Since the early Meiji period, Japan's 'catch-up' development strategy has been heavily reliant on the importation of 'advanced knowledge' from the West. Japanese higher education has assumed a pivotal role in the dissemination of Western knowledge through translation. This seminar addresses how cultural transmissions, facilitated by translation, have impacted Japanese higher education and the manner of thinking cultivated thereby.

For far too long now the Edo period has been pigeonholed as a ‘print culture’. It is time to explode this myth, and Professor Kornicki will do so by exploring some of the huge quantity of manuscript books that circulated in the Edo period. Sceptical? Well, consider why it is that so many printed books survive in only one copy or in no copies at all, while many manuscript books survive in hundreds of copies. And consider why so many collections of books private and public contain so many manuscript books.

Beyond the Mountains: Social and Political Imaginaries in Gilgit-Baltistan (Raachi, 2024) is a multilingual, indigenous volume and collaborative research endeavor with the aim of decolonizing knowledge. This talk will focus on the politics of race and anthropology historically in Gilgit-Baltistan, the necessity of local knowledges, and rethinking publishing and the academy in this historical conjuncture.

In the fall of 1920, the Egyptian police found seventeen female corpses buried under the floor of five houses in the working-class district of Labban, Alexandria. Several men and women were charged with the mass killing, yet two sisters among them – Rayyā and Sakīna – came to be remembered as its main perpetrators. This paper interrogates the genealogy of such representation. It seeks to show how, months before the trial and with no police evidence, the Egyptian press presented Rayyā and Sakīna as the masterminds of the crimes and Rayyā, in particular, as the boss of the gang.