China Humanities Seminar
Xie Lingyun and Imperial Performance: Deploying the Language of the Chuci
CGIS Knafel K262 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA, United StatesSpeaker: Harrison Huang, Assistant Professor, East Asian Languages and Cultures, Columbia University The reception of the Chuci anthology has been largely framed around the representation of the attributed author Qu Yuan as […]
China Humanities Seminar: The Poetry Demon – Tensions within Chinese Buddhist Monks’ Literature
CGIS Knafel K262 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA, United StatesSpeaker: Jason Protass is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Brown University. He completed doctoral work at Stanford University in 2016, and was a visiting researcher at Academia Sinica in […]
China Humanities Seminar: Perceptions of China’s Sexual Economy
CGIS Knafel K262 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA, United StatesSpeaker: Harriet Zurndorfer Abstract: This lecture focuses on men and women engaged in China’s sexual economy, which is dominated by the exchange between wealthy and politically influential men and unmarried […]
China Humanities Seminar: Forging a Master Key: Li Yu’s 李漁 Theory of Universal Theater
CGIS Knafel K262 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA, United StatesSpeaker: S.E. Kile, University of Michigan Studies of Li Yu’s theorization of playwriting and theatrical performance have generally focused on his creation of a new technical vocabulary for playwriting and performance, the relationship between his theory’s tenets and his own playwriting practice, and the impact of profit-seeking on his ideas. I propose that using technology […]
China Humanities Seminar – Huaben and the Mind
CGIS Knafel K262 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA, United StatesSpeaker: Tina Lu, Yale University As a genre, huaben are relentlessly experimental. Sometimes these stories come close to stream of consciousness (especially in their depiction of dreams), and it is easy to lapse into habits of reading that consider those experiments proto-modernist. Tina Lu would like to take a step back and consider the ways […]
David Palmer & Elijah Siegler – Enchanting Huashan in the Global Spiritual Circuit: Intersecting Modes of Making Sacred Space
CGIS Knafel K262 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA, United StatesSpeakers: David Palmer, University of Hong Kong Elijah Siegler, College of Charleston This talk is based on the newly released book Dream Trippers (University of Chicago Press), a multi-sited ethnographic study of transnational encounters between American Daoist spiritual tourists and practitioners and the Chinese monks and hermits of the sacred Daoist peak of Huashan. In this talk, the […]
CANCELED: Jing Tsu – Key Strokes: What Made the Chinese Script Revolution?
CGIS Knafel K262 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA, United StatesSpeaker: Jing Tsu, Yale University It is tempting to understand the Chinese script revolution of the modern era as part of a familiar narrative of vengeance. The Chinese language was idealized then disparaged by the Europeans, on this view, banished then revived only to play a mere prop in different fantasies about the Orient. That Chinese […]
Paul W. Kroll – Personal Moments in Medieval Chinese Poetry
CGIS Knafel K262 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA, United StatesSpeaker: Paul W. Kroll, University of Colorado Medieval Chinese poetry, like most self-consciously traditional literature, embraces learning, presumption, and intertextuality with ardor. Scholarship delights to roam in these fields which provide rich fare for the mind. But those moments that suddenly engage the heart (a somewhat neglected organ in the postmodern era) affect us at […]
Eric Greene – Repentance in the Formation of Chinese Buddhism
Speaker: Eric Greene, Yale University The ritual activity that in China was known as chanhui 懺悔 – often understood to mean “confession” or “repentance” – was without doubt one the central forms […]
Evelyn (Chiung-yun) Liu – When Fantastic Narrative Encounters Empirical Knowledge: Imagining the World in “The Eunuch Sanbao’s Voyage to the Western Ocean”
CGIS Knafel K262 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA, United StatesSpeaker: Evelyn (Chiung-yun) Liu, Academia Sinica, HYI Visiting Scholar The Eunuch Sanbao's Voyage to the Western Ocean, a late-sixteenth century novel loosely based on the historical expeditions commanded by Zheng He […]
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 […]