The RC’s Center for World Performance Studies Faculty Lecture Series features Faculty Fellows and visiting scholars and practitioners in the fields of ethnography and performance. Designed to create an informal and intimate setting for intellectual exchange among students, scholars, and the community, faculty are invited to present their work in an interactive and performative fashion.
Emily Wilcox is Assistant Professor of Modern Chinese Studies at U-M.
During the latter half of the 1980s, a popular dance craze known as “piliwu” 霹雳舞 swept urban communities across China. Incorporating two new styles of U.S. urban popular dance–New York-based b-boying/b-girling or “breaking” and California-based popping and locking– piliwu was China’s first localized movement of hip-hop culture, which reflected new circuits of intercultural exchange between China and the United States during the first decade of China’s Reform Era. Analyzing the dance choreography recorded in a 1988 Chinese film, Rock Youth 摇滚青年 (dir. Tian Zhangzhuang), together with media reports and testimonials from members of China’s piliwu generation, this talk reconstructs the history of the piliwu movement, arguing for the central influence of U.S. pop culture icon Michael Jackson, the growth of China’s underground commercial dance (zou xue 走穴) economy, and the agency of dancers’ bodies in transnational movements of media culture.
Jim May STORYTELLING WORKSHOP. 1-3 pm. No charge, but you must register for this event as participation is limited.
New America think tank CEO Anne-Marie Slaughter, a former U.S. State Department policy planning director, presents a talk adapted from her new book, The Chessboard and the Web: Strategies of Connection in a Dangerous World. Reception follows; signing.
4-5:30 p.m., 1010 Weiser, 500 Church. Free. 763-9200.
Talk by local writer Beverly Jenkins, recipient of the 2017 Romance Writers of America Nora Roberts Lifetime Achievement Award. She sets her African American historical romance novels in the decades after emancipation to emphasize black history after slavery.
7-8:30 p.m., AADL Malletts Creek, 3090 E. Eisenhower (between Stone School & Packard). Free. 327-4200.
Poet and memoirist Carmen Bugan was born in Romania and emigrated to the United States in 1989. She earned a BA from the University of Michigan Residential College, an MA in creative writing from Lancaster University, and a MA and PhD, both in English Literature, from Oxford University. Bugan’s work reckons with the legacy of totalitarianism, including the crippling effects of the culture of surveillance that existed under Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu.
Her visit is co-sponsored by the LSA Honors Program and the Residential College.
Poet and memoirist Carmen Bugan was born in Romania and emigrated to the United States in 1989. She earned a BA from the University of Michigan Residential College, an MA in creative writing from Lancaster University, and a MA and PhD, both in English Literature, from Oxford University. Bugan’s work reckons with the legacy of totalitarianism, including the crippling effects of the culture of surveillance that existed under Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu.
Her visit is co-sponsored by the LSA Honors Program and the Residential College.
Poet and memoirist Carmen Bugan was born in Romania and emigrated to the United States in 1989. She earned a BA from the University of Michigan Residential College, an MA in creative writing from Lancaster University, and a MA and PhD, both in English Literature, from Oxford University. Bugan’s work reckons with the legacy of totalitarianism, including the crippling effects of the culture of surveillance that existed under Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu.
Her visit is co-sponsored by the LSA Honors Program and the Residential College.
Talk by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Elizabeth Fenn. Her book Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People, won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for History.
Poet and memoirist Carmen Bugan was born in Romania and emigrated to the United States in 1989. She earned a BA from the University of Michigan Residential College, an MA in creative writing from Lancaster University, and a MA and PhD, both in English Literature, from Oxford University. Bugan’s work reckons with the legacy of totalitarianism, including the crippling effects of the culture of surveillance that existed under Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu.
Her visit is co-sponsored by the LSA Honors Program and the Residential College.
Poet and memoirist Carmen Bugan was born in Romania and emigrated to the United States in 1989. She earned a BA from the University of Michigan Residential College, an MA in creative writing from Lancaster University, and a MA and PhD, both in English Literature, from Oxford University. Bugan’s work reckons with the legacy of totalitarianism, including the crippling effects of the culture of surveillance that existed under Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu.
Her visit is co-sponsored by the LSA Honors Program and the Residential College.
Ken Mikolowski taught poetry at the RC for many years.
