As Emory welcomes visiting delegations from Nanjing University and Jiangsu Province in China this week, the Halle Institute for Global Learning and the Confucius Institute in Atlanta will host several public events in celebration of the Emory-Nanjing partnership.
Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Mike Luckovich will speak and cartoon about the U.S. presidential election over dinner on Thursday, Nov. 8. The event will be held at the Emory Conference Center Hotel, and tickets are $45. Signed prints of Luckovich's cartoons will be available to order, and proceeds will support the Emory-Nanjing partnership. Buy tickets.
Emory hopes to grow the university's partnership with Nanjing and—along with Atlanta businesses and officials—to strengthen U.S.-China relations, according to Holli Semetko, vice provost for international affairs and director of the Halle Institute.
"We are delighted to host our colleagues from China, especially now at the end of an intense campaign that reached new heights in negativity," Semetko says. "Mike Luckovich's cartooning keynote will bring smiles all around."
An editorial cartoonist with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution since 1989, Luckovich is the most nationally reprinted cartoonist in the United States. His work appears regularly in TIME, Newsweek, the Washington Post, and The New York Times.
Also on Nov. 8, Emory faculty will join 11 professors from Nanjing for a conference on "cultural politics in the visual." The conference, which is open to the public, will take place in Cox Hall from 8:45 a.m. to 5:45 p.m. on Thursday, Nov. 8 and will move to the Michael C. Carlos Museum from 9:15 a.m. to 11 a.m. on Friday, Nov. 9. The event is co-sponsored by the Halle Institute, Nanjing University, Emory's Confucius Institute in Atlanta, the Center for Faculty Development and Excellence, and the Department of Russian and East Asian Languages and Cultures.
The Nanjing delegation will also meet senior executives at CNN, Coca-Cola, the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, and The Carter Center China Program in post-conference cultural workshops.
On Wednesday, Nov. 7, students from four universities in Georgia—Emory, Georgia Tech, Georgia State University, and Spelman College—participated in a Chinese speech contest in Emory's Performing Arts Studio. Sponsored by the Jiangsu International Cultural Exchange Center, the Confucius Institute and Nanjing University, judges from the local community and Atlanta-area institutions presided over the contest.
Now in its fourth year, the Emory-Nanjing Visiting Scholars Program engages faculty in the humanities and social sciences with their counterparts to promote research, teaching, and learning on both campuses. Based in the Halle Institute at Emory and the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences at Nanjing University, the program sponsors joint conferences, research, scholarly exchanges, and study trips abroad that have involved dozens of faculty, students and staff from Emory and Nanjing.
The partnership also supports the Confucius Institute in Atlanta, which offers a broad range of courses and programs on Chinese language and culture for students, educators, businesses, and the wider Atlanta community.