Speaker: Nicolas Standaert, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium) The Chinese gazette as a publicly available government publication was distributed in a variety of formats since the twelfth century. Little is known, however, about its form and content before 1800. By looking at European sources, this presentation shows how they offer a unique way of expanding the […]

Speaker: Meimei Zhang, Occidental College This paper examines the Song dynasty literati’s ming 銘 inscriptions on the qin 琴, a seven-string plucked instrument that is also known as zither or guqin. The tradition of inscribing musical instruments can be traced back to bronze bells and chime stones in the Shang and Zhou dynasties, which bore pithy messages primarily functioning as historiographical and musicological records. From […]

Speaker: Charles Hartman, University at Albany, Emeritus This lecture will introduce my recent book, Structures of Governance in Song Dynasty China 960-1279 CE (Cambridge, 2023). Together with its historiographical prelude, The Making of Song Dynasty History: Sources and Narratives (Cambridge, 2021), Structures of Governance seeks to go beyond the static organizational charts of the official […]

Speaker: Soojung Han, Assistant Professor of History, Southwestern University Following the collapse of the Tang dynasty and before the rise of the Song dynasty, the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period (907–979) is known to have been one of the most chaotic periods in Chinese history. In this lecture, I explore the relations between China […]

Speaker: Xiaoqiao Ling, Associate Professor of Chinese, Arizona State University This paper investigates ways in which the proximity of texts in literary environments complicate our understanding of invention and creation in the late Ming narrative tradition. Early vernacular short stories (huaben) are typically dismissed as haphazard patchworks of disparate textual segments. Pioneering scholars such as […]

Speaker: John Kieschnick, Robert H.N. Ho Family Foundation Professor of Buddhist Studies, Stanford University Drawing on newspapers, essays, memoirs, correspondence and Buddhist journals, this talk will outline the major trends in Chinese vegetarianism from 1900-1950, attempting to capture the diverse motivations, arguments and innovations in the anti-meat movement in China in the first half of […]

Speaker: Franciscus Verellen, Professor Emeritus, École française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO); Vice President, Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, Institut de France The understudied end phase of the Tang dynasty (618–907) is mainly known through official accounts dating to the tenth and eleventh centuries. This lecture examines the process that led to the empire’s breakup from the vantage […]

**NOTE UPDATED DATE***Speaker: Matthew Wild, Preceptor in Literary Sinitic, Harvard University. This talk examines the poetics of time at the height of Qing empire. It offers a new approach to the work of the Qing poet Huang Jingren (1749–1783) against his subsequent appropriation by early twentieth-century writers who claimed Huang as a proleptic modern Chinese […]

Speaker: Shoufu Yin, Assistant Professor of History, University of British Columbia What could China—or the entire world—have been? Starting in the fourteenth century, hundreds of thousands of individuals in present-day China, Korea, and Vietnam were ruminating on this question in their own ways. They began by placing themselves in a moment in Chinese history, composing […]

Speaker: Ya Zuo, Associate Professor of History, University of California, Santa Barbara Quanzhen Daoism wielded a profound influence across eastern Eurasia, shaping the intellectual landscape of the Jurchen Jin dynasty (1115–1234) and leaving a lasting impact on the Mongol Yuan empire (1279–1368). In this talk, I delve into the focus on emotions in Quanzhen philosophy. The religion […]