Cycle de conférences : Current Research on East Asia

Thursday October 15, 2026

Daniel Hole (Universität Stuttgart)

Conditional evaluative constructions in four East Asian languages

Resume : Conditional evaluative constructions (CECs) are sentences that combine a situation with an evaluation of that situation, such as saying that something is good, desirable, or wished for. Interestingly, in several East and Southeast Asian languages, these constructions can express not only a real situation, but also a possibility or a wish about something that has not happened. Vietnamese provides a particularly interesting example. The sentence Trời tạnh mưa là tốt (rồi)! Literally: “The rain stopping is good!” can have different interpretations depending on the context. It can mean “It’s good that the rain has stopped”, when the speaker knows that it has happened. It can also mean “It’s good if the rain stops”, expressing a desirable possibility, or even “I wish the rain would stop!”, expressing a wish that has not been fulfilled. Drawing on the available literature on Chinese, Japanese and Korean CECs, this talk will be the first to identify the rather large system of CECs as it unfolds in Vietnamese.s.

Bio : Prof. Daniel Hole has been the director of the Institute of German Studies and Linguistics at the University of Stuttgart since October 2013. Prof. Daniel Hole’s research focus areas include syntax and semantics, i.e. the structure of language and the theory of meaning and association that arises from this structure. One of the aspects he investigates is event structure, i.e. the question of how sentence parts go together to form successive descriptions of increasingly complex events. Another area of interest is information structure, i.e. how the meaning of a sentence is influenced by the arrangement of information or emphasis. Hole works with Chinese, German and Vietnamese.

Thursday November 12, 2026

Birgit Geipel (University of Tübingen)

Remembering the “Comfort Women” in Contemporary South Korean Literature: Kim Soom’s Novel Han Myŏng

Resume : The “comfort women” issue, the coercion of an estimated 200,000 women from across Asia into Japanese military sexual slavery, remains a painful legacy of Japanese colonialism and the Asia-Pacific War. After decades of silence and stigmatization, survivor-led activism has transformed individual testimony into a powerful form of public memory and political intervention. With very few known survivors remaining in South Korea, questions of remembrance and ethical representation have acquired renewed urgency. This lecture examines Kim Soom’s Han Myŏng (2016; One Left) as a significant intervention in South Korean “comfort women” literature. Through its intertextual incorporation of survivor testimonies, the novel negotiates tensions between fictional representation, testimonial authority, and the ethics of representing traumatic experience. Its publication also coincided with the resurgence of feminist activism known as the South Korean “Feminism Reboot,” which foregrounded literature as a site of feminist critique. Situating Han Myŏng within histories of “comfort women” activism and literary representation, I read the novel through feminist affect theory. I argue that its affective temporality renders past, present, and future co-present. By insisting on the unresolved past’s persistence within the present, the novel mobilizes affect to transform individual suffering into political solidarity.

Bio : Birgit Geipel serves as a lecturer at the Department of Korean Studies at the University of Tübingen. She holds an M.A. in Comparative Literature from Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Riverside. Her dissertation examines literary and cinematic discourses of national division and unification in Korea and Germany, analyzing concepts of nation, border, and identity in works from North and South Korea, as well as East, West, and unified Germany. Currently, her research centers on women’s literature, with a particular focus on contemporary young women writers in Korea and the themes of feminism and transnationalism in their works.

Thursday December 3, 2026

Sean Fear (University of Leeds)

Truong Dinh Dzu and the Rise and Fall of Vietnamese Wartime Populism: Revisiting the 1967 South Vietnamese Presidential Election

Resume : South Vietnam’s 1967 Presidential Election is rarely more than a footnote in conventional accounts of the Vietnam War. When mentioned, the contest is often dismissed as a cynical, poorly veiled effort by the military government and the United States to appease civilian politicians while consolidating military power behind the scenes. And to be sure, though the military’s victory required considerable bribery, legal finagling, and a concerted administrative campaign to deliver a favourable result, among Vietnamese observers, the outcome was never in doubt. But despite meeting widespread derision among South Vietnam’s political class, the election helped usher an important transition in Vietnamese politics, whose full significance became apparent only after the 1968 communist Tet Offensive. Under growing pressure at home and abroad, the military found itself forced to make constitutional concessions to civilian political groups. Against a backdrop of political instability, military infighting, and regional and religious tensions, this contributed to a new era of relative stability, providing a basic political structure for anti-communist parties to rally behind after the communist assault during Tet. More a “performance” of democracy than a meaningful chance for voters to exercise power, the election, for all its flaws, nonetheless enabled opposition voices to air grievances, and increased the cost of military transgressions of the rule of law. More importantly, it provided an opportunity for Saigon’s anti-communist elites, government and opposition alike, to re-introduce the South Vietnamese state and political system to a long neglected rural population cut off from events in the capital by the war. The surprising second-place finish of little-known peace candidate Trương Đình Dzu offers unique insight into the overlooked but crucial evolution of rural South Vietnamese public opinion, acknowledged by all parties in the conflict as an essential factor in determining the outcome of the war.

Bio : Sean Fear is Lecturer in International History at University of Leeds. His research explores the intersection of domestic politics and foreign relations in the Vietnam War, modern Southeast Asia, and the global Cold War. His forthcoming book, under contract with Harvard University Press, examines the South Vietnamese state’s failure to win legitimacy in the eyes of its divided constituents, a critical but poorly-understood factor in the denouement of the Vietnam War. Drawing on Vietnamese-language archival materials, memoirs, and print media, this study of U.S.-South Vietnamese domestic politics and diplomacy reveals how the Cold War superpowers’ presumptions were manipulated and exploited by a diverse range of Vietnamese actors pursuing their own complex political goals.

Thursday January 21, 2027

Valeria Zanier (University of Bologna)

The role of business organizations in the reconfiguration of trade networks with Mao’s China (1949-1978)

Resume : The talk will focus on the role of European and American business interest associations (BIAs) in promoting trade with China across the Cold War divide. Analyzing everyday business practice reveals how these organizations were identified in many cases as main reference points by the Chinese authorities and were, thus, in a privileged position to change the image of the West from colonizers into viable partners at a time when the PRC was shaping a new national narrative.

Bio : Valeria Zanier has been an Associate Professor at the University of Bologna since 2022. Her research focuses on the social and economic history of socialism and of the Cold War. In particular, she studies the reconfiguration of transnational networks following decolonization in East Asia, analyzing the circulation of technologies and resources to identify elements of continuity and change.

Thursday February 25, 2027

Margaret Mehl (University of Copenhagen)

The Relationship Between Western and Traditional Japanese Music in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth- Century Japan

Resume : Traditional Japanese music (jun hôgaku) and Western music (yôgaku) tend to be treated as entirely separate entities. This reflects the major differences in their character, history, and practices. To this day, practitioners occupy largely separate worlds, although the boundaries appear to be increasingly less fixed. The introduction of Western music as part of the reform package in the wake of the Meiji Restoration of 1868 resulted in the marginalization of Japan’s indigenous music. At the same time, however, the fate of Japanese music was entangled with the history of Western music in Japan in many ways that may not be immediately obvious and have largely been neglected in most narratives of the history of music in modern Japan, but are nevertheless significant.

Bio : Margaret Mehl is a historian of modern Japan with a special interest in musical culture. She is currently an Associate Professor at the University of Copenhagen, having previously held appointments at the universities of Cambridge, Edinburgh, Stirling, and Berlin. Margaret Mehl has published widely on the history of historiography, education, and music in modern Japan. Her previous books include History and the State in Nineteenth-Century Japan: The World, the Nation and the Search for a Modern Past  (2017 [1997], which has been translated into Japanese in 2017), Private Academies of Chinese Learning in Meiji Japan: The Decline and Transformation of the Kangaku Juku (2003), Not by Love Alone: The Violin in Japan, 1850–2010 (2014) and Music and the Making of Modern Japan: Joining the Global Concert (2024).

Thursday March 25, 2027

Thursday April 22, 2027