About the lecturer: A political refugee after the collapse of the 1898 Reform Movement, Kang Youwei spent fifteen years in exile, attempting to organize a political movement from abroad but most of all seeking the meaning of Chinese history through comparisons with that of other nations. As chronicled in his periodical Buren zazhi, his travels took him through eleven European countries, each of which nourished his reflection on politics, economics, governance, and customs. Rome occupied a special place in these reflections, as a kind of mirror image and alternate past for the Chinese empire. Kang’s meditation in the ruins of the Roman Senate sketch out, in terms reminiscent of Montesquieu, a history of the deliberative assembly as political form subject to particular conditions of viability. As the topic of “Rome and China” has been revived in recent scholarship (e.g., Randolph Ford, Walter Scheidel), Kang’s way of envisioning the parallel may have suggestive value for contemporary thinking about empires, alliances, and confederations.
About the speaker: Dr. Haun Saussy is a professor at East Asian Languages and Civilizations and the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. He was president (2009-2011) of the American Comparative Literature Association and is currently a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His primary research interests include classical Chinese poetry and commentary, literary theory, comparative study of oral traditions, problems of translation, pre-twentieth-century media history, and ethnography and ethics of medical care. He is the author of six monographs and the editor/co-editor of seven books. His most recent monograph is The Making of Barbarians: China in Multilingual Asia (2022).
