Date: November 13, 2025 (Thursday)
Time: 2:00-4:30 pm
Venue: FKH 101, Fung King Hey Building, CUHK
Registration Link:
https://cloud.itsc.cuhk.edu.hk/webform/view.php?id=13720060
Join us for an enlightening dialogue on the “Social Life of the Dead in Contemporary China,” featuring Dr. Nayden from the Research Institute for the Humanities and Dr. Lin from the Centre for China Studies. Their research shares an interest in the spiritual life of temporal (dis)continuity from rural southwest China to the former battlefields of World War II. Delving into the intricate dynamics of the afterlife, our discussion will explore the hierarchy of the deceased, the wider social significance of commemorative ritual, the re-orientation of national or individual purpose and identity on the basis of what is no longer, and more. We will unravel shared insights from our research and seek the conceptual bridges between the treatment of death and remembrance across scales: from the communal to the national, from the personal to the political.
Moderator: Prof. Wu Ka-ming (CUHK)
Speaker: Prof. LIN Zhenru Jacqueline (CUHK) & Dr. Angel Nayden (CUHK)
About the Speaker
Prof. Jacqueline Zhenru Lin is a Research Assistant Professor in the Centre for China Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork and oral histories, her research focuses on memory activism, war commemoration, online charities, and NGO development in contemporary China. She is the author of the book “Making National Heroes: The Exemplarist Production of Masculinities in Contemporary China” (HKU Press, 2024), and has contributed articles on Chinese transnationalism and the transnational commemoration of World War II.
Dr. Angel Nayden is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Research Institute for the Humanities at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Drawing on seventeen months of fieldwork in rural Sichuan, he is primarily concerned with the entanglements of time, value, and self-realization and the ways that recognition gives human life a rhythmic shape. Beyond this project pursued during his PhD at Cambridge, he is currently developing a study on the evolving rhythms of realization on the Tibetan plateau.
Organized by the Centre for Cultural Studies, Department of Cultural and Religious Studies, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Enquiries: cuccs@cuhk.edu.hk