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15 2024-01

FAH-DENG: Holocaust Survivor – Peter Gaspar – at UM on Wednesday, 17th January

2024-01-15T17:48:12+08:00

Holocaust Survivor, Peter Gaspar, will speak at UM on Wednesday, 17th January, 2024 in E4 – 1063 at 3.30pm.  The talk with Q & A will last about 100 minutes.

Peter Gaspar, born in what was then Czechoslovakia (now Slovakia) in 1937, was, with his parents, initially hidden by kind Christian neighbours during the German occupation and the persecution of that country’s Jews.  Once this became too dangerous, he and his parents had to hide in a hole in the ground and once this became unbearable and dangerous to the young Peter’s health, his parents had no option but to hand themselves over to the German authorities. His father was then sent to a labour camp and he and his mother were sent to Theresienstadt, the notorious ghetto-concentration camp north of Prague, from where trains daily took Jews to Auschwitz-Birkenau to be murdered.  It was from there that he and his mother – painfully thin and diseased – were finally liberated by the Soviet Army on the very last day of the War, 8th May 1945.

Peter will be telling his story on Wednesday, 17th January, at 15h30 (3.30pm) in E4 – 1063.  This is your opportunity to hear directly from him and also to ask him questions and talk to him at greater length.

Sadly, Holocaust survivors are now very rare indeed and the majority of those still alive are too old to travel so this is a very rare opportunity to meet someone who was there – among the last who can report directly on what happened during the madness and horror of the Holocaust.  Do not miss this opportunity to engage with living history.

All Are Welcome to join the talk. Thank you and see you on Wednesday.

FAH-DENG: Holocaust Survivor – Peter Gaspar – at UM on Wednesday, 17th January2024-01-15T17:48:12+08:00
7 2023-11

FAH-DENG Guest Lecture: ‘Telling Stories with Large Corpora: New Approaches to Language Change and Variation’ by Prof. Huang Chu-ren, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

2023-11-25T00:00:10+08:00

Abstract:
The humanities tell the stories of our shared human experience, strengthen communities, and help bridge divides.  -Ohio Humanities Council

    Humanities focuses on understanding meaning, purpose, and goals and furthers the appreciation of singular historical and social phenomena.   – Wilhelm Dilthey on ‘Human Sciences’

 

This talk focuses on how we can turn the multitude of data points (e.g., big data) into the story of the purpose and goals, to understand meaning of ourselves and our society. In particular we will answer three research questions. First how can language tell the story of the purpose and goals, and interpret the meaning of ourselves and our society? Second, what are the linguistic devices for expressing meaning, purpose, and goal? What are the linguistic cues that can be used to discover them? And third, how to interpret with linguistic cues the purpose, goals and meaning of ourselves and our society? To answer these questions, we underline Language’s nature as a dynamic self-adaptive complex system that is consisted of many linked small worlds and formed by many relations. As such, language big data or corpora offers continuous sampling over the continuum of time and space. To construct a narrative to explicate this complex system we must adopt and End-to-End paradigm by partitioning the data in more than one way, e.g., both diachronic and cross-sectional. This will allow us to tell a story, especially how and why it happened and to Interpret it with a shared conceptual framework/ontology. Several examples will be provided to illustrate the points raised.

 

Biography:

Chu-Ren Huang is a Chair Professor in the Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Focusing on Chinese, computational, and corpus linguistics, he is fascinated by what language can tell us about human cognition and our collective reactions to natural and social environments. He approaches these questions with a deep and comprehensive study of the Chinese language. His recent books on Chinese include A Reference Grammar of Chinese (Cambridge), the Routledge Handbook on Chinese Applied Linguistics, and the Cambridge Handbook of Chinese Linguistics, His recent papers appeared in Behavior Research Methods; Computational Linguistics; Cognitive Linguistics; Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theories; Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, Knowledge-based Systems; Language, Cognition and Neuroscience; Language Resources and Evaluation; Lingua; Natural Language Engineering; PLoS One; etc.

FAH-DENG Guest Lecture: ‘Telling Stories with Large Corpora: New Approaches to Language Change and Variation’ by Prof. Huang Chu-ren, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University2023-11-25T00:00:10+08:00
17 2023-03

Book Launch of Prof. Nick Groom (FAH-DENG): ‘Twenty-First-Century Tolkien: What Middle-Earth Means To Us Today’

2023-04-17T00:01:58+08:00

Members of UM are cordially invited to the launch of Prof. Groom’s acclaimed new book, Twenty-First-Century Tolkien. This will take place at the Portuguese Bookshop (Livraria Portuguesa) at 6pm on Saturday 25 March. Prof. Groom will be introduced by Prof. Andrew Moody (Head of English, UM); Prof. Groom will give an introductory talk and a short reading from the book, and this will be followed by an audience Q&A and a reception. Copies of the book will available at the event.

Twenty-First-Century Tolkien was published late last year and has already been recorded as an audiobook, available on audible.com. A second updated paperback edition and an American edition will be published in September 2023, and there are also foreign-language translations in preparation. The book has been reviewed as ‘Fascinating…. Wonderfully exhilarating’, while another reviewer has noted that ‘Each chapter displays a mastery of both the works in question – whether books or adaptations – and of the vast corpus of Tolkien scholarship … narratives of literary production or of Hollywood bureaucratic processes rarely come as absorbing as Groom’s’. All who enjoy The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, or The Rings of Power are welcome to attend.

Book Launch of Prof. Nick Groom (FAH-DENG): ‘Twenty-First-Century Tolkien: What Middle-Earth Means To Us Today’2023-04-17T00:01:58+08:00
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