Location TBD

Watch traditional Shigaraki pottery come to life during this live demonstration with Hiroaki Takahata, Director of the Shigaraki Ceramic Research Institute. Takahata will showcase the creation of textured clay forms made using hand-crushed stones from Shigaraki, Japan, highlighting the materials and techniques that define this historic ceramic tradition.

Free event. Pre-registration required. Limited seating available.

Click here to register

Join ceramic artist Hiroaki Takahata for a lecture exploring the history and rustic beauty of Shigaraki pottery, one of Japan's six ancient kiln traditions. The talk will cover the cultural traditions of Shigaraki ceramics, including craftsmanship, mindfulness, and tea culture.

Free event. No prior registration required.

How do nuclear weapons and nuclear disasters shape the stories we tell? This talk explores the shifting nuclear imagination in modern Japanese fiction through two provocative novels that move from Cold War anxiety to post-Fukushima visions of future conflict: Kobo Abe's Ark Sakura (1984) and So Kurokawa's From the Rocky Cliff (2017). Abe's darkly humorous tale unfolds over a single day inside a nuclear shelter, where eccentric characters prepare for global annihilation.

Kurokawa's novel imagines Japan in the year 2045, confronting environmental disasters, overflowing nuclear waste, international wars, and a military uprising at a nuclear power plant that risks another catastrophe. By reading these works together, the talk situates the nuclear imagination within broader debates on environmental crises and asks what Japanese literature can teach us about living with long-term nuclear risk on the 15th anniversary of the Fukushima disaster.

Rachel DiNitto is Professor of Japanese Literature at the University of Oregon. Her research explores the nuclear environmental humanities through contemporary cultural production including literature, film, and manga. Her publications include the books Fukushima Fiction: The Literary Landscape of Japan's Triple Disaster (2019) and the edited volume Eco-Disasters in Japanese Cinema (2024).

Does Islam Have a Liberation Theology?", with multiple panels and keynote presentations by Ebrahim Moosa (University of Notre Dame) and Sylvia Chan-Malik (Rutgers University). Webinar registration

Event program 

Rhea Rahman (Assistant Professor of Anthropology Brooklyn College (CUNY). An ethnography of Islamic Relief (IR), the largest Islamic NGO based in the West, Racializing the Ummah explores how a Muslim organization can do good in a world that defines Muslimness as less than human. Rooted in more than a decade of international research, her study on the organizations projects, methods, and limitations reveals how racial capitalism permeates all aspects of humanitarianism and paints a frank, nuanced portrait of the constraints Islamic aid entities face in the effort to disentangle themselves from neocolonialism and Western hegemony.

We are curating build a lending library to give prospective applicants and Peace Corps invitees resources about service as seen through the eyes of RPCVs. We have a dozen books already and would like to get to 25 by the end of the academic year.

While our wish list is posted on Amazon, we also encourage you to consider ordering books from a local book shop such as Schuler Books (Okemos) or Hooked (Lansing). If you prefer to donate and have us handle the purchasing, please visit our online giving link!

Please email Joy Campbell, MSU's recruitment supervisor, at joycamp(at)msu.edu with any questions! 

Learn more about MSU's Peace Corps Recruitment Office on our website. 

Details TBA

Paper submission deadline: March 27th.