Watch the full recording above.
Rarely does a study remain a must-read in its field twenty-five years after its appearance. Lydia H. Liu's Translingual Practice (Stanford UP, 1995) is such a work, helping to shape several generations of scholars working on Chinese literature and history, translation studies, comparative literature, and more. Today, the book's theoretical leverage and its myriad of close readings are still as urgent as ever.
On December 18 at a workshop celebrating Lydia H. Liu’s Translingual Practice, scholars from world's leading institutions shared profound remarks on the book's broad legacy and their own researches regarding the field of translingual cultural studies, in the hope of pushing future work that would honor the rigor and significance this book exemplifies.
The event was jointly organized by the University of Toronto, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and McGill University, co-sponsored by the Weatherhead East Asian Institute and Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University, and supported by the Columbia Global Centers | Beijing.
Participating speakers included David Xu Borgonjon, Harlan Chambers and Benjamin Kindler from Columbia University, Li Chen and Yurou Zhong from the University of Toronto, Tamara Chin from Brown University, Anatoly Detwyler from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Gal Gvili from McGill University, Ari Heinrich from the Australian National University, Michael Gibbs Hill from William & Mary, Andrew F. Jones from the University of California, Berkeley, Jing Jiang from Reed College, Liansu Meng from the University of Connecticut, and Shaden Tageldin from the University of Minnesota.
Professor Lydia H. Liu gave a brief report of her current work, Wittgenstein in the Machine, linking linguistic studies with AI machine learning to deal with the issue of word/concept entanglement.
Participants expressed their gratitude for the opportunity to have this insightful academic conversation online during the unprecedented pandemic.