Making sense of the many Chinas: a dialogue between Xiaolu Guo and Jeffrey Wasserstrom
Key information
- Date
- Time
-
7:00 pm to 9:00 pm
- Venue
- Paul Webley Wing
- Room
- Wolfson Lecture Theatre (SWLT)
- Event type
- Seminar
About this event
As different as Xiaolu Guo's personal, story-driven Everyday Tang is from historian Jeffrey Wasserstrom's Everything You Wanted to Know about China, both are short new books by versatile authors, and both seek to entertain as well as inform general readers.
Both also stress the need to remember that China has always been a land characterised by transformations as well as continuities, and one where multiple cultural strands are always in play. In this event, moderated by Dr Carwyn Morris, Guo and Wasserstrom will draw each other out on their latest books and their recent engagements with China, including the most interesting, exciting, unsettling, and unexpected experiences.
Registration
This event is open to the public and free to attend; however, registration is required. This event is taking place on campus and will not be recorded or live-streamed.
Organiser
This event has been organised by the SOAS China Institute.
Image credit: Yubin Zhou
About the speakers
Xiaolu Guo is a writer and filmmaker who was born in China and published six books there before moving to Britain in 2002. One of her many films, She, A Chinese, received the Golden Leopard Award at the Locarno Festival 2009. Her publications since moving to the UK include the memoir Once Upon a Time in the East, which won the National Books Critics Circle Award; last year's novel Call Me Ishmaelle, a celebrated reimagining of Moby Dick; and Everyday Tang: On What We Can Learn from a Dynasty, just out from Notting Hill Editions.
Jeffrey Wasserstrom is a Distinguished Professor of History at UC Irvine and a past Leverhulme Visiting Professor at Birkbeck College who writes for both general interest periodicals and academic journals. He is the editor of The Oxford History of Modern China and the author, most recently, of Everything You Wanted to Know about China* (*But Were Afraid to Ask), a chatty work in question and answer form that was published in the UK and Singapore by Bui Jones Books earlier this year and will be out in other markets from Stanford University Press in 2027.
Chair
This event will be chaired by Dr Carwyn Morris (Senior Lecturer in Digital Society and Geography in the Department of Media Studies and a Research Fellow at the SOAS China Institute).
Contact
Email: sci@soas.ac.uk
