Workshop on Transpatial Modernity

Brownbag lunch: "Transpatial Modernity: Chinese Cultural Encounters with Russia via Japan (1880-1930)"

March 4, 2026

11:30-1:00

Ahmadieh Family Conference Hall

240, John Hope Franklin Center

Speaker:
Xiaolu Ma, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Lunch will be provided. Please RSVP

Sponsored by the Duke Critical Asian and Middle Eastern Humanities Program

For questions, contact carlos rojas: c.rojas@duke.edu

"Transpatial Modernity: Chinese Cultural Encounters with Russia via Japan (1880-1930)"

Transpatial Modernity offers the first in-depth account of the triangular relationship among Chinese, Japanese, and Russian literature and culture in the modern era. Drawing on primary sources in all three languages-among others-Xiaolu Ma reveals how Chinese writers translated and appropriated Russian cultural tropes through the intermediary of Japanese writing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Not limited to a dyadic relationship between source and target culture, Transpatial Modernity explores the implications of cultural brokerage within complex transculturation process, thus establishing the value of a new transpatial framework for understanding literary and cultural exchange in local, regional, and global contexts.

Xiaolu Ma is assistant professor in the Division of Humanities at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. She engages in research in the interrelationship of trans-Eurasian literature and culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is the author of Transpatial Modernity: Chinese Cultural Encounters with Russia via Japan (1880-1930), published by Harvard University Press in 2024. Her research articles have appeared or are forthcoming in peer-reviewed journals including JAS, PMLA, and Modern Language Quarterly.