event

Adventures in Biography: Lectures by Adam Sisman | "Asa Briggs: The Chinese Connection"

11

Mar

The Faculty of Arts and Humanities is hosting a public lecture titled “Asa Briggs: The Chinese Connection” by award-winning writer and biographer, Adam Sisman, on Wednesday, 11 March, from 6.30 – 8 PM, at the Don Bosco Auditorium.

About the Talk:

For over six decades, from the 1950s until his death in 2016, the eminent historian Asa Briggs was involved with Hong Kong, Macau, and China. From the late 1970s until the early 2000s, he took an extremely active interest in the founding of the University of East Asia, Macau’s first modern university, and later in its successor institutions. He was also a founder member of the Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding, and eventually became its president. In a dual presentation, Adam Sisman, his biographer, and Priscilla Roberts of USJ, who is researching his involvement with the University of East Asia, will offer a dual picture of Lord Briggs’s influence on the development of higher education in Greater China and on cultural relations between China and Great Britain and other Commonwealth countries.

Abou the Speaker:

ADAM SISMAN

Adam Sisman is the author of Boswell’s Presumptuous Task, winner of the US National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, and the biographer of John Le Carré, A. J. P. Taylor, Hugh Trevor-Roper, and Asa Briggs. “Mr. Sisman has an ideal biographical style: inquisitive and open, serious yet not severe,” Dwight Garner wrote of his life of Hugh Trevor-Roper in the New York Times: “I’d read him on anyone.” Among Sisman’s other works is The Professor and the Parson: A Story of Desire, Deceit and Defrocking. He has also edited or co-edited three volumes of letters. Sisman is based in Bristol, England. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an Honorary Professor at the University of St Andrews.