Reischauer Lectures upcoming

Established in 1986, the annual Reischauer Lectures are sponsored by the Fairbank Center for East Asian Research at Harvard. This years lectures will be held April 19-21 in room S020 on the concourse level of the Center for Government and International Studies (CGIS) South Building. Each lecture will feature a different discussant and will begin at 4 p.m.

Presenting this year’s Reischauer Lectures is Leonard Blussé, professor of history and Asian-European relations at Leiden University (Netherlands), and currently the Erasmus Lecturer on the History and Civilization of the Netherlands and Flanders in the Department of History at Harvard. Blussé will speak on the theme “Visible Cities: Canton, Nagasaki, and Batavia and the Arrival of the Americans (1780-1808).”

The first lecture (April 19) is titled “Three Windows of Opportunity: The Limitations of Institutional Control” with discussant Felipe Fernández-Armesto of Tufts University.

The discussant for the second lecture (April 20) – titled “The Performance of Rituals of Cross-Cultural Trade: Theory and Practice” – is Professor Eric Tagliacozzo of Cornell University.

For the final lecture (April 21), Associate Professor of History Daniel Botsman of Harvard will be the discussant on the topic “Face to Face: Towards a Global Interaction of Culture, Science, and Technology.”

The first and third lectures will be followed by receptions.