Date: 8 July 2026 (Wed)
Time: 2:30pm
Venue: Room 201, Leung Kau Kui Building (KKB), The Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Speaker: Prof. Christian Sorace, University of Cambridge
Immunity is a dream of protection from being alive. On the Mongol steppe, it has taken many forms — imperial privilege, socialist collectivization, nationalist enclosure — each one promising to shelter life in sovereign protection. Today, sovereignty is under pressures it cannot control, generating symptoms it cannot contain. From within this impasse, Steppe Immunity asks what comes after.
Drawing on fieldwork, archival research, and the histories, poetry, and ecologies of the steppe, Christian Sorace traces immunity from Chinggisid sovereignty to the present. Against understandings of immunity as separation or exemption, the book reimagines it as the basis of a life in common. The steppe is not a refuge outside history. It is a constellation of past and future possibilities, emanating light.
Registration: https://cloud.itsc.cuhk.edu.hk/webform/view.php?id=13734204
*Priority for this event will be given to faculty members and Research Postgraduate (RPg) students of the Department of Religious and Cultural Studies.
Co-organiser: Centre for Cultural Studies, CUHK
Enquiry: cuccs@cuhk.edu.hk