Past NYU Shanghai Reads Events 2023-2024

As the second part of the Faculty Salon Series, EAP Lecturer Paul Meloccaro was joined by 47 attendees to discuss humanity’s growing fear of AI displacing human creativity and thought. In response to the themes of virtual parenting, deceitfulness, and artificial reproductive technologies in Zhao Haihong’s short story “Baby, I Love You,” Professor Meloccaro addressed our underlying hopes and anxieties around AI as we become increasingly dependent on our robotic counterparts. He referenced NYTimes journalist Kevin Roose’s real-life conversations with a ChatBot and welcomed students’ dramatic readings of excerpts from the transcript. Why does a robot’s desire to ‘be alive’ make us feel so uneasy? Professor Meloccaro challenges the very qualities that make us “uniquely human”: theory of mind, culture, morality, language, and arts. Following Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud, another invention has displaced humans from the center of the world. As ChatGPT can write rudimentary essays and begin to “think” about philosophy, we are posed with the vital question of what makes us “quintessentially human”? Can humans and AI maintain a mutualistic relationship, instead of one of toxic dependency? Professor Meloccaro leaves us all pondering about these fascinating existential questions.

NYU Shanghai Reads was so excited to invite two authors of The Way Spring Arrives, Xiu Xinyu and Nian Yu, on campus to share their writing process with our university community on October 12. Gathered together in the intimate space of the World Languages Lounge, 10 attendees learned about the inspirations behind the authors’ short stories “The Stars We Raised” and “A Brief History of Beinakan Disasters as Told in a Sinitic Language”. From Orbeez water beads to a BBC documentary about the “Frozen Planet,” the authors revealed the many ways that the sci-fi genre is continuously responding to contemporary cultural and technological productions. As women writers, Xiu Xinyu and Nian Yu also touched upon the ways their gender identity unintentionally molds the shape of their stories into narratives that are distinctively “female”. The event ended on a high note with a rich Q&A discussion, as students, faculty and fellows inquired about various aspects of creative writing (e.g. the purpose of sci-fi, the authors’ vision of our collective future, the authors’ upcoming creative projects, etc.). For more information on the Author Talk, as well as our past and upcoming events, please see this article.

On Tuesday, November 21, NYU Shanghai Reads wrapped up its Fall events on a high note with Professors Beilei Gu and Meiling Chen presenting short stories “The Way Spring Arrives” and “What Does the Fox Say?” in a completely new light. They highlighted the musical components present in the stories and centered on the ways in which the intimate connection between music, literature, and culture deepens our understanding of the narratives. Professor Meiling Chen from the Performing Arts department gave live demonstrations of various musical textures and the evolving musical styles across history from the Western classical to Romantic period. By stressing different musical notes, Professor Chen illustrates the shifting semantics that are embedded in musical melody. Her graceful execution of Mozart’s Piano Sonata No.11 in A Major demonstrated that dialogue – in the form of questions and answers – are occurring throughout musical pieces. In the second half of the event, Professor Beilei Gu explores the ocarina (埙), a Chinese globular vessel flute, as a key object in “The Way Spring Arrives”. Alongside Professor Chen’s brief demonstration of the ocarina’s musical sounds, Professor Gu reveals to the 20 community members in attendance how one’s reading experience of these short stories can be meaningfully enriched by traditional folk tunes. Faculty, staff, and students alike learned the multitudinous ways that music can speak to us as a language on its own – how it tells a story, responds to itself, and kindles a range of emotional responses. Though the Fall semester is nearing its end, NYU Shanghai Reads is excited to announce that the program will be returning in the Spring with exciting new events. Please stay tuned for more!

How similar is parenting vs. programming?

If you’re thinking “not at all,” then Dr. Olivier Marin, Professor of Practice in Computer Science at NYU Shanghai, will have convinced you otherwise at the Faculty Salon. The short story “Baby, I Love You” from The Way Spring Arrivesserved as a gateway to explore the study of computer science. Highlighting the character of patience as key to successful parenting, Dr. Marin argued that the relationship between the programmer and the computer is, however unexpectedly, akin to that between a parent and a child. How do we give instruction in an effective way for a desired outcome—whether that’s asking the computer to count to 10 or urging children to wash the dishes after dinner? To demonstrate this, he replicated Harvard’s Peanut Butter & Jelly Sandwich demonstration in an Introduction to Algorithm lecture—if you don’t know what that is watch this video!

Additionally, through other interactive activities, he rendered jargon such as “recursion” and “loop” readily accessible for even coding-newbies. The 33 attendees, comprised of students, faculty members, and staff, were, to say the least, well-entertained, and were given the opportunity to see programming in an entirely different light.

Please stay tuned for the upcoming part three of our Faculty Salon Series!

As a celebration of International Women’s Day, the NYU Shanghai Reads Program and Lit Club co-hosted a panel of inspirational women that included Zhuhui Sun, NYU Shanghai Class of ‘27 student, Claudia Kosser, Partner and Head of FGS Global Shanghai Office, and Hua Jiang, Director of University Communications. The 60-minute conversation covered issues of gender within the context of career, family, and academia. Joined by 31 attendees, the panelists, alongside the student moderator Yijia Cao, NYU Shanghai Class of ‘26 student and Lit Club president, spoke with forthcoming frankness about the challenges and inspirational moments they have encountered as women. The multigenerational panel framed their discussion around Chihui’s short story “The Woman Carrying a Corpse” from the anthology The Way Spring Arrives. Hua described the corpse as a metaphor of our 包袱—the emotional and existential burdens we carry with us as we trudge forward. Across the multi-generational panel, the concept resonated. For both Kosser and Jiang, traveling across countries and experiencing the expansiveness of the world for themselves has been key to reinventing their identities as women. The NYU Shanghai students also shared their similar experiences about how attending university and making plans for the future shape their identities.

So, what corpses are you carrying? And which corpses have you dropped?