Academics aren't all narrow specialists. Cornell's Mark Selden shows his versatility with lectures on American bombing campaigns since WWII and the rural-urban divide in China.

Late last month, one scholar addressed two UCLA audiences in two days on "US Bombing Strategy, the Destruction of Japanese Cities, and the American Way of War from the Pacific War to Iraq" and "China's Durable Inequality: Legacies of Revolution & Pitfalls of Reform." Mark Selden is coordinator for Japan Focus, an electronic journal and archive on Japan and the Asian Pacific, and a senior fellow at Cornell University in the East Asia Program.

A podcast of the first talk is available from the event sponsor, the Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies at UCLA. The Center for Chinese Studies has a brief article on the second talk and a more complete summary on its site.