[Talk / April 30] Memory as Resistance: From Tiananmen to Hong Kong

Join the Department of History, Classics, and Religion and The China Institute on Tuesday, April 30 at 3:30 PM in Telus 150 for "Memory as Resistance: From Tiananmen to Hong Kong", a talk by Dr. Rowena He (Senior Research Fellow, University of Texas, Austin). This is an in-person only event and refreshments will be provided.

This talk is grounded in over two decades of fieldwork on the preservation of historical memory tabooed by the CCP regime. Drawing on contextualized personal accounts, Rowena He will illuminate the unequal contest between state-imposed interpretations of history and independent scholarship on China’s forbidden past, and their implications for nationalism, democratization, and the field of China studies. Highlighting her extensive interactions with local and mainland Chinese students during Hong Kong’s unprecedented social movement, she illustrates how memory becomes a form of resistance that embodies citizen autonomy and agency. The power of the powerless.

About the Speaker

Rowena He 何曉清 is author of Tiananmen Exiles: Voices of the Struggle for Democracy in China and a three-time recipient of Harvard University’s Certificate of Teaching Excellence. Her research has been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Harvard’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the National Humanities Center, and the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas Austin. Her op-eds have appeared in the Washington Post, Nation, Guardian, Globe and Mail, and Wall Street Journal. She was designated among the Top 100 Chinese Public Intellectuals 2016. Born and raised in China, she received her Ph.D. from the University of Toronto.