author of "Revolutionary Stagecraft: Theater, Technology, and Politics in Modern China" (University of Michigan Press, 2024) and co-editor with Xiaomei Chen and Siyuan Liu of "Rethinking Socialist Theaters of Reform: Performance Practice and Debate in the Mao Era" (University of Michigan Press, 2022). Her work has appeared in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, TDR, and Asian Theatre Journal, and several edited volumes. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship (USA) and other awards.

David Zweig, Professor Emeritus, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

This talk documents China’s “over-the-top” effort to gain the help of immensely talented Chinese who were living and working in the US, as well as the US government’s harsh counterattack, and its strategy to disrupt the transfer of US technology to China. The case studies include stories of unknown victims of that campaign whose cases were never made public. It also highlights the harm this war has brought to Sino-American scientific collaboration and the education of Chinese students in America.

David Zweig (PhD, The University of Michigan, 1983) is Professor Emeritus, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Distinguished Visiting Professor of Taipei School of Economics and Political Science, National Tsinghua University, Taiwan, and Vice-President of the Center for China and Globalization (Beijing). He was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard in 1984-85, and received the Humanities and Social Sciences Prestigious Fellowship, Research Grants Council, Hong Kong, 2013-14. For 15 years, he directed the Center on China’s Transnational Relations at HKUST.