Henrietta Harrison, professor of Modern Chinese Studies at the University of Oxford, will present the spring semester’s first presentation of Cal State San Bernardino’s CSUSB Modern China Lecture Series.

Harrison will speak about on her new book, “The Perils of Interpreting: The Extraordinary Story of Two Translators Between Qing China and the British Empire” (Princeton, 2021). The program will begin at 11 a.m. Wednesday, Feb. 6, on Zoom.

Open to the free and open to the public, it can be accessed online at  https://csusb.zoom.us/j/388207496.

Harrison, who is also a fellow of Pembroke College, taught at the University of Leeds and then at Harvard before arriving at Oxford. Her books include “The Man Awakened from Dreams: One Man’s Life in a North China Village 1857-1942” (Stanford University Press, 2005) and “The Missionary’s Curse and Other Tales from a Chinese Catholic Village” (University of California Press, 2013).

Her recent book, “The Perils of Interpreting,” is the story of the interpreters for the Macartney embassy of 1793: Li Zibiao and George Thomas Staunton. Both grew up between Europe and China and gained a deep knowledge of the other’s languages, society and culture, but were crushed in the growing conflict between China and Britain. Harrison argues that some Chinese people knew much more about the West than is usually acknowledged and we should look instead at the reasons why that knowledge did not reach senior decision makers.

After Harrison’s virtual event, the Modern China Lecture Series continues with a full slate of speaker through the spring term.

They include a March 7 event with the University of Arizona’s Fabio Lanza on “The Barbers of Beijing,” a March 14 event with Arizona State University’s Linh Vu on “Necropolitics in Modern China,” and a March 21 event with the University of Oregon’s Bryna Goodman on “The Suicide of Miss Xi.” These events will be at 10:30 a.m.

Details can be found at the series homepage.

Alexander Serrano, a second-year master of arts in candidate in the CSUSB History Department has led the organizing efforts in the series this semester, and expects to add several more events to the series. Serrano has been accepted in the East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies Ph.D. program at UC Santa Barbara with the prestigious Kenneth Pai Fellowship for the fall 2022 term.

“I have been a viewer of the Modern China Lecture Series for a few years now,” said Serrano. “In my first time helping organize this series I wanted to bring in a variety of topics. By doing so I selected speakers from various institutions who could bring such strong expertise to CSUSB and help enrich this fantastic program.”

The Modern China Lecture Series was initiated to promote awareness of important issues related to China for those on the CSUSB campus and in the community. In the series of more than 60 lectures, workshops, film screenings and roundtable forums since January 2014, China scholars from UC San Diego, UC Riverside, the Claremont Colleges, UCLA, USC, UC Irvine, Columbia, Oxford, and other institutions have visited the CSUSB campus to share their expertise and opinions.

Speakers in the series have included specialists in history, economics, political science, philosophy, finance, security studies, literature, anthropology and other fields.

The series cosponsors this year are the CSUSB Department of History, the History Club/Phi Alpha Theta, and the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, the Intellectual Life Fund, and the Jack Brown College of Business and Public Administration.

For more information on the Modern China Lecture Series, contact Jeremy Murray, associate professor of history, at jmurray@csusb.edu.

Modern China Lecture, Feb 9 event flier