Lydia H. Liu (NHC Fellow, 1997–98)

Fellowship Work Summary, 1997–98

Lydia H. Liu worked intensively on her project "Missionary Linguistic Enterprise in Nineteenth‑Century China"; finished editing a volume of essays called Tokens of Exchange: The Problem of Translation in Global Circulations to be published next year; published an article, entitled "What's Happened to Ideology? Transnationalism, Postsocialism, and the Study of Global Media Culture," in the Duke University Working Paper Series in Asian/Pacific Studies; and completed an essay on science, aesthetics, and maritime trade in the eighteenth century. She was an invited speaker at a roundtable on "Intellectuals and Their Inter/National Publics" at the Institute of International and Comparative Studies of Northwestern University; presented a paper, "The Quest for Petuntse: The'Scientific Beginnings' of European Porcelain Industries in the Eighteenth Century," at a conference on "Materializing Cultures: Science, Technology, and Medicine in Global Context," at the Stanford Humanities Center; was a keynote speaker for "Borderless Wor(l)ds: A Roundtable on Translation at the Turn of the Millennium," a Comparative Literature Colloquium at Cornell University; gave an invited lecture "Legislating Universalism: The Translation and Round‑Trip Circulation of International Law in the Nineteenth Century," to the Chinese Cultural Studies Colloquium at the University of Chicago, and also to the Duke University Law School; and gave an invited lecture "Tokens of Exchange: The Problem of Translation in Global Circulations," to the East Asian Studies Council at Yale University. She presented a number of other papers including: "Legislating a Family of Nations: Missionary Translations of International Law in East Asia," at the Annual Conference of the Association for Asian Studies held in Washington, D.C.; "What's Happened to Ideology? Transnationalism, Postsocialism, and the Study of Global Media Culture," at the Annual Conference of the American Comparative Literature Association, held at Austin, Texas; Crusoe's Pottery: Science, Aesthetics, and the Metaphysics of True Porcelain in the Eighteenth Century," at the conference "Intersecting Areas and Disciplines: Cultural Studies of Chinese Science, Technology, and Medicine," at the Institute of East Asian Studies at the University of California at Berkeley; "Legislating a Family of Nations: Missionary Translations of International Law in East Asia," at an international conference on "Alternative Modernities," held in New Delhi, India; and "Goddess Reclaimed: Rethinking Popular Culture and the Politics of Ethnicity in Twentieth‑Century China," at a symposium on Chinese literature, in honor of Patrick Hanan, held at Harvard University.