Professor Gilman will focus on a set of interlinked claims about posture in modern culture. Over the past two centuries it has come to define a wide range of assumptions in the West from what makes human beings human and beyond to the efficacy of the body in warfare. Posture separates “primitive” from “advanced” peoples and the “ill” from the “healthy.” Indeed an entire medical sub-specialty developed in which gymnastics defined and recuperated the body. But all of these claims were also part of a Western attempt to use posture (and the means of altering it) as the litmus test for the healthy modern body of the perfect citizen. Focusing on the centrality of posture in two oddly linked moments of modern thought — modern Zionist thought and Nationalism in early 20^th century China — in terms of bodily reform, Prof Gilman shall illustrate how all of the earlier Western claims about posture (and the body of the “sick Jew” as well as the “sick man of Asia”) brings all of the earlier debates together to reform unhealthy posture.