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ACMS Speaker Series

Speaker Series Audience

The ACMS Speakers Series is an on-going series of lectures presented by Mongolian and visiting international academics to the public. The Speaker Series began in the Fall of 2004, and it has grown to include an average of 12 lectures per academic year.

Speaker Series lectures are generally given from 5 pm to 6 pm on Thursday evenings on the campus of the National University of Mongolia. The lectures are 40-50 minutes in length, with an opportunity for audience members to ask questions. From 6 pm to 7 pm audience members are invited to the ACMS reading room for refreshments and an opportunity for further discussion.

The ACMS invites researchers and scholars to present public lectures at the ACMS Speaker Series on a rolling basis. If you are planning to visit Mongolia between late August and early July to conduct research or study, please contact info@mongoliacenter.org to schedule a date to present. The lectures must be conducted in English, and all academic disciplines are welcome. The Speaker Series is a great opportunity for scholars to present their work and for the general public to learn about academic research in Mongolia. Please notify the ACMS at least two weeks prior to your proposed date to speak in order to allow enough time to advertise the lecture.

Call for Speakers for Fall 2009

The American Center for Mongolian Studies (ACMS) invites researchers and scholars to present public lectures during the ACMS Fall 2009 Speaker Series. If you are planning to visit Mongolia between September and December 2009 to conduct research or study, please contact info@mongoliacenter.org to schedule a date to participate in this public lecture series. The lectures must be conducted in English, and all academic disciplines are welcome. The Speaker Series is a great opportunity for scholars to present their work and for the general public to learn about academic research in Mongolia. Please notify the ACMS at least two weeks prior to your proposed date to speak in order to allow enough time to advertise the lecture.

Past Speaker Series Lecturers

Below is a list of all previous Speaker Series lecturers since 2004. The list is preseneted in chronological order beginning with the most recent lecture from the previous season.

Dr. Scott Gardner, University of Nebraska

Host - Parasite Biodiversity: A global perspective

May 28th, 2009, 5pm Room 305, Building No. 5 NUM

Dr. Scott Gardner

Biological diversity is the foundation of life on earth. Without the diverse and interconnected communities and assemblages of living organisms on our earth, we would have no food webs to sustain extant species of plants and animals. Dr. Gardner studies these interconnected systems from the viewpoint of a systematist and parasitologist. At first glance, these two fields of study, systematics and parasitology, seem to be very specific, but they are actually very broad in scope. While systematics seeks to understand the evolutionary relationships among species of organisms, Parasitology is the study of parasites and of parasitism. All species of animals harbor their own specific parasites ranging from macro- (like tapeworms, ticks, lice, or nematodes) to micro-parasites like viruses and protozoans.

Our work world-wide over the past 20 years has shown how predictions of areas of high biodiversity can be made based on the presence of a single species of tapeworm in marsupials. We have argued, too, how the presence and absence of parasites in humans in both the Old World and the New World can shed light on large scale geographic movements of people in prehistoric times. More recently my students, colleagues, and I have been describing the diversity of parasites from mammals of Mongolia and relating this diversity to the ecology of the host mammals. Our current project in Mongolia, the Mongolian Vertebrate Parasite Project is a multi-national collaborative effort funded by the US National Science Foundation. We are bringing together research scientists and students from the National University of Mongolia, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Hokkaido University, the University of New Mexico, Portland State University in Oregon, and the University of Kansas to study the diversity, relationships, and ecology of small mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and their parasites in Mongolia.

Researchers from these institutions will spend the next 3 years exploring the 27,000 square kilometer Gobi Gurvan Saikhan National Park, and its environs, in an effort to better understand the diversity of species and their parasites that live in this area, and how they interact with each other and their environment. By understanding which parasites these animals may harbor researchers will garner a better idea of the habits and interactions of these animals as well as potential threats to wildlife or local human inhabitants. For example, in addition to basic work in biodiversity, we will examine wildlife populations for the presence of several potential zoonotic agents of disease, including hantavirus and the tapeworm of carnivores and rodents which is the causative agent of alveolar hydatid disease in humans.

Dr. Gardner is Professor of Biological Sciences at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) and Curator and Director of the Harold W. Manter Laboratory of Parasitology at UNL. He studies parasites in vertebrates world-wide focused primarily on macro- and micro-parasites of mammals. (See: http://hwml.unl.edu and http://lamarck.unl.edu/mongolia).

Jonathan Schlesinger, ACMS Fellow, Harvard University

An Introduction to the Environmental History of Qing Mongolia: the View from the Archives

May 14th, 2009, 5pm Room 305, Building No. 5 NUM

Jonathan Schlesinger

In the year 1800, why were sables and wild boars disappearing so rapidly from Mongolia’s protected areas? And why, for that matter, had the ruling Manchus even established such areas? Under what circumstances would officials ever consider the natural environment to be damaged or polluted? This lecture will attempt to answer such questions in light of new research on Qing-period archival records, with a focus on the years 1796-1850. For the Manchus, I will argue, maintaining the ethnic integrity of Inner Asian homelands – such as Khalkha Mongolia – was central to their imperial project, and this extended to the protection of the frontiers’ flora, fauna, and natural landscapes. In practice, though, in an era of unprecedented commercial expansion, frontier ecology came to embody negotiations between multi-ethnic empire and marketplace, as local actors – many impoverished – sought to profit from a surging urban demand for natural resources. This lecture will introduce the relevant archival materials for studying Qing Mongolia’s environmental history and discuss what they tell us about the maintenance of state-protected wilderness, poaching industries, and the shifting meanings of pollution and cleanliness.

Jonathan Schlesinger is an ACMS fellow and a PhD candidate in History and East Asian Languages at Harvard University. His dissertation, entitled “Inventing Nature in the Qing Empire,” explores the tensions of frontier and metropole that shaped Qing environmental history. He has been conducting research at the Mongolian National Central Archives since arriving in Ulaanbaatar in September 2008.

Dr. Mikael Thompson, ACMS Fellow

Strings, Pipes, and Magnets: The Mathematical Theory of Vowels, Historical Linguistics, and Mongolian

April 30th, 2009, 5pm Room 305, Building No. 5 NUM

Dr. Mikael Thompson

Since the 1960s the study of the physics of speech production has progressed greatly; concurrently, advances in digital sound processing and computer technology have afforded linguists unprecedented opportunities to study the sounds of the world’s languages, and as a result a number of theories have been put forward to explain regularities found in the vowel systems of languages. However, none of these theories is fully adequate to account for change in vowel systems over time. Khalkha Mongolian is significant for such studies in part because its close clustering of rounded vowels is unusual among the languages of the world, and as this appears to be fairly recent, the details of its historical development might be found fairly easily by studying the current language cross-generationally and through comparison with other dialects. Dr. Thompson's study has several aims: First, to study the vowel system of contemporary UB Khalkha in the speech of 75-100 native speakers in great detail; second, to use this data to study stress and devoicing; and third, to find evidence of change in progress in the vowel system of UB Khalkha. Finally, to place this study in the full context of contemporary linguistics, Dr. Thompson will touch on the role of instrumental phonetic studies like this one in sociolinguistics and historical linguistics.

Mikael Thompson (Ph.D. Linguistics, Indiana University at Bloomington, 2008) is currently in Mongolia conducting research as an ACMS Fellow. He is a historical linguist and phonetician specializing in Mongolian and in Inner Asian linguistic history. He is the co-author of A Tajiki Reference Grammar for Beginners (with Nasrullo Khojayori, Georgetown University Press, 2009) and contributed articles on Inner Asian and Tibetan scripts to the 2nd edition of the International Encyclopedia of Languages and Linguistics (2006) and the 2nd edition of The World’s Writing Systems (2009). He has also served as managing editor of Studies in African Linguistics and textbook editor at the Center for Languages of the Central Asian Region at Indiana University at Bloomington.

Dr. Morris Rossabi, City University of New York

Recent Re-evaluations of Chinggis Khan and Khubilai Khan

April 23rd, 2009, 5pm Room 305, Building No. 5 NUM

Dr. Morris Rossabi

Over the past decade, there have been quite a number of books, both for a popular audience and for scholars, and museum exhibitions dealing with Chinggis Khan and Khubilai Khan, the two most renowned figures of the Mongolian era in global history. This lecture will attempt to sort out and, as far as possible, evaluate these interpretations.

Dr. Rossabi is Distinguished Professor of History at City University of New York, as well as Professor of History at Queens College and Graduate Center at City University of New York and Visiting Professor of Chinese and Mongolian History at Columbia University. His extensive list of publications include books and articles about Khubilai Khan, the history of the Yuan and Ming Dynasties, Chinese history, and Mongolia's transition to a free-market and democratic society.

Dr. Brian Baumann, Indiana University, ACMS Fellow

Mongolia’s Journey through Hell

April 9th, 2009, 5pm Room 305, Building No. 5 NUM

Dr. Brian Baumann

Beginning with an introduction to a pre-classical Mongolian Buddhist treatise on enlightenment and liberation from the bonds of Hell, this lecture will explain the ties that bind the classical genre of Hell as it stretches across Eurasia and through time, and so use Hell’s foundation in science as a way to understand the history of the genre in Mongolia.

Dr. Baumann is currently in Mongolia as an ACMS Fellow conducting research on Mongolia's transition from a dynastic religious society to Communist state in the early to middle part of the 20th century. He received his PhD from Indiana University in Central Eurasian Studies, where he teaches courses on Mongolian history and Buddhism.

Jean-Luc Houle, PhD Candidate, University of Pittsburgh

Revealing the ‘Invisible Culture’: The Social Organization of Early Mobile Pastoralists of Central Mongolia

March 12th, 2009, 5pm Room 305, Building No. 5 NUM

Jean-Luc Houle

Unprecedented settlement data now provides the social context for the Bronze Age groups of Central Mongolia that built monuments that supersede in above ground elaborateness anything else of its nature in the Bronze Age steppe. Some of these recent archaeological discoveries have upended old ideas and now offer a more comprehensive picture of subsistence, mobility patterns and social organization. Through a review of the extant archaeological data, this presentation will address some of the issues related to the nature and degree of societal complexity of these early mobile pastoralists. It will be suggested that what we see may represent the first stage in the emergence of political organization operating beyond the descent group.

Jean-Luc Houle is a PhD Candidate in the Eurasian Archaeology Program of the Department of Anthropology, University of Pittsburgh (USA). He received his MSc in Anthropology at the University of Montreal (Canada) during which time he researched the development of societal complexity in Northern China. Since 2001, Jean-Luc has been involved in research in Mongolia. As senior co-PI of the Khanuy Valley Archaeology Project since 2006, he is currently conducting multidisciplinary field research in the Khanuy Valley region of north-central Mongolia, where he is studying the development of societal complexity among early mobile pastoralists of the Late Bronze Age (mid-second to mid-first millennia BCE).

Lucy Rees, PhD Candidate, University of Leeds, England

Hearing Mongolian Identity: Tradition, Change and Social Commentary in Mongolian Films and their Soundtracks

March 5th, 2009, 5pm Room 305, Building No. 5 NUM

Lucy Rees

This talk provides an overview of the main themes and issues raised by filmmakers and film composers throughout seven decades of Mongolian cinema. A discussion of a number of the most influential films will illustrate how filmmakers and film composers have expressed the socialist ideology, Mongolian cultural traditions, and social problems associated with the transition to a market economy. Both Mongolian-made films and collaborations with foreign film studios will be explored.

Lucy Rees is working towards a PhD in Mongolian film music at Leeds University, England. She is spending the 2008-2009 academic year in Mongolia to conduct research towards this PhD. She has a Master's Degree in Film Music from Kingston University, London (Distinction) and Master's Degree in Creative Writing from the University of Wales (Distinction) and an honours degree in Classical music from the University of Birmingham, England. Her research interests include film music, ethnomusicology, and composition.

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