POSTPONED!

The Online Colloquium of the Summer Term 2025 by the Research Training Group GRK 2833 “East Asian Futures” will continue with a lecture by Professor Aaron William MOORE. You are cordially invited to attend.

Prof. Aaron William MOORE (University of Edinburgh)
“Planners, Popularisers, and Prognosticators: Envisioning the Future of Warfare in East Asia, 1900–1937”
Monday, July 7, 2025, 10 am – 12 pm (Central European Time)

This colloquium lecture has to be postponed. We are very sorry for any inconveniences and will inform you here about the rescheduled date.

Abstract
This talk will examine how Japanese and Chinese writers imagined a future of extraordinary warfare, utilising weapons and techniques that had never been seen before. Such super-weapons promised not only widespread destruction, but a complete transformation of the old world order. MOORE explains how turn of the century newsprint created an information system that mixed fact and fantasy, making foreign countries a space for projecting hopes and fears while legitimising some of the wilder dreams of the East Asian ‘visionary class’. He then shows that the new industries and rapid social changes after WWI coincided with the emergence of a new magazine culture, which popularised speculative scientific writing, including what eventually became known as science fiction or ‘sf’. Focusing on the global conversation around the ‘death ray’, which MOORE calls ‘the total war that wasn’t’, he argues that Japanese and Chinese ‘future writing’ was an important cultural component for justifying the use of weapons of mass destruction.

Bio
Prof. Aaron William MOORE is the Handa Chair of Japanese-Chinese Relations at the University of Edinburgh. He is a comparative historian who has worked with materials in China, Japan, Russia, the US, and Great Britain, publishing on combat soldiers’ diaries in “Writing War” (Harvard, 2013), civilian accounts of air raids in “Bombing the City” (Cambridge, 2018), and personal documents by wartime children and youth in a number of articles and book chapters. He has co-edited two new volumes, “How Maoism Was Made” (Oxford, 2024), which features new work on early PRC Chinese diary writers, and “Mass Culture and Intermediality in Interwar Japan” (Bloomsbury, 2025), which includes his original translations of the path-breaking intellectual HIRABAYASHI Hatsunosuke. He is currently finishing a book on transnational wartime youth entitled “What Can Be Said”, and a series of articles on science fiction, wartime violence, and the memories of Japanese occupation among Taiwanese indigenous communities. His research has been previously supported by the AHRC, British Academy, and the Leverhulme Trust, and in 2014 he was awarded the Leverhulme Prize.

Organizer
Research Training Group 2833 “East Asian Futures: Visions and Realizations on National, Transregional and Global Scales”, Ruhr University Bochum and University of Duisburg-Essen.