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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Speaker: 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. […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Speaker: April Hughes, Boston University This talk examines the association between Wu Zhao of Great Zhou (Empress Wu Zetian) and Maitreya Buddha in a commentary on the Scripture of the Great Cloud (Dayun jing 大雲經, T. no. 387) presented to the throne in 690 just prior to her being declared emperor. The Commentary quotes from Attesting Illumination (Zhengmingjing證明經, T. no. 2879), a non-canonical apocalyptic scripture in […]

Speaker: Zeb Raft, Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy, Academia Sinica The Shishuo xinyu, the fifth-century collection of anecdotes, is full of echoes.  Stories can be repeated, in somewhat different form.  Individual entries may juxtapose two accounts that are different, yet similar in certain respects.  Common motifs figure prominently.  How should we interpret this “echo effect”?  This […]