Randolph-Macon College’s Asian Studies Department will host Dr. Miranda Brown, an accomplished scholar of early Chinese history, as the keynote speaker for the annual J. Earl Moreland Lecture on Asia on Thursday, April 17, 2025. The event begins at 7:30 p.m. in the Dollar Tree Room in Brock Commons and is free and open to the public.

Brown is the Yi-Tsi Mei Feuerwerker Collegiate Professor of Chinese Studies in the Department of Asian Languages and Culture, and the Director of the Honors Program in the College of Literatures, Sciences, and Arts at the University of Michigan, where she has taught since 2002. She is currently writing a book on Chinese food, Dumpling Therapy (St. Martin’s Press). Brown spent the 2023-2024 academic year in Taipei, Taiwan on a Fulbright grant, which enabled her to research post-war Taiwanese foodways. 

Her lecture, entitled “The Forgotten, Gourmet Origins of Your Favorite Chinese Takeout,” will offer a fresh perspective on the misunderstood cultural legacy of Chinese-American restaurants. In recent years, food critics and historians have decried staples like potstickers, Kung Pao chicken, and General Tso’s as mere corruptions of authentic Chinese cooking. But Brown traces the surprising origins of American Chinese takeout menus in the elite kitchens of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) in wartime Chongqing and analyzes the cuisine’s turbulent journey from China to postwar Taiwan, and finally to 1970s America.

Each spring, the J. Earl Moreland Lecture on Asia brings a distinguished expert to the Randolph-Macon campus for a public lecture. The lecture was established through the generous donation of the late Dr. Lik Kiu Ding ’49 to commemorate J. Earl Moreland, president of Randolph-Macon College from 1939 to 1967. The event aims to create greater student understanding and interest in Asian affairs by connecting students directly with distinguished scholars and prominent professionals.