Drawing members from fields across UWM and other institutions in the Milwaukee area, the Critical East Asian Humanities Reading Group offers scholars from a wide swath of disciplines and departments a forum in which to focus on recent scholarship concerning East Asia. Our goal is to explore the humanities as critical disciplines in contemporary society. Amid an ongoing global shift in attention towards East Asia, assessing the rise of this region requires new modes of inquiry that integrate approaches and methodologies from cultural studies and critical theory.

The CEAHRG shares and discusses cutting-edge research and hosts talks by scholars from the around the region and across the nation in order to open a space of intellectual exchange and critical inquiry with a commitment to engaging in new approaches to East Asian critical humanities.

Upcoming Events

Coming soon!

Past Events

Midwest Japan Seminar
Seminar and Workshop (April 4, 2020)

Participants in this one-day conference will workshop in-progress papers by three scholars of Japan: Elizabeth Lublin (Wayne State University), Robert Tierney (University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign), and Hilary Snow (UWM Honors College).

Divining the Past: Dream Encyclopedic Knowledge in China
Lecture with Brigid Vance (October 25, 2019)

In this talk, Professor Vance asks what happens to dreams after they are dreamed? How was such knowledge about dreams disseminated in China? What was the value of earlier knowledge about dreams in the Ming dynasty? This talk traces the legacy and cultural import of dreams and dream divination from the Song (960-1279) through the Ming (1368-1644) dynasties by examining a dream encyclopedia.

Youth for Nation: Culture and Protest in Cold War South Korea
Lecture with Charles Kim (April 26, 2019)

Historian Charles Kim (University of Wisconsin – Madison) came to campus to discuss the April 19th Students’ Revolution that occurred in 1960 in South Korea. The talk was based on Kim’s recent book, offering a cultural explanation of this landmark event, rooted in post-WWII and Korean War statist rhetoric and media that encouraged student protestors to emulate the anticolonial resistance movement of March First (1919).

The ‘Human’ in History and Biology
Distinguished Lecture by Julia Adeney Thomas (April 5, 2018)

The Critical East Asian Humanities Reading Group hosted this special lecture in association with the World History Association & UWM Asian Studies Distinguished Lecture series. Julia Adeney Thomas is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. During her talk, Thomas addressed the question, “What does it mean to be human in an epoch of accelerating climate change, the Age of the Anthropocene?”

Group Members:

  • Xin Yu (History)
  • Nan Kim (History)
  • Hilary Snow (Honors College)
  • Xin Huang (Women’s Studies)
  • Michael Wert (History, Marquette University)
  • David Divalerio (History and Religious Studies)
  • Kevin Mulholland (Foreign Languages and Literature)