The Modern China Lecture Series will host two talks in October when it resumes for the 2024-25 academic year. Both will take place in person in the Faculty Excellence Center on the fourth floor of the John M. Pfau Library, as well as shared online via Zoom.

At 1 p.m. on Monday, Oct. 7, Zuoyue Wang, a professor of history from Cal Poly Pomona, will present “Chinese American Scientists and US-China Relations: A Historical Perspective from the Cold War to the China Initiative.” His talk will focus on the contributions to American science, technology, and medicine made by Chinese American scientists, and examine how they have also suffered racially and politically motivated persecutions in the United States, coming under intense scrutiny.

Wang’s research specializes in science, technology, and politics in modern U.S., China and transnational contexts. He is the author of “In Sputnik’s Shadow: The President’s Science Advisory Committee and Cold War America,” and is currently studying the history of Chinese American scientists and engineers and U.S.-China scientific relations, for which he received a grant from the National Science Foundation in 2010-2014. 

Ten days later, on Thursday, Oct. 17, also at 1 p.m., Sijia Yao, assistant professor of Chinese language and culture at Soka University, will present “Cosmopolitan Love: Utopian Vision in D. H. Lawrence and Eileen Chang,” based on her recently published book of the same title. She will discuss “the homogenizing aspect of Freud’s Oedipus complex by looking into the parent-child love in ‘Sons and Lovers’ (1913) and Chang’s short story ‘Xin jing’ 心經 (‘The Heart Sutra’) (1943). She shows how the emancipation from the love between parent and child in both writers creates a liberation not only from the local, but also from the hegemonic secular discourse of science, in this case the global spread of Freud’s theory of the Oedipal complex.”

In addition to her book, Yao has published articles on Sinophone literature, film, music, and culture in journals such as The Comparatist, Comparative Literature Studies and Tamkang Review.

Attendees will also be eligible for a book-give away drawing featuring the work of Wang and Yao.

The Modern China Lecture Series was initiated in January 2014 to promote awareness of important issues related to China for those on the CSUSB campus and in the community. Since then, it has presented more than 100 lectures, workshops, film screenings and roundtable forums featuring China scholars from UC San Diego, UC Riverside, the Claremont Colleges, UCLA, USC, UC Irvine, Columbia, Oxford and other institutions have visited the CSUSB campus to share their expertise and opinions.