HISTORIAN TO DISCUSS LEPROSY IN IMPERIAL CHINA AT BARD COLLEGE ON TUESDAY, APRIL 20
ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y.—On Tuesday, April 20, historian Angela Ki Che Leung will discuss issues surrounding leprosy in imperial China. Her talk, "The Stigmatization of Leprosy in Late Imperial China: Contagion, Sex, and Black Magic," is presented by Bard in China with support from the Freeman Undergraduate Asian Studies Initiative. It is free and open to the public and takes place at 7:30 p.m. in room 115 of the Olin Language Center.
Leung—a research fellow at, and former director of, the Sun Yat-sen Institute for Social Sciences and Philosophy, Academia Sinica, in Taipei, Taiwan—will talk about the description, in late imperial medical texts, of leprosy as a contagious disease. She will talk about the social reactions, rational and irrational, to various aspects of the disease, especially its transmission, prevention, and treatment. While the talk will focus on a seemingly remote time in history, many of points will provide a context for modern societal attitudes and behaviors toward disease.
Leung is a member of the School of Historical Studies of the Institute for Advanced Study and a professor at National Taiwan University and the Institute of History, National Tsing-hua University. She has taught and lectured extensively in Asia, Europe, and the United States. She is the author of Shishan yu jiaohua: Ming-Qing di cishan zuzhi (Charity and Moral Transformation: Philanthropic Organizations of the Ming and Qing periods). She has a B.A. from the University of Hong Kong and Ph.D. from Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris.
For more information about the forum, please call 845-758-7388 or e-mail [email protected].