China Humanities Seminar
Jing Tsu – Thinking Small in the Literary Cosmos
CGIS Knafel K262 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA, United StatesSpeaker: Jing Tsu, Yale University More than ten years after Sinophone studies, is it breaking up? This talk begins with a recent skirmish over the fraught term and its export. In the […]
Amelia Ying Qin – Seeking Patterns: Close and Distant Readings of Two Collections of Tang 唐 (618-907) Dynasty Anecdotes
CGIS Knafel K262 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA, United StatesSpeaker: Amelia Ying Qin, An Wang Post Doctoral Fellow, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies This study takes two different approaches—close and distant readings—to the hidden patterns in two anecdote collections. The Songchuang zalu 松牕雜錄 (Miscellaneous Notes under the Pine Window) is a small Tang 唐 (618-907) collection of sixteen anecdotes that claims its accounts are both “particularly […]
Wen-Yi Huang – Families Divided: Migration and Those Left Behind in Fifth- and Sixth-Century China
Speaker: Wen-Yi Huang, An Wang Post-Doctoral Fellow, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University In this talk I explore the impact of migration on family members left behind, particularly those whose parents, children, siblings, and spouses were forcibly moved to the Northern Wei (386-534 CE) from four successive southern states of Eastern Jin (317-420 CE), Liu-Song (420-479 […]
Alex des Forges – The Examined Subject and the Natural Self in the Eight-Legged Essay
Speaker: Alex des Forges, University of Massachusetts - Boston This paper inquires into the rhetoric and practice of the individual voice in Ming dynasty examination essays, commonly referred to as shiwen (modern prose) or bagu wen (eight-legged essays). Beginning in the early 1500s, essay criticism and the essays themselves feature a rhetoric of the natural […]
郝春文 Hao Chunwen – 敦煌寫本齋文的分類、定名及其文本結構 Rethinking the Structure and Typology of Liturgical Texts From Dunhuang
This talk will be given in Mandarin Speaker: Hao Chunwen 郝春文, Senior Professor, Capital Normal University This talk gives an overview of recent scholarly thinking on the typology and structure of the liturgical texts found among the Dunhuang manuscripts. We can divide the thousands of liturgical texts found at Dunhuang into two main categories: liturgical protocols […]
Andrew Chittick – The Resistant South: Sketching a History of the Wu People in the First Millennium CE
Speaker: Andrew Chittick, Eckerd College The history of East Asia in the first millennium CE is ordinarily framed as the successive “fragmentation” of China under the Han dynasty, and its “reunification” under the Sui and Tang dynasties. This talk develops an alternative perspective, in which mainland East Asia is characterized by many distinct cultural regions, which […]
Meow Hui Goh – Fake News, Genuine Words: The Power Dynamic of Literature in Early Medieval China
Speaker: Meow Hui Goh, Ohio State University As we grapple with the consequences of fake news, disseminated across the globe in high-speed internet to impact countries and communities on issues as grave as presidential election, gender discrimination, and ethnic cleansing, it might feel as if our world is treading on unchartered territory. But viral misinformation is […]
Matthew Wells – The Vision to Restore the Empire: Manufacturing Monarchy and Empire in the Early 4th Century
CGIS South Room S354 1730 Cambridge St, Cambridge, MA, United StatesSpeaker: Matthew Wells, University of Kentucky This presentation will discuss part of an ongoing project that attempts to explain how the early leaders of the Eastern Jin understood and executed what Dennis Grafflin has called the “interesting task of reality construction” that was required for establishing their new empire in Yangzhou 揚州 in the early 4th century. […]
Wei Shang – “The Story of the Stone” and the Visual Culture of the Manchu Court
Speaker: Wei Shang, Columbia University This talk addresses The Story of the Stone (otherwise known as Dream of the Red Chamber, Honglou meng 紅樓夢), authored by Cao Xueqin (ca. 1715--ca. 1763), with special focus on its recurrent theme as captured in Chapter 1: “Truth becomes fiction when fiction is true; real becomes not-real where the […]
Jon Felt -Postimperial Metageographies of Early Medieval China
Speaker: Jon Felt, Brigham Young University For a long time the imperial metageography has been the dominance spatial framework though which people have studied the history of China. This metageography exaggerates the unity and centrality of the imperial court in China and of China in the world—hence the popular idea of “the Middle Kingdom.” The […]
Anthony DeBlasi – The Anomaly of Tang Zhongzong 唐中宗 (r. 684 and 705-710) and the Dynamics of Tang History
Speaker: Anthony DeBlasi, University at Albany, State University of New York Most accounts of the life and reigns of the Tang emperor Zhongzong have portrayed him as an addendum to the careers of his more illustrious relatives, his mother the Empress Wu Zetian 武則天 and his nephew Tang Xuanzong 唐玄宗, seeing him as merely an […]
Christian de Pee – Losing the Way in the City: Cities and Intellectual Crisis in Eleventh-Century China
Speaker: Christian de Pee, University of Michigan During the eleventh century, literati endeavored for the first time to write the commercial streetscape. Literati of previous centuries had written the city in the past tense, in tales of dissolute youth and in memoirs about capitals destroyed, but had otherwise hidden urban streets behind a generic blur of […]