Episode 2 of the Meanings of Violence series, hosted by Dr. Morten Oxenboell with University of Pennsylvania guest Dr. David Spafford.

After this conversation, Dr. Spafford noted the following corrections: 1) the nun Jukei died just a few months before the end of her house, not a few years. 2) Hagakure was written in the eighteenth century, not the seventeenth.

In collaboration with the Hamilton Lugar School’s Area Studies Centers, the East Asian Studies Center has launched into a a multi-faceted exploration of the history of collective violence. In East Asia, as everywhere, violence (or the threat thereof) has determined the fates of nations, driven advancements in technology and administration, and spurred doctrinal developments in philosophy and religion.

This series facilitates dialogue between scholars from different disciplines about how violence can be understood. With both global and historical approaches, our network of experts is ideally situated to explore how different social contexts inform sentiments and appropriate and/or illegitimate violence—an approach that is critical for developing sustainable and effective policies for violence prevention in the future.