Friday, March 22 2024, 2pm 101 LeConte Hall Join us for a presentation by Ji Li on Friday: "God's Little Daughters" and a Missionary Odyssey in Modern China. Dr. Ji Li is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Hong Kong and a 2023-24 joint visiting fellow at the Harvard-Yenching Institute and the Ricci Institute. She received her B.A. and M.A. at Peking University and her Ph.D. at the University of Michigan. Her research focuses on the relationship between religion, local society, and the making of modern China in a local and global context. She is the author of God’s Little Daughters: Catholic Women in Nineteenth-Century Manchuria (Washington 2015), Missions Étrangères de Paris (MEP) and China since the Seventeenth Century to the Present (ed., Brill 2021), and At the Frontier of God's Empire: A Missionary Odyssey in Modern China (Oxford 2023). Free and open to the public. With support from the Horace Montgomery Professorship in History, the University of Georgia's Center for Asian Studies, and the Department of History. ............... Abstract of talk: In 1871, three letters written on yellow rice paper arrived in Paris. Addressed to a French Catholic missionary who had returned to France in poor health after spending twenty-three years in Manchuria, the letters were from three Chinese Catholic women from a small village in northeast China. Thirty years later, Alfred Marie Caubrière (1876–1948) arrived in the same village and experienced and survived the extraordinary political and social changes in Manchuria from 1899 to 1948. Ji Li draws extensively on the incredible missionary archives to examine this imperial yet mundane encounter between Manchurian grassroots society and international actors. The study opens a unique window into the expansion of the Catholic Church in East Asia, the interplay of mission and empire in local society, and the intense transformation of Manchurian society that embodies the clash of both domestic and international tensions in the making of modern China
