The Grace Chao Lecture Series at Agnes Scott College: "A History of 'Women' in China" with Dr. Tani Barlow

Tani Barlow, known for her work in gender history in modern China, will be Agnes Scott College’s Grace Chao Lecture Series speaker on Nov. 15 at 7 p.m. in Evans Hall.

The lecture is free and open to the public.

In the period 1890 to1937 Chinese new media in advanced cities published two special kinds of information, advertising images and social theory. A modern culture of consumerism began during this period. Modern social theory focused on social evolution and argued that people should live in nuclear families and select their own marriage partners. The concept of 'women' appears in both the new theories and the advertising media. This talk suggests that they reinforced one another and set the stage for women's liberation and social emancipation movements. It also suggests that it consumer culture supported the rise of the new middle class. 

Barlow has written books, articles and essays on a variety of China-and Asia-related topics, including the gender problematic but also including questions of colonialism and semi-colonialism, globalization, history of social science, colloquial literature and most recently the history of the advertising industry in Shanghai and several other Chinese cities in the 1920s and 1930s.

Barlow is the founding senior editor of /positions: east asia cultures critique/ and was director or co-director for many years of the University of Washington Rockefeller Foundation grant in the humanities, Project for Critical Asian Studies at the Simpson Center for the Humanities.