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 […]

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” […]

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 […]

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. […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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. […]

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 […]

Speaker: Paize Keulemans, Princeton University What are the ludic attractions of a fifteenth-century novel?  What role is played by historical narrative in a twenty-first-century game?  How is a character developed in […]