The Council on East Asian Studies Colloquium Series presents:
Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Chancellor’s Professor of History, University of California, Irvine: “Hong Kong on the Brink: Historical and Comparative Perspectives.”
This talk will focus on patterns of protest and the tightening of political controls in Hong Kong during the last few decades, paying particular attention to the 2014 Umbrella Movement and of this dramatic events of 2019, including the most recently June 4th anniversary vigil, which the speaker attended. The resenter, who has been visiting Hong Kong regularly since 1987, will draw on his work as a specialist in the history of anti-authoritarian movements in various parts of the world and his work on global cities of Asia. The presentation will showcase ideas in his new short book Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink, which publishes February 11, 2020, in the Columbia Global Reports series.
Jeffrey Wasserstrom is Chancellor’s Professor of History at UC Irvine, where he also holds a courtesy appointment in the School of Law. A former editor of the Journal of Asian Studies and the Historical Writing Mentor for UCI’s Literary Journalism Program, his most recent books are (along with Vigil), Eight Juxtapositions: China through Imperfect Analogies from Mark Twain to Manchukuo (Penguin 2016) and the co-authored third edition of China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford 2018). In addition to writing for scholarly periodicals, he is a regular contributor to newspapers (the New York Times, the Financial Times, etc.), magazines (such as the Atlantic), and literary reviews (e.g, the TLS).