Events

China Humanities Seminar – Writing and Reading “Local Court Drama” in Late Imperial China: Texts, Genres, and Identities 

Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave. 2 Divinity Ave., Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States

Speaker: Tian Yuan Tan 陳靝沅: Shaw Professor of Chinese, University of Oxford; Professorial Fellow, University College

Recent reprint projects have given researchers much improved access to the vast corpus of Chinese court dramatic texts kept in palace archives and private collections, which in turn presents a challenge: how do we unpack the complex textual web and varied forms contained therein? I am interested in ways of reading court drama in connection with the wider textual and cultural worlds. This talk will focus on a body of texts that I call “local court drama” - playtexts that were presented to the emperor from across various regions, produced on occasions ranging from the celebration of imperial birthdays to welcoming the sovereign on tours. We will look at the textual problems and the generic labels applied, literary models invoked, and identities represented in the process. 
 
Tian Yuan Tan 陳靝沅 is the Shaw Professor of Chinese at the University of Oxford and a Professorial Fellow of University College. His main areas of research include Chinese literary history and historiography, text and performance, and cross-cultura

China Humanities Seminar featuring Anne Feng – Water Transformation: Buddhist Meditation and Pure Land Art in Tang China

Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave. 2 Divinity Ave., Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States

Speaker: Anne N. Feng, Assistant Professor of Chinese Art, Boston University This paper investigates the relationship between Buddhist meditation and images in medieval China by reconsidering the development of Pure Land transformation tableaux in Dunhuang caves. Working against previous studies that treat the Sixteen Meditations as a linear step-by-step sequence in which the meditator focuses […]

China Humanities Seminar featuring Meimei Zhang – Immortalizing the Ephemeral: Qin Inscriptions from the Song Dynasty (960-1279)

Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave. 2 Divinity Ave., Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States

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 […]

China Humanities Seminar featuring Cheng-hua Wang – What Handscroll Landscape Painting Could Convey: Format, Structure, and the Discourse on Huayi in the Late Northern Song Dynasty

Common Room, 2 Divinity Ave. 2 Divinity Ave., Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States

Speaker: Cheng-hua Wang, Associate Professor, Princeton University Focusing on landscape paintings in the handscroll format from the tenth to the twelfth century, this talk aims to present two structural innovations […]

China Humanities Seminar featuring Michelle Wang – Terrestrial Diagrams in Early China

CGIS South, Room S050 1730 Cambridge St, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States

Speaker: Michelle H. Wang, Associate Professor of Art History and Humanities, Reed College In The Art of Terrestrial Diagrams in Early China (University of Chicago Press, 2023), Michelle H. Wang explores the diagrammatic tradition of rendering space in early China. The book centers on maps (ditu) excavated from three tombs that date from the fourth […]