Coming Distractions: China Events at the 2009 AAS Meeting

USC’s very useful US-China Institute website, which helps us keep up with relevant events taking place in Southern California and other places as well, has ahelpful guide to the upcoming Association for Asian Studies meetings, which will be held in Chicago March 26-29. Even if you won’t be anywhere close to Chicago on the relevant dates, scrolling through this list of China-related panels can be an effective form of one-stop shopping for those interested in getting a quick sense of the sorts of things that academics (mostly North American, but the meetings pull in participants from other parts of the world as well) are working on and talking about these days. Not everything of potential interest to readers of this blog is mentioned there (e.g., some that have a China plus other parts of Asia focus were skipped), so if you are going be sure to look at the main page for the meetings, which among other things calls attention to the organization’s recent efforts to bring more policy-makers and journalists into the mix at AAS gatherings. There are so many panels listed on the USC website that involve people who’ve blogged for us, people who’ve written things we’ve blogged about, people we’d someday like to have write for us, etc., that we’re loath to single out any sessions for special attention. Still, we can’t help mentioning one that includes participants not often seen (especially together) at conference held on this side of the Pacific. This is SESSION 70, which will take place from 10:45 A.M.–12:45 P.M. on the Friday of the meetings and bring together into a discussion on Chinese intellectual life, among others, Geremie Barmé (coming over from Canberra), Worrying about China author Gloria Davies (coming over from Melbourne), and former Dushu(Reading) editor Wang Hui (who is based in Beijing). If any reader involved in another panel wants to draw special attention to it (and explain why readers of the blog might find it particularly interesting) by posting a comment–please do so. And there’s another kind of comment we’d welcome. Namely, since many of us will be at the meetings (a good one for us to attend in part because the just-out CB-based anthology China in 2008: A Year of Great Significance will be displayed at the Rowman and Littlefield booth), we may well run one or more posts about the meetings, so if you can’t be there and see something listed that you’d particularly like to learn about long distance after the fact from someone who caught it, feel free to post a comment about that as well