Lecture: Cosmopolitan Ethics, Aesthetics, and Confucianism: Kang Youwei's Great Community

Rutgers University's Wang Ban presents a talk on, Kang Youwei, the Chinese thinker and reformer at the turn of the 20th century.

Kang Youwei projected a moral vision of the world community that departs from interstate realpolitik in the West. Kang re-works ritualistic and ethical premises of Confucianism and extends them to an intersubjective space of global connection based on pedagogy and moral improvement.

Wang Ban received his Ph.D. from UCLA in 1993 and is a Professor of Chinese Literature at Rutgers University. He is the author of "The Sublime Figure of History" (Stanford University Press, 1997), "Illuminations from the Past" (Stanford UP, 2004), "Narrative Perspective and Irony" (Mellon, 2002), and "History and Memory" (in Chinese, Oxford University Press, 2004). He co-edited with Ann Kaplan "Trauma and Cinema" (Hong Kong University Press, 2004) and with Xueping Zhong "The Image of China in the American Classroom" (Nanjing University Press, 2005). He has also written on English and French literatures, psychoanalysis, international politics and cinema. He was a recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2000 and was a research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton in 2007. He taught as a visiting professor in Asian Studies at Harvard University in 2002 and at Stanford in 2006.

Co-sponsored by the UM Institute for the Humanities.