Aoife Cantrill

A poster with the text: "This talk examines how Japanese settlers reimagined and branded Mt. Asahidake, Hokkado's highest peak, to advance colonial goals. For the Ainu, it was a sacred and distant realm, but after Hokkado's annexation in 1869, settlers replaced Ainu cosmologies with new narratives. In the 1920s and 1930s, the Hokkaido government, educators, journalists, and alpine clubs sought to bring the mountain closer everyday life by promoting its sublime beauty and accessibility, while the Imperial Japanese Army elevated it as a symbol of Japanese spirit. These redefinitions transformed Mt. Asahidake into a symbol of Japanese imperial identity, illustrating how mountains served as tools of dominance and regional assertion within the empire. Chris Tsui Shuen Lau is a historian of modern Japan and a postdoc at the University of Tübingen, Germany. Her research focuses on cultural, social, colonial, and global history. Her current project explores modern mountaineering in the Japanese empire, using Mt. Asahidake in Hokkaido and Yushan in Taiwan as case studies to investigate how mountains were reimagined and repurposed for colonial objectives."

Tomorrow at HKU! All are welcome.

A talk by Chris Tsui Shuen Lau: "From Ainu Cosmologies to Imperial Symbols: The Colonial Narratives of Mt. Asahidake in Hokkaido, 1900s-1930s"

Date: March 4, 2026 (Wed)
Time: 17:00-19:00
Venue: CRT-5.41, 5/F, Run Run Shaw Tower,
Centennial Campus, HKU

"Solitude is an elemental necessity of intellectual life, but it has been replaced by a technocratic vision of learning."

Joshua Hall on the work of literary critic Mark Edmundson: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/mark-edmundson-literary-criticism-american-university-humanities-essay/

YouTube video by Cambridge History Faculty Taoiseach of Ireland announces the first Childers Professor of Irish History, 20 February 2026.

Watch now on YouTube: Taoiseach of Ireland @micheal-martin.bsky.social announces Professor Alvin Jackson as first Childers Professor of Irish History @cam.ac.uk

Speeches also from Vice-Chancellor Deborah Prentice and @lucydelap.bsky.social

@trincolllibcam.bsky.social

🔗 youtu.be/rNynCzuh0CA?...

Blue book cover reading "Immunity on Trial: Ethiopian Courts, Chinese Corporations and Contestations over Sovereignty", Miriam Driessen

Introduction section of the book (available following the link on the publisher's website). It reads: "Introduction Everyone had retreated to rest in the scarce shade when Benli Li mounted a loader parked on the construction site.! He was bantering with an Ethiopian laborer under his direction and dared him to step into the machine's bucket. The worker complied, perhaps hesitant to go against his expatriate manager's request or eager to prove his courage. The Chinese foreman ignited the engine. The machine shot forward. Within moments, the young man lost his balance and landed on the ground. Unable to bring the machine to a halt, Li drove over him. On July 24, 2016, the Supreme Court of Amhara, Ethiopia, summonsed the twenty-six-year-old site supervisor to a hearing of its mobile bench at Debre Tabor, a mountain town in South Gondar. The state prosecutor demanded a prison sentence, charging Li with homicide caused by severe negligence. Li, however, did not appear, and the local police failed to find him. Months went by before the court arranged a new hearing. Yet again, the police officers of Farta Wereda, the rural county in which the incident occurred, visited the Chinese camp and returned empty-handed. They requested another adjournment. "This time", they wrote in their note to the Supreme Court, "we promise that we will bring him to court."3 They failed yet again. As procedure requires, the court then turned to the national press agency. It placed a public summons in the English-language newspaper The Ethiopian Herald and its Amharic counterpart Addis Zemen, calling"

Happy pub day to @driessenmiriam.bsky.social 's "Immunity on Trial: Ethiopian Courts, Chinese Corporations, and Contestations over Sovereignty," a labour of love and heartbreak, with fieldwork in Ethiopia spanning 2011-2020, by a brilliant colleague who's one of the finest anthropologists I know ✨💫

Recently on the Formosa Files Podcast: Austrian Traveler’s 1898 Journey Through Early Japanese Taiwan - Kaohsiung Times Three-part series presents the first known English translation of Adolf Fischer’s 1900 travelogue, offering rare outsider observations on colonial Taiwan from Dadaocheng to Takao.

Formosa Files: first English translation of 1898 Austrian traveler in Formosa
www.kaohsiungtimes.com/recently-on-...

‘In 1995, thousands of people attended a three-day outdoor festival in the ruins of a Banqiao distillery.The Taipei International Post-Industrial Arts Festival (臺北國際後工業藝術祭) featured some of the most notorious Taiwanese and international noise groups of that time[..]abrasive noise, and bodily senses’

The New York Review of Books: Massacre Under the Starry Flag Vicente L. Rafael The history of a single photograph reveals how an atrocity in the Philippines was forgotten by its American perpetrators. October 23, 2025 issue

We’ve lost Vince Rafael today. One of his last published works was this essay about the celebration and subsequent erasure of an atrocity in the U.S. colonization of the Philippines www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

I created a deep linked table of contents (titles searchable) for the over 50 issues of "Tokyo Gazette" (1937-1942) that can be found on @archive.org - great source for students to critique: froginawell.net/tokyo-gazette/ Done with major LLM help and OCR, main titles checked over manually. #japan

Yan Ge | It cannot read the human heart A friend in China messaged me on WeChat. ‘What are your thoughts on the plagiarism scandal?’‘What scandal?’ I...

‘“This plagiarism scandal is exposing a structural problem in Chinese literature,” my friend said. “Literature should never be funded by the government. Public financial aid only corrupts artists.”’

Yan Ge on the Chinese plagiarism scandal exposed on RedNote.

www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/fe...

Q&A with Maria Stepanova about "The Disappearing Act" We’re eagerly awaiting the publication next week of The Disappearing Act by Maria Stepanova, translated by Sasha Dugdale. Today we’re sharing a special pre-release interview with Maria Stepanova, one ...

‘My own personal choice is to continue writing – simply because that is the only thing I can do to counterbalance the distortion. Someone has to use Russian as a language of love’

- Maria Stepanova on Disappearing Act
@fitzcarraldoeds.bsky.social

shop.pushkinhouse.org/blogs/booksh...

In memory of Professor Murray Rubinstein [Obituary] Professor Murray A. Rubinstein Historian of Taiwan, Religion, and Identity Ph.D., New York University (1976) Professor Emeritus, Baruch College, City University of New York Senior Research…

Sharing this obituary on behalf of the European Association of Taiwan Studies as we remember Professor Murray Rubinstein in our own way and honour his profound contributions to Taiwan Studies and to our scholarly community: eats-taiwan.eu/news/in-memo...

History Workshop in Turbulent Times How can history offer illumination and hope at a time of global upheaval and chaos?

"We have a challenge here in the face of appalling things happening around the world not to give in to a politics of despair because that's exactly what the people in power want us to do."

Laura C. Forster, Julia Laite, Laura Schwartz, Anne Irfan and Jo Kelcey on doing history in turbulent times.

𝐂𝐚𝐥𝐥 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐚𝐛𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐬—𝐂𝐡𝐚: 𝐀𝐧 𝐀𝐬𝐢𝐚𝐧 𝐋𝐢𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐫𝐲 𝐉𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐧𝐚𝐥 𝐖𝐨𝐫𝐤𝐬𝐡𝐨𝐩

𝐇𝐨𝐧𝐠 𝐊𝐨𝐧𝐠 & 𝐈𝐫𝐞𝐥𝐚𝐧𝐝:
𝐈𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐰𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐧 𝐇𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐬, 𝐒𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐞𝐝 𝐋𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐮𝐚𝐠𝐞𝐬, & 𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐧𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐅𝐮𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞𝐬

⧉ 𝐌𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐢𝐧𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧: chajournal.com/2026/02/17/c...
。。。。。

The interface of the Taiwan cross-database archival search website got a full revamp in the wake of the opening of the new National Archives -nice!

Now if so could fix the zillion 國家寶藏基金會 results that have been coming up for years no matter the keyword that would be amazing 😅
across.archives.gov.tw

Required Reading: The Life of Everyday Texts in the British Empire by Priyasha Mukhopadhyay

Priyasha Mukhopadhyay

Congrats to Priyasha Mukhopadhyay, whose book Required Reading won the @modernlanguage.bsky.social's Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for South Asian Studies! Explore her groundbreaking look at how ordinary writing shaped the way colonial subjects understood their place in empire: hubs.ly/Q03Yb5cj0

Ad for hunting gear/guns that ran in the Japanese settlers' newspaper 京城日報 in colonized Korea (1925). Many elite male settlers emulated the sporting practice of White hunters (complete with dogs), while Korean access to firearms remained strictly limited.

JOB> Bicentenary Research Fellowships in Humanities, University of Manchester www.jobs.manchester.ac.uk/Job/JobDetai...

Muban Educational Trust The Muban Educational Trust was established in 1997 by Christer von der Burg and the late Verena Bolinder-Müller. It is a small charity based in south-west London and is dedicated to the preservation,...

There's a bunch of high-quality stuff about #Chinese #printmaking and #graphics on the Youtube channel of the Muban Educational Trust, quite the resource:
www.youtube.com/@mubaneducat...

The Future That Was How Third World women seized the means of knowledge production to fight against rising authoritarianism and imagine a future freer than our present

The Introduction, “What is the Future We Yearn For?,” to my book, *The Future That Was*, is now live and freely available to all on the book’s @princetonupress.bsky.social website

press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...

Policing Language in Colonial India Vipin Krishna explores how colonial officials in nineteenth-century India turned linguistics into a tool for classification, surveillance, and control.

In the nineteenth century, British officials became obsessed with collecting and codifying 'secret languages' across northern India.

In our latest article, Vipin Krishna explores how linguistics became a tool for classification, surveillance, and control.

【★メルマガ号外配信しました】

文学通信のメルマガ［号外］
12/2（火曜）19時開催！
これからの人文書翻訳の話をしよう！
bungaku-report.com/blog/2025/11...

空齋獨坐，正思夜來床頭鼠耗可惱，不知其戛戛者是損我何器，嗤嗤者是裂我何書。中心回惑，其理莫措，忽見一狻貓，注目搖尾，似有所覩。斂聲屏息，少復待之，則疾趨如風，唧然一聲，而此物竟去矣 —— 不亦快哉！ I'm sitting alone in my study with a mouse on my mind. I’m wondering which of my things that nibbling sound is coming from, which book's destruction is the source of that chewing noise, and quite at a loss for what to do — when out of nowhere I spot a vicious-looking cat, eyes blazing, tail lashing, gaze fixed on something I can’t see, and I hold my breath and watch as it darts forward, quick as the wind, and with a piteous squeak that little critter is gone for good — — ahhhh, you love to see it.

飯後無事，翻倒敞篋。則見新舊逋欠文契不下數十百通，其人或存或亡，總之無有還理。揹人取火拉雜燒淨，仰看高天，蕭然無雲 —— 不亦快哉！ Rummaging through some old chests after dinner for lack of anything better to do, I discover dozens of unpaid promissory notes, more than a hundred maybe, from borrowers variously living and dead, and uniformly unlikely to repay, and so when nobody's looking I pile them together higgledy-piggledy, set them on fire, burn them clean away, and then look up at the sky, where they leave not even a cloud behind — — if that's not a good feeling, I don't know what is.

冬夜飲酒，轉復寒甚，推窗試看，雪大如手，已積三四寸矣 —— 不亦快哉！ Drinking on a winter's night, I feel a sudden sharp chill and push open the window to see snow falling in flakes the size of my hand, three or four inches deep already — — if that isn't nice, I don't know what is. 夏日於硃紅盤中，自拔快刀，切綠沉西瓜 —— 不亦快哉！ On a summer’s day, take a sharp knife, slice up a bright green watermelon, and set it out on a deep vermilion plate — — Well!

春眠初覺，似聞家人嘆息之聲，言某人夜來已死。急呼而訊之，正是-城中第一絕有心計人 —— 不亦快哉！ I'm just waking up one spring morning when I seem to hear someone in my household sighing and saying something about somebody dying the night before. Startled awake, I ask who. It turns out to be the schemingest bastard in town — — if that doesn’t cheer you up, nothing will.

In 1657, Jin Shengtan 金聖嘆 broke off from his commentary on 'The Romance of the Western Chamber' to list "33 Nice Things" 不亦快哉三十三則.
It's one of the most likable things I know of in any language. I translated it to cheer myself up a while ago, if anyone could use it. www.burninghou.se/p/whats-good

savenottinghamlanguages The University of Nottingham has suspended applications to all languages degree programmes, with a view to permanent closure of all of its undergraduate languages degrees. Under the proposals, it…

Colleagues and UCU members from UoN's Department of Modern Languages have put together this wonderful guide on supporting their programmes. A lot of what they suggest is also helpful in challenging the 48 courses at risk across the university

www.savemlcatnotts.org.uk

Photograph of old box of flashcards with Chinese characters.

John K. Fairbank’s flashcards. #sinology

#Unicode now includes new Hanzi characters suggested by Taiwan's education ministry, but this doesn't cover all possible characters. "The infamous #tofu characters (those little boxes that appear when fonts don't support a character) are frustratingly common for users of Taiwan's diverse languages."

Sandbag protection of artworks in Venice in 1916, in anticipation of bombing.

Feminist Translation Studies Special Issue: Translating with the Earth: Gender, Feminism and Eco-Translation. Guest Editors: Şebnem Susam-Saraeva and Carolyn Shread. Volume 2, Issue 1 of Feminist Translation Studies

So glad to share with you the inaugural special issue of Feminist Translation Studies 'Translating with the Earth: Gender, Feminism and Eco-Translation' www.tandfonline.com/toc/rftr20/2/1 @olgacastro80.bsky.social @ftnetwork.bsky.social @womenintranslation.bsky.social @drpaulinehenry.bsky.social

Tamil | Priyamvada Ramkumar | Granta ‘Every language grows by absorbing and layering the absorbed with its own genius. The act of translation has long been a lubricant for this form of exchange.’

‘Every language grows by absorbing and layering the absorbed with its own genius. The act of translation has long been a lubricant for this form of exchange.’ 

Priyamvada Ramkumar on translating Tamil and the evolution and expansion of languages.

granta.com/tamil/

Publishing across the UK and Europe in 2026, TAIWAN TRAVELOGUE by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, translated by Lin King

‘A delightfully slippery novel about how power shapes relationships’
New York Times

www.andotherstories.org/taiwan-trave...

The Repetition of China | Made in China Journal Chinese scholars who have engaged with Fredric Jameson often observe—sometimes with admiration and sometimes with a degree of irony—that he appears ‘more Marxist than any Marxist in China’. Jameson’s ...

In this essay, Alex Taek-Gwang Lee argues that China no longer mirrors Western modernity but transforms it from within, forcing us to rethink the very categories through which we understand capitalism, socialism, and the modern world, and to confront the limits of the West's theoretical imagination.