Lecture Series 2025-2026: Borderlines: Asia Through Geospatial Desires

When and Where

Friday, September 12, 2025 3:00 pm to Wednesday, March 18, 2026 5:00 pm
EAS Lounge, 14th Floor
Robarts Library

Description

Curator: Erin Y. Huang

“Borderlines” probes the formation of Asia through the histories of borders, borderlands, frontiers, and other geospatial technologies of bordering (in the verb form). At a time of growing global connectedness that prompts the imaginary of a borderless world, the practice of bordering, which is increasingly tied to the modern nation-state, continues to evolve and proliferate. From mountains, rivers, deserts, and oceans (attributes of geography), to smart walls, drone patrols, and biometric technologies of mass surveillance (artificial and technological borders), borders have become a combination of the physical and the virtual, its complex workings motivating and shaping inter-racial, inter-imperial, inter-national, and trans-continental relations. Asking what we can learn from seeing Asia through borderlines, the series invites speakers whose work address the long history of migration, empire expansion, population control, war, security, religion, trade, settlement, territory, technology, and the emergence of perpetual zones of exception, conflict, and extraterritoriality. At the intersection of multiple geospatial realities and virtualities, “Borderlines” examines the border’s integral role in reinforcing sovereign statehood, but also its potentials in challenging and rewiring geospatial desires. 

 

1) The Travels of Yelü Chucai and the Interpretation of the Mongol Empire

Speaker: Matthew Mosca

Time: Friday, September 12, 3-5pm

Location: EAS Lounge

Abstract:

Chinese histories of the early Mongol empire assigned a crucial formative role to the minister Yelü Chucai – a figure unknown to other historical traditions.  From the 1630s onward, translations prepared in the Qing Empire freed Yelü Chucai to circulate widely across Eurasia.  This talk contrasts his reception in Europe, where his achievements were embraced and celebrated, with the more guarded stance of Manchu and Mongol authors.  It argues that Yelü Chucai became a touchstone for addressing one of the thorniest questions in the historical interpretation of the Mongol Empire: the relationship between early khans and advisors drawn from the sedentary world.

Bio:

Matthew W. Mosca is Dau-lin Hsu Endowed Professor and associate professor of History and International Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle.  His book The Khan and the Unicorn: Mongol Empire and Qing Knowledge in the Making of World History (Harvard Asia Center) will be published in 2026.

 

2) Transpacific Freedom Dreams Across Militarized Cartographies: A Korean Argentine Diasporic Viewing of Im Heung-soon’s Good Light, Good Air

Speaker: Junyoung Verónica Kim

Time: Friday, October 10, 2-4pm

Location: Munk School, 1 Devonshire Pl, 108N

Abstract:

On April 30th, 1977, 14 mothers sent a letter asking the military dictator Jorge Rafael Videla for the whereabouts of their disappeared children and began to gather in silent protest in the Plaza de Mayo, Buenos Aires. Known as the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, and the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, this spurred a mass movement that continues today. Around the same time, on May 18th, 1980, citizens of Gwangju, South Korea, launched a mass resistance movement against the dictatorship of Chun Doo-hwan. The South Korean military retaliated in full force resulting in the massacre and disappearance of thousands of Gwangju citizens. The connections and intimacies between the overlapping histories of these two cities demonstrate the ways in which Global South countries were violently conscripted into dirty wars against communism. Despite the explicit linkages, why are the histories of these two places (cities and nations) studied separately––divided and separated by discrete disciplinary boundaries? How does insurgent memory both disrupt dominant historical national narratives and yoke together these two geographies/histories/futurities? Moreover, how does the present absence of the missing in Gwangju and the desaparecidos (disappeared) in Buenos Aires haunt the urban geographies that are shaped through the ordinary violence of gentrification and urban development? Engaging in a reading of Im Heung-soon’s video installation and documentary Good Light, Good Air (2018, 2020), Junyoung Verónica Kim explores the multiple vectors and scales of transpacific connectivity. By adopting Eyal Weizman’s conceptualization of forensic architecture, Kim contends that the ruins, holes, and missing parts of both the material (bodies and urban geographies) and the epistemic (archives, knowledge production, disciplinary formation) demonstrate what cannot be visiblized or seen otherwise. In situating the Gwangju Uprising and the Argentine dirty war as part and parcel of the diasporic, this talk proposes that paying attention to Korean-Latin American intimacies offers a possibility of fabulating a decolonial and demilitarized world.

Bio:

Junyoung Verónica Kim is Visiting Assistant Professor of East Asian Cultures in the Department of Liberal Studies at New York University. Her interdisciplinary research examines how settler militarism, imperialism, and racial capitalism intersect in East Asia and Latin America and across hemispheric Asian American diasporas. Her book in progress–Cacophonous Intimacies: Reorienting Diaspora and Race in Asia-Latin America– centers Asian diaspora(s) in Latin America and reveals the intimacies between seemingly disparate histories of multiple imperialisms, hemispheric American settler colonialism, and postcolonial nation building in both East Asia and Latin America. Currently, she has also started working on a new monograph tentatively titled Nuclear Diaspora: Asian-Latin American Genealogies, the Black Pacific, and the Korean War, as well as co-editing a special journal issue on "The Transpacific Korean War." She was a visiting scholar at the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at New York University for 2024-25, and a visiting scholar at the Humanities Institute at Pennsylvania State University for 2023-24.

 

3) Unruly Comparison: Queerness, Hong Kong, and the Sinophone

Speaker: Alvin K. Wong

Time: Thursday, January 15, 2026, 3-5pm

Location: EAS Lounge

Abstract:

Unruly Comparison examines queerness in Hong Kong through a transdisciplinary analysis of Sinophone literature, cinema, visual culture, and civil society. Moving beyond Eurocentrism in queer theory and China-centrism in area studies, Wong frames Hong Kong as a model for global comparison by theorizing a method of unruly comparison—acknowledging the incommensurability of cultural texts and queer figures across different temporal and spatial locations. Here, unruly comparison positions Hong Kong as an undefinable time-space that troubles historicist, colonial, and China-centric renderings of the city as merely a site of British colonial legacy, Chinese rule, or global capital. By foregrounding the friction, asymmetry, and perverse juxtapositions of unruly comparison of Hong Kong with the Sinophone world, Wong reframes key debates in queer theory and East Asian studies.

Bio:

Alvin K. Wong is Assistant Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. His research covers Hong Kong literature and cinema, Sinophone studies, queer theory, and transnational feminism. His book Unruly Comparison: Queerness, Hong Kong, and the Sinophone is published by Duke University Press in 2025. He has also published in journals such as Gender, Place & Culture, Continuum, Diacritics, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Interventions, and Screen. He also coedited the volume Keywords in Queer Sinophone Studies (Routledge, 2020). Alvin is the editor of the journal Continuum and Chair of the Society of Sinophone Studies (3S). 

 

4) Philology's Ecological Footprint

Speaker: Tamara Chin

Time: Wednesday, March 18, 2026, 3-5pm 

Location: EAS Lounge

Abstract: TBA

Bio: Tamara Chin is an associate professor of Comparative Literature at Brown University and the author of Savage Exchange: Han Imperialism, Chinese Literary Style, and the Economic Imagination (Harvard 2014).

 

Contact Information

Erin Y. Huang