Here are a few of the talks I have given, either for academic or general audiences. This page does not include most of the talks I have given on my research at academic conferences.

• “Chinese Empire after Empire: Agrarian Colonization on the Twentieth-Century Frontier”

This was a talk for the Council on East Asian Studies at Yale University on April 22, 2021 . Click here for the announcement.

• “Assimilation Ecology: Gender, Ethnicity, and Lifeways in the Chinese Settlement of Eastern Tibet”

I gave this colloquium at Yale on February 15, 2019 as part of the Program in Agrarian Studies Colloquium series. Click here for the event announcement.

• “Hunger in the Making of a Modern Sino-Tibetan Borderland”

I gave this talk at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on November 9, 2018 as part of the EALC Speaker Series. Click here for the flyer.

• “U.S. Race Relations in Chinese Perspective”

I gave this talk on October 24, 2017 at the 11th Annual China Town Hall hosted by the Center for East Asian and Pacific Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Click here for a link to the event page and poster.

• “Academic Freedom and its Limits in America as seen through the ‘Salaita Controversy'” 

I gave this talk at the US Consulate in Chengdu on January 25, 2017 as part of their weekly Wednesday speaker series. The talk looked at how “academic freedom” in the United States operates in practice by scrutinizing a case study.

Click here to see online readings related to this talk.

“Window or Mirror? How Cultural Knowledge Changes Culture.”

I was invited to give a talk at a TEDx event in Chengdu in April 2016. The name of the event was “Window,” and the title of my talk was “Window or Mirror? How Cultural Knowledge Changes Culture.” For a while I’ve been pondering a future research project on how changes to the the concept of “culture” have historically changed Chinese and global cultures–a sort of recursive phenomenon. This short talk was my first public foray into that topic.