We are pleased to continue our Distinguished Lecture Series, now in its 15th season. On Sunday, November 21, 2021 at 4:00 p.m. Dr. Eugenio Menegon, Associate Professor of History at Boston University, will discuss the history of US-China relations from 1776 to today.
This event will take place via Zoom; please click HERE to access the meeting.
In order to understand today’s complex relations between the US and China, we need to know the deep roots of the relationship between our two countries. This lecture will explore in creative ways how both sides, Chinese and American, have seen the other, and how the people (leaders and commoners alike), religions, educational, and medical systems, economies, and the militaries, have interacted with each other over the span of the last three centuries. The lecture will also explain, in historical perspective, why the China-US relationship is so important for the world today, even if it is often fraught with misunderstandings and competition.
Professor Eugenio Menegon has published extensively on the history of Chinese-Western relations, and is the author of two books: One Single Sky: Geography, Art, Science, and Religion in Europe and China and Ancestors, Virgins, and Friars: Christianity as a Local Religion in Late Imperial China, which was the recipient of the 2011 Joseph Levenson Book Prize in Chinese Studies. Dr. Menegon has been Research Fellow in Chinese Studies at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium), Junior and Senior Fellow at the BU Humanities Foundation, and the An Wang Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University. He has held appointments as visiting scholar at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (Beijing), the Beijing Center for Chinese Studies, the Ricci Institute at the University of San Francisco, the University “L’Orientale” in Naples, the University of Padua, and the Cini Foundation, Venice. He was Director of the Boston University Center for the Study of Asia in 2012-15, and has been a research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies at Boston College, as well as the recipient of the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation Scholar Grant.
Now in its 15th season, the Distinguished Lecture Series is organized and hosted by Dr. Jeremy Yudkin. Dr. Yudkin is a resident of the Berkshires and professor of music at Boston University and Oxford University. Every summer at the Lenox Library he presents the pre-concert lectures for the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Tanglewood season.
We are grateful to the Lenox Library Association for their sponsorship of Zoom, which makes these virtual programs possible.