Events

China Humanities Seminar featuring Paula Varsano – Troubled Hearts and Worried Minds: Knowing the Subjects of the “Airs of the States”

Speaker: Paula Varsano, University of California, Berkeley In a moment when digital humanities, distant reading, manuscript studies, and a variety of historical and political lenses invite us to look at literature as a manifestation of larger and, sometimes, impersonal cultural forces, this talk takes up a different constellation of questions:  how does one recognize and define […]

China Humanities Seminar Featuring Stephanie Balkwill – Another Cakravartin Ruler?: Feminist History and the History of Buddhism in Early Medieval China

Speaker: Stephanie Balkwill, Assistant Professor, Buddhist Studies, UCLA Northern Wei 北魏 (386–534 CE) Empress Dowager Ling 靈 (d. 529) is commonly regarded as the last independent ruler of her dynasty, which descended into terminal internecine war during her regency. As a ruler, she inherited a deeply divided state. The move of the capital from Pingcheng […]

China Humanities Seminar Featuring Scott Pearce – Looking Behind the Text: The Case of Northern Wei’s ‘Yuan Pi’

Speaker: Scott Pearce, Western Washington University All textual traditions are based on their own particular sets of assumptions and preoccupations. This was the case of the Chinese classical tradition as well, which having taken full shape under the Han empire, continued to be used as the only available language of written record by the very […]

China Humanities Seminar Featuring Suyoung Son – Publisher at Work: Yu Xiangdou’s Images and Visualizing Intellectual Labor

Speaker: Suyoung Son, Associate Professor, Cornell University How could intangible, tacit intellectual labor be legible, acknowledged, and compensated? The relationship between authorship and authorial property was hotly debated in late imperial China when a flurry of fakes, forgeries, and counterfeits abounded in the commercial book market. My talk will use examples from Yu Xiangdou (ca. […]

China Humanities Seminar featuring Yuhang Li – Engineering Religious Bliss at the Qing Court: Jile shijie in the Beihai Park

Speaker: Yuhang Li, University of Wisconsin-Madison   In 1770, with the purpose of presenting an unusual surprising gift to his mother Empress Dowager Chongqing (1692-1777) for her eightieth birthday, Emperor Qianlong (1711-1799) ordered the imperial architectural department to construct a Buddhist compound named jile shijie or blissful land on the northern shore of imperial Beihai Park next […]

China Humanities Seminar featuring Yuri Pines – The Great Unity (da yitong 大一統) Ideal: The Key to China’s Imperial Longevity?

Speaker: Yuri Pines, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem One of the most notable features of imperial China is the exceptional durability of the imperial political system. Having been formed in the aftermath of Qin 秦 unification (221 BCE), this system lasted intact for 2132 years, until the abdication of the child emperor Puyi 溥儀 on February 12, […]