Speaker: Matthias L. Richter, Associate Professor of Chinese, University of Colorado at Boulder Audiences in early China were probably more aware of technicalities in texts than we are today, since they had first-hand experience of a predominantly oral textual culture and the management of cognitive load it required. Conventions of structuring texts rooted in this

Speaker: Lili Xia, Assistant Professor, Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures, Barnard College. The geocultural significance of the “North” was crucial to the competing claims to China between the Jurchen Jin (1115–1234) and Southern Song (1127–1279) dynasties. This talk examines the contemporary conception of “northernness,” arguing that Jurchen-ruled North China was at once a

Speaker: Zhuming Yao, Assistant Professor of Chinese & Comparative Literature at Boston University Many poems in the Shijing 詩經 feature a lyric “I,” a first-person voice speaking about intense emotions. Yet, who those “Is” are has never been clear. After two millennia of commentarial writings, we are no more certain than the first critics of