BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
PRODID:-//Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies - ECPv6.16.2//NONSGML v1.0//EN
CALSCALE:GREGORIAN
METHOD:PUBLISH
X-WR-CALNAME:Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies
X-ORIGINAL-URL:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu
X-WR-CALDESC:Events for Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies
REFRESH-INTERVAL;VALUE=DURATION:PT1H
X-Robots-Tag:noindex
X-PUBLISHED-TTL:PT1H
BEGIN:VTIMEZONE
TZID:America/New_York
BEGIN:DAYLIGHT
TZOFFSETFROM:-0500
TZOFFSETTO:-0400
TZNAME:EDT
DTSTART:20150308T070000
END:DAYLIGHT
BEGIN:STANDARD
TZOFFSETFROM:-0400
TZOFFSETTO:-0500
TZNAME:EST
DTSTART:20151101T060000
END:STANDARD
BEGIN:DAYLIGHT
TZOFFSETFROM:-0500
TZOFFSETTO:-0400
TZNAME:EDT
DTSTART:20160313T070000
END:DAYLIGHT
BEGIN:STANDARD
TZOFFSETFROM:-0400
TZOFFSETTO:-0500
TZNAME:EST
DTSTART:20161106T060000
END:STANDARD
BEGIN:DAYLIGHT
TZOFFSETFROM:-0500
TZOFFSETTO:-0400
TZNAME:EDT
DTSTART:20170312T070000
END:DAYLIGHT
BEGIN:STANDARD
TZOFFSETFROM:-0400
TZOFFSETTO:-0500
TZNAME:EST
DTSTART:20171105T060000
END:STANDARD
BEGIN:DAYLIGHT
TZOFFSETFROM:-0500
TZOFFSETTO:-0400
TZNAME:EDT
DTSTART:20180311T070000
END:DAYLIGHT
BEGIN:STANDARD
TZOFFSETFROM:-0400
TZOFFSETTO:-0500
TZNAME:EST
DTSTART:20181104T060000
END:STANDARD
BEGIN:DAYLIGHT
TZOFFSETFROM:-0500
TZOFFSETTO:-0400
TZNAME:EDT
DTSTART:20190310T070000
END:DAYLIGHT
BEGIN:STANDARD
TZOFFSETFROM:-0400
TZOFFSETTO:-0500
TZNAME:EST
DTSTART:20191103T060000
END:STANDARD
BEGIN:DAYLIGHT
TZOFFSETFROM:-0500
TZOFFSETTO:-0400
TZNAME:EDT
DTSTART:20200308T070000
END:DAYLIGHT
BEGIN:STANDARD
TZOFFSETFROM:-0400
TZOFFSETTO:-0500
TZNAME:EST
DTSTART:20201101T060000
END:STANDARD
BEGIN:DAYLIGHT
TZOFFSETFROM:-0500
TZOFFSETTO:-0400
TZNAME:EDT
DTSTART:20210314T070000
END:DAYLIGHT
BEGIN:STANDARD
TZOFFSETFROM:-0400
TZOFFSETTO:-0500
TZNAME:EST
DTSTART:20211107T060000
END:STANDARD
END:VTIMEZONE
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20200224T160000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20200224T180000
DTSTAMP:20260518T024838
CREATED:20200128T155606Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20200128T155606Z
UID:9071-1582560000-1582567200@fairbank.fas.harvard.edu
SUMMARY:Zvi Ben-Dor Benite - "The 18th Brumaire of Yuan Shikai\," By Mao Zedong: History\, Classical Commentary\, and Politics.
DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Zvi Ben-Dor Benite\, New York University \nTaking a small comment by the young Mao Zedong in his “Classroom Notes” as its point of departure\, this talk revisits the very early days after the fall of the last dynasty. It ties them to events in post-revolutionary France and the late Han period. It ends and begins with a comment on the relationship between Mao Zedong Thought\, Mao Studies\, and Chinese History. \nZvi Ben-Dor Benite teaches in the Department of History and the Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University. He studied pre-modern and modern Chinese History in Jerusalem\, in China\, and later at UCLA. His research centers on the interaction between religions in world history and cultural and intellectual exchanges across vast space and deep time. He is the author of The Dao of Muhammad: A Cultural History of Muslims in Late Imperial China (Harvard\, 2005); The Ten Lost Tribes: A World History (Oxford\, 2009); and co-editor and translator of Modern Middle Eastern Jewish Thought: Writings on Identity\, Culture\, and Politics (Brandeis\, 2013); and an edited volume on Sovereignty (Columbia University Press 2017).
URL:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/zvi-ben-dor-benite-the-18th-brumaire-of-yuan-shikai-by-mao-zedong-history-classical-commentary-and-politics/
CATEGORIES:China Humanities Seminar
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=:
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20200127T160000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20200127T180000
DTSTAMP:20260518T024838
CREATED:20200103T151333Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20200103T151333Z
UID:9009-1580140800-1580148000@fairbank.fas.harvard.edu
SUMMARY:Paize Keulemans - Acoustic Immersion and Iconic Extraction in Three Kingdoms History\, Fiction\, and Videogames
DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Paize Keulemans\, Princeton University \nWhat 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 text and in pixels\, in words\, painting\, or on a (computer) screen?  And how is the noise and confusion of a third-century battle digitally reproduced in the songs programmed for Sony’s Playstation? This talk investigates a classical tale of ancient China\, The Three Kingdoms\, tracing its transformation through time\, across nations\, and\, most notably\, across different media platforms\, from history to poetry and from novel to video-game. The aim decidedly is NOT to simply to fix a classic\, textual “origin” to contemporary media\, but rather to bring 21st-century game and 16th-century text\, ancient history and contemporary play together in a creative tension.  To do so\, we will focus on two complementary aspects of literary and ludic interaction applicable both to premodern text and contemporary game: acoustic immersion and iconic extraction.
URL:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/paize-keulemans-acoustic-immersion-and-iconic-extraction-in-three-kingdoms-history-fiction-and-videogames/
CATEGORIES:China Humanities Seminar
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=:
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20191118T160000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20191118T180000
DTSTAMP:20260518T024838
CREATED:20191024T175942Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20191024T175942Z
UID:8822-1574092800-1574100000@fairbank.fas.harvard.edu
SUMMARY:Zeb Raft - ‘Echoes’ in the Shishuo Xinyu: Repetition and its Significance in Early Medieval China
DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Zeb Raft\, Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy\, Academia Sinica \nThe 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 paper identifies some of the factors involved in the formation of echoes and considers different ways of explaining the phenomenon.  Approaches include the historical (seeking the source of an echo)\, the cultural (defining what an echo expresses)\, and the aesthetic (following the artful construction of an echo sequence).  But there should also be ways of addressing the echo more directly\, taking it not as the effect of something else but as a motive in its own right\, shaping both the culture of early medieval China and our perspective on that culture. \nZeb Raft is an Assistant Research Fellow at the Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy\, Academia Sinica.  His research area is China from the Eastern Han through the Tang dynasties (i.e.\, roughly\, the first millennium of the Common Era)\, with a focus on poetry and historiography in this period.  His main thematic interests include communication\, rhetoric\, textual criticism\, and translation.
URL:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/zeb-raft-echoes-in-the-shishuo-xinyu-repetition-and-its-significance-in-early-medieval-china/
CATEGORIES:China Humanities Seminar
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=:
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20191104T160000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20191104T180000
DTSTAMP:20260518T024838
CREATED:20191016T131106Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20191016T131106Z
UID:8709-1572883200-1572890400@fairbank.fas.harvard.edu
SUMMARY:April Hughes — Apocalyptic Saviors\, Terrestrial Utopias\, and Imperial Authority: The Reign of Empress Wu Zetian (690-705CE)
DESCRIPTION:Speaker: April Hughes\, Boston University \nThis 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 which Maitreya appears during the chaos of the apocalypse in order to fight demons and save the wholesome. This apocalyptic worldly savior Maitreya rules over his terrestrial utopia without a Wheel-Turning King—thus he is simultaneously a political ruler and religious teacher. I argue that by associating Wu Zhao with this particular depiction of Maitreya\, she can also be seen as embodying both roles.
URL:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/april-hughes-apocalyptic-saviors-terrestrial-utopias-and-imperial-authority-the-reign-of-empress-wu-zetian-690-705ce/
CATEGORIES:China Humanities Seminar
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=:
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20191007T160000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20191007T180000
DTSTAMP:20260518T024838
CREATED:20190903T153105Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190903T153105Z
UID:8585-1570464000-1570471200@fairbank.fas.harvard.edu
SUMMARY:Christian de Pee - Losing the Way in the City: Cities and Intellectual Crisis in Eleventh-Century China
DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Christian de Pee\, University of Michigan \nDuring 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 dust and traffic. Literati in the eleventh century\, in contrast\, deemed the living streetscape a topic suitable for literary composition\, and they changed the topography of literary genres in order to make a place for the city in writing. As a new literary subject\, the urban streetscape afforded scope for original effects\, but literati also wrote the city for ideological reasons. On the written page\, they could set themselves apart—as individuals in the anonymous crowd\, as connoisseurs among spendthrift nobles—as they could not in the streets and markets of the dense metropolis. On the written page\, moreover\, they could conform the confusing movement of people\, goods\, and money to a moral economy of perfect circulation and equitable distribution. By the end of the eleventh century\, however\, both these ideological projects had failed. Literati found themselves encompassed by the relative values that they had tried to contain\, and debates about economic reform exposed the lack of objective criteria for the application of classical learning to practical policy. \nChristian de Pee is Associate Professor of History at the University of Michigan. He is the author of The Writing of Weddings in Middle-Period China: Text and Ritual Practice in the Eighth through Fourteenth Centuries (2007) and co-editor of Senses of the City: Perceptions of Hangzhou and the Southern Song\, 1127-1279 (2017). He is currently a fellow at the International Institute for Asian Studies\, where he is completing an intellectual history of the city from 800 to 1100 CE and preparing to write a general history of eleventh-century China.
URL:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/christian-de-pee-losing-the-way-in-the-city-cities-and-intellectual-crisis-in-eleventh-century-china/
CATEGORIES:China Humanities Seminar
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=:
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20190930T160000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20190930T180000
DTSTAMP:20260518T024838
CREATED:20190820T152027Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190820T152027Z
UID:8503-1569859200-1569866400@fairbank.fas.harvard.edu
SUMMARY:Anthony DeBlasi - The Anomaly of Tang Zhongzong 唐中宗 (r. 684 and 705-710) and the Dynamics of Tang History
DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Anthony DeBlasi\, University at Albany\, State University of New York \nMost 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 emblem of a toxic court culture that characterized the turn of the eighth century. On closer examination\, however\, his career and his legacy tell us much about the long-term dynamics underlying Tang history and the way government bureaucrats made sense of that history. This talk analyzes court initiatives during Zhongzong’s time on the throne as well as posthumous debates about his historical significance to highlight these dynamics.
URL:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/china-humanities-seminar-3/
CATEGORIES:China Humanities Seminar
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=:
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20190916T160000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20190916T180000
DTSTAMP:20260518T024838
CREATED:20190820T152206Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190820T152206Z
UID:8504-1568649600-1568656800@fairbank.fas.harvard.edu
SUMMARY:Jon Felt -Postimperial Metageographies of Early Medieval China
DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Jon Felt\,  Brigham Young University \nFor 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 foundational tenets of this imperial metageography were established in the Han dynasty (202 BCE–220 CE). But after the fragmentation of this political order\, literati examined alternative metageographies for making sense of their place in the world. It was at this time that the genre of geographical writing (diliji 地理記) first appeared. In this new body of texts\, literati articulated postimperial metageographies that challenged the concepts of the unity of China\, the human mastery of nature\, and the centrality of China in the world. These metageographies are interesting for making sense of a period disparaged as “The Age of Chaos” (220–589). But more importantly\, they provide alternative spatial frameworks for looking at all of Chinese history in entirely new ways\, ways that highlight people who are traditionally obfuscated in imperial and nationalist histories\, and ways that deconstruct what it is we are even talking about when we use the term “China.”
URL:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/china-humanities-seminar-4/
CATEGORIES:China Humanities Seminar
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=:
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20190422T160000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20190422T180000
DTSTAMP:20260518T024838
CREATED:20190319T132856Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190319T132856Z
UID:8010-1555948800-1555956000@fairbank.fas.harvard.edu
SUMMARY:Wei Shang - "The Story of the Stone" and the Visual Culture of the Manchu Court 
DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Wei Shang\, Columbia University \nThis 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 unreal is real.” Apparently paradoxical\, this theme seems to invite a philosophical and religious interpretation that transcends the time when the novel was written. Instead\, I will trace it to the stimuli of the visual culture permeating the Manchu court in the early and mid-eighteenth century. I seek to examine Cao Xueqin’s representation of the Grand Prospect Garden\, the main residence for the young protagonists\, in light of what may be called the aesthetics of jia 假 (the unreal or fiction) that manifests through all sorts of visual tricks in the interior decoration of imperial palaces and gardens of the time. \nIn this talk\, I will focus on the novel’s explicit and implicit references to paintings\, including an illusionistic painting and an ambitious project undertaken by Xichun to capture a panorama of the garden in one gigantic painting. More specifically\, I emphasize the novelist’s impulse to incorporate into his narrative the popular motifs of the contemporaneous paintings\, including the paintings executed by the Jesuit painters employed by the imperial court. Reading the novel from this perspective highlights issues of enormous importance for the comprehension of the cultural dynamics of the time that in turn participate in shaping the novel itself: the dialectics of reality and illusion\, the mutual fertilization of media and technology\, and the constant negotiations between the written and graphic media and between the Manchu court and Europe in the realm of material and visual cultures.
URL:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/wei-shang-the-story-of-the-stone-and-the-visual-culture-of-the-manchu-court/
CATEGORIES:China Humanities Seminar
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=:
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20190401T160000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20190401T180000
DTSTAMP:20260518T024838
CREATED:20190312T134308Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190312T134308Z
UID:7996-1554134400-1554141600@fairbank.fas.harvard.edu
SUMMARY:Matthew Wells - The Vision to Restore the Empire: Manufacturing Monarchy and Empire in the Early 4th Century
DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Matthew Wells\, University of Kentucky \nThis 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. We will trace the efforts of Wang Dao 王導 (276-339) to establish the rule of Sima Rui司馬睿 (276-323)\, who reigned as Emperor Yuan\, by focusing on Wang’s efforts to reach out to southern gentry and former Wu officials for support and guidance. In particular\, I am interested in the way in which three specific individuals were recruited for the task of building the Eastern Jin regime: Gu Rong 顧榮 (d. 312)\, He Xun 賀循 (260-319)\, and Ji Zhan 紀瞻 (253-324). According to the Jin shu editors and sources from the period\, this particular group of southern elites was central to the establishment of the first Jiankang empire. Answering the question of what these three men brought to the table and why their recruitment was so important for Wang Dao is fundamental to understanding Wang’s notions of empire and monarchy\, and the way in which the construction of these institutions relied on the public imagination for their success.
URL:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/matthew-wells-the-vision-to-restore-the-empire-manufacturing-monarchy-and-empire-in-the-early-4th-century/
LOCATION:CGIS South Room S354\, 1730 Cambridge St\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02138\, United States
CATEGORIES:China Humanities Seminar
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=:
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20181126T160000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20181126T180000
DTSTAMP:20260518T024838
CREATED:20180904T160828Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20180904T160828Z
UID:7545-1543248000-1543255200@fairbank.fas.harvard.edu
SUMMARY:Meow Hui Goh - Fake News\, Genuine Words: The Power Dynamic of Literature in Early Medieval China
DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Meow Hui Goh\, Ohio State University \nAs 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 not unique to social media such as Facebook or Twitter. Before these\, there were email\, mail\, and telephone hoaxes\, which\, in fact\, are still common. While the urgent issue at hand may be that of the speed and reach of fake news on social media\, recognizing that the phenomenon of fake news is universal\, having a long history and found everywhere\, is crucial to uncovering its nature. Focusing on specific cases of “fake news” in second and third century China\, my talk calls attention to some similarities—however tenuous—between these cases and the examples from our own time. As reporting in investigative journalistic outlets such as The New York Times suggests\, the spread of fake news seems to reflect a heightened sense of anxiety and tension. Perhaps not dissimilar\, the cases in my study took place against a general atmosphere of chaos and instability\, brought on by the collapse of the Han central court and exacerbated by the armed conflicts that followed. Also comparable is the increasing influence of new “media”—though surely incomparable in speed and scale to modern social media\, the communication networks enabled by the availability and use of paper\, a relatively new material invention in this period\, became influential during the late Han and the Three States. Against these developments\, enemy regimes vying to fill the power vacuum left by the Han court created and disseminated “fake news” in the form of fake or altered letters\, aiming to gain propagandistic and strategic advantages for themselves. A closer examination of these fake or altered letters reveals that they were often based on “believable\,” if not correct\, information\, just like the fake news circulating in the social media of our time. As such\, the issue that they pinpoint is not the problem of forgery or fakery\, but the nature of “believability” and of packaging. In the context of early medieval China\, this was the issue of wen\, or literary writing\, which reflects an approach to “misinformation” that might not sit comfortably with our modern notion of “fact.”
URL:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/china-humanities-seminar-2-2018-11-26/
CATEGORIES:China Humanities Seminar
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=:
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20181112T160000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20181112T180000
DTSTAMP:20260518T024838
CREATED:20180904T160828Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20180904T160828Z
UID:7544-1542038400-1542045600@fairbank.fas.harvard.edu
SUMMARY:Andrew Chittick - The Resistant South: Sketching a History of the Wu People in the First Millennium CE
DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Andrew Chittick\, Eckerd College \nThe 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 developed a thriving multi-state order following the breakup of the multi-cultural Han Empire. Over the next four centuries East Asian peoples began to articulate their separate political\, cultural\, even ethnic identities\, which invites us to write meaningful histories of them as distinctive peoples. My recent work focuses on the political identity of the Wuren or “Wu people” of the Yangzi delta region\, who in the 3rd-6th centuries CE formed the nucleus of the sprawling\, multi-cultural Jiankang Empire\, repeatedly resisting the imperialist pressure of regimes based in the Central Plains of the Yellow River. In this talk I will highlight their use of distinctive local cultural elements in legitimating their rule\, their similarities to contemporary Southeast Asian regimes\, and their eventual adoption of South and Southeast Asian political models. \nAndrew Chittick is the E. Leslie Peter Professor of East Asian Humanities and History at Eckerd College\, St. Petersburg\, FL. A native of California\, he received his PhD in 1997 from the University of Michigan. He is the author of Patronage and Community in Medieval China: The Xiangyang Garrison\, 400-600 CE (SUNY Press\, 2010). He was a visiting fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton in 2016-17\, and last year held a research fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. His next book\, The Jiankang Empire in Chinese and World History: Ethnic Identity and Political Culture\, is scheduled to be released by Oxford University Press next year. \n 
URL:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/china-humanities-seminar-2-2018-11-12/
CATEGORIES:China Humanities Seminar
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=:
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20181029T160000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20181029T180000
DTSTAMP:20260518T024838
CREATED:20181016T181318Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20181016T181318Z
UID:7683-1540828800-1540836000@fairbank.fas.harvard.edu
SUMMARY:郝春文 Hao Chunwen - 敦煌寫本齋文的分類、定名及其文本結構 Rethinking the Structure and Typology of Liturgical Texts From Dunhuang
DESCRIPTION:This talk will be given in Mandarin \nSpeaker: Hao Chunwen 郝春文\, Senior Professor\, Capital Normal University \nThis 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 (zhaiyi斋仪) and liturgies (zhaiwen 斋文). Liturgical protocols (identical to what are occasionally called ‘written protocols\,’ shuyi 書儀) were used as references for drafting liturgies. Liturgies\, written up on the basis of these liturgical protocols\, were functional documents that were read aloud at all kinds of ritual gatherings. \nWe can divide the structure of a liturgy into five parts: the ‘opener’ (haotou 号头)\, ‘exaltation of virtues’ (tande 歎德)\, ‘liturgical purpose’ (zhaiyi 齋意)\, ‘ritual area’ (daochang 道場)\, and ‘adornment’ (zhuangyan 莊嚴). This structure is roughly applicable to liturgical protocols and liturgies with all manner of content\, including hymns of praise\, apotropaic rituals\, healing rites\, and mourning rites\, though there are of course many variations in the specific arrangement and sequence of the parts. \nThis talk will also touch on the commonly used term ‘prayer texts’ (yuanwen 願文); we will suggest that this is a specific kind of liturgical text; the term cannot be used as a blanket reference to the category ‘liturgical text.’
URL:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/hao-chunwen-rethinking-the-structure-and-typology-of-liturgical-texts-from-dunhuang/
CATEGORIES:China Humanities Seminar
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=:
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20181015T160000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20181015T180000
DTSTAMP:20260518T024838
CREATED:20180320T171733Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20180320T171733Z
UID:6819-1539619200-1539626400@fairbank.fas.harvard.edu
SUMMARY:Alex des Forges - The Examined Subject and the Natural Self in the Eight-Legged Essay
DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Alex des Forges\, University of Massachusetts – Boston \nThis 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 self who writes and acts without undue constraint; at the same time\, writers made extensive use of a range of techniques to complicate narratorial perspective and tone of voice that anticipate the free indirect discourse that would become a defining characteristic of the modern Western novel. I would like to suggest that shiwen and their associated critical discourse serve not only as precedent\, but also as inspiration for the distinctive literary voices and aesthetic sensibilities for which the late Ming moment is known. \nAlexander Des Forges is Associate Professor of Chinese at University of Massachusetts – Boston. His publications include Mediasphere Shanghai: The Aesthetics of Cultural Production (University of Hawai’i\, 2007)\, “Burning with Reverence: The Economics and Aesthetics of Words in Qing China” (PMLA\, 2006)\, and “Sleights of Capital: Fantasies of Commensurability\, Transparency\, and a ‘Cultural Bourgeoisie’” (differences\, 2014). He is currently finishing a book manuscript on literary work and the aesthetics of voice and representation in early modern China\, with particular attention to the challenges the examination regime poses to a market-based concept of cultural capital.
URL:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/alex-des-forges-19th-century-prose-and-its-socio-cultural-context/
CATEGORIES:China Humanities Seminar
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=:
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20181001T160000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20181001T180000
DTSTAMP:20260518T024838
CREATED:20180904T160828Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20180904T160828Z
UID:7542-1538409600-1538416800@fairbank.fas.harvard.edu
SUMMARY:Wen-Yi Huang - Families Divided: Migration and Those Left Behind in Fifth- and Sixth-Century China
DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Wen-Yi Huang\, An Wang Post-Doctoral Fellow\, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies\, Harvard University \nIn this talk I explore the impact of migration on family members left behind\, particularly those whose parents\, children\, siblings\, and spouses were forcibly moved to the Northern Wei (386-534 CE) from four successive southern states of Eastern Jin (317-420 CE)\, Liu-Song (420-479 CE)\, Southern Qi (479-502 CE)\, and Liang (502-557 CE). I will do so by asking three questions: how did the families recover the migrants in a time of conflict? How did they repatriate the remains of the migrants across political divides and spatial distance? How did they cope with the consequences of their husbands or fathers’ dual marriages on both sides of the border? The talk highlights the agency of the left-behind families in the migration process\, their changing relationships with the migrants\, and the shifting meaning of home. Examining the roles of the state in the split-families issue\, it also seeks to illuminate the state’s influence on migration at the private\, familial scale. \n 
URL:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/china-humanities-seminar-2/
CATEGORIES:China Humanities Seminar,Environment
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=:
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20180507T160000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20180507T180000
DTSTAMP:20260518T024838
CREATED:20170831T132116Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20170831T132116Z
UID:5813-1525708800-1525716000@fairbank.fas.harvard.edu
SUMMARY:Amelia Ying Qin - Seeking Patterns: Close and Distant Readings of Two Collections of Tang 唐 (618-907) Dynasty Anecdotes
DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Amelia Ying Qin\,  An Wang Post Doctoral Fellow\, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies \nThis 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 unusual” 特異 and “definitely true” 必實. Close reading reveals it to be a text containing hidden structures with an emphasis on “the unusual” as a concept bearing discursive weight for the purpose of subtle political criticism. The intertwined ideas of unusualness and truthfulness define each other and form a discourse of “the unusual” that provides an interpretive framework for the collection’s core anecdotes. These accounts\, when read closely within this framework\, point to signs that foreshadow the Tang’s decline while voicing concerns over its end and directing muted criticism at the irresponsible Tang rulers. The Tang yulin 唐語林 (Forest of Conversations on the Tang)\, on the other hand\, is a collection of over eleven hundred anecdotes about Tang historical figures\, events\, and customs compiled during the Northern Song 北宋 (960-1127). Its contents were selectively recycled from fifty or so earlier miscellanies of various sizes\, and both the content and structure of the collection suffered from a hectic textual history of loss and restoration. To examine a text of this nature and size\, this study experiments with the approach of distant reading to explore potential patterns in its content\, structure\, and selective use of source material. In juxtaposing these two texts examined with different methods\, the speaker hopes to reflect upon the mercurial and ephemeral nature of anecdotal memories of the past\, as well as the possible ways of reading and understanding such memories. \nAmelia Ying Qin graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison\, with a Ph.D. in Chinese literature (2013) from the Department of East Asian Languages and Literature and an M.A. (2010) from the School of Library and Information Studies. Prior to her study in Madison\, she also completed degrees at the University of Rhode Island and Fudan University in Shanghai\, China. Her current research interest is in the relationship and dynamics between cultural memory and historiography in Chinese anecdotal and historical narratives during the time period of 600-1300. She is also the translator of two chapters of The Grand Scribe’s Records. Her teaching interests include Chinese language of all levels\, survey of Chinese literature\, special topics in modern and classical Chinese literature\, as well as comparative topics in East Asian literature and cultures.
URL:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/china-humanities-seminar-2018-05-07/
LOCATION:CGIS Knafel K262\, 1737 Cambridge Street\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02138\, United States
CATEGORIES:China Humanities Seminar,Events of Interest
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=:
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20180326T160000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20180326T180000
DTSTAMP:20260518T024838
CREATED:20180129T193546Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20180129T193546Z
UID:6521-1522080000-1522087200@fairbank.fas.harvard.edu
SUMMARY:Jing Tsu - Thinking Small in the Literary Cosmos
DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Jing Tsu\, Yale University \nMore 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 attempt to bring faraway and neglected kins into its fold\, Sinophone studies is facing open resistance where writers are choosing not to belong or subscribe.  Yet\, this talk suggests\, it is a good thing when literary relations come to an end\, because it signals a readiness to be disenchanted with a fixed topic.  The plethora of contemporary Chinese literature has far exceeded any of our explanatory frameworks\, and its direction is no longer sustained by the diasporic obsession with saying yes or no to Chineseness from any locale\, or turning to Sinophone studies.  What literary scale\, then\, are we entering into as the ceiling is being lifted from the China narrative?  Is it a technological world beyond worlds\, or still an ideological world in a teacup?  I discuss the works and engagement of one of the most unexpected literary meterorites of recent times\, Liu Cixin\, the first Chinese and Asian to win the Victor Hugo Prize for Science Fiction.
URL:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/china-humanities-seminar-jing-tsu/
LOCATION:CGIS Knafel K262\, 1737 Cambridge Street\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02138\, United States
CATEGORIES:China Humanities Seminar
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=:
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20180319T160000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20180319T180000
DTSTAMP:20260518T024838
CREATED:20170831T132116Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20170831T132116Z
UID:5812-1521475200-1521482400@fairbank.fas.harvard.edu
SUMMARY:Evelyn (Chiung-yun) Liu - When Fantastic Narrative Encounters Empirical Knowledge: Imagining the World in "The Eunuch Sanbao's Voyage to the Western Ocean"
DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Evelyn (Chiung-yun) Liu\,  Academia Sinica\, HYI Visiting Scholar \nThe Eunuch Sanbao’s Voyage to the Western Ocean\, a late-sixteenth century novel loosely based on the historical expeditions commanded by Zheng He (1371-1433)\, is a peculiar mixture of factual accounts of foreign lands and fantastic narrative. In this work\, popular Buddhist and Daoist figures living in a mythological landscape encounter a new worldview based on firsthand geographical accounts of maritime voyages recorded as early as the fourteenth century. While the novel is often regarded as a literary failure\, a hodgepodge in which the author imitates and copies earlier texts and jumbles them together\, this talk proposes to understand such “failure” as a multi-faceted response to the rapidly expanding cognitive sphere of that time. Taking the novel as a cultural product of the late Ming book market\, we will examine the author’s choices of source materials in connection to his target reader\, the strategies he employs to maneuver between the exotic and the familiar\, and the epistemological disjunctions he faces in the attempt to create a narrative that encompasses “the end of the Western Ocean.”  We will also look at the possible changes in the conception of “the world” revealed through the ways in which the author negotiates between empirical geography and Buddhist/Daoist cosmologies. \nChiung-yun Evelyn Liu is an Associate Research Fellow at the Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy\, Academia Sinica\, Taiwan. She earned her B.A. from National Taiwan University\, M.A. from Columbia University and Ph.D. from Harvard University. Her research interests include literature of the fantastic\, mediations on historical memory\, and the intersection of knowledge production\, cultural imagination and psychological responses to the foreign in late imperial China. She is completing a book manuscript\, which investigates how moral value\, memory politics\, literary sensibility and commercial media worked together in shaping and transforming historical memories. Her next project explores the function of sentiment in the process of knowledge reception and reformulation; particularly how Chinese literati coped with turbulent dynastic transitions and unsettling cross-cultural encounters through encyclopedic writing as means of reordering and comprehending the changing world.
URL:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/china-humanities-seminar-2018-02-26/
LOCATION:CGIS Knafel K262\, 1737 Cambridge Street\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02138\, United States
CATEGORIES:China Humanities Seminar,Events of Interest
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=:
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20180305T160000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20180305T180000
DTSTAMP:20260518T024838
CREATED:20170919T170440Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20170919T170440Z
UID:5938-1520265600-1520272800@fairbank.fas.harvard.edu
SUMMARY:Eric Greene - Repentance in the Formation of Chinese Buddhism
DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Eric Greene\, Yale University \nThe 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 of Buddhist practice in medieval China. Despite this\, scholars have often disagreed concerning\, firstly\, what “repentance” even means in the Chinese or Buddhist contexts\, as well as the best way of understanding the relationship between Chinese Buddhist chanhui and its Indian Buddhist antecedents on the one hand\, and pre-Buddhist Chinese religious ideologies on the other. In this talk I will attempt to offer some new ways of thinking about some of these questions that will help us understand how “repentance” came to serve within early medieval Chinese Buddhism (roughly 200-600 AD) not so much as one mode of Buddhist activity among many\, but as a unifying frame for understanding the ultimate point of all forms of Buddhist practice whatsoever. \nEric Greene is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies. He received his B.A. in Mathematics from Berkeley in 1998\, followed by his M.A. (Asian Studies) and Ph.D. (Buddhist Studies) in 2012. He specializes in the history of medieval Chinese Buddhism\, particularly the emergence of Chinese forms of Buddhism from the interaction between Indian Buddhism and indigenous Chinese culture. Much of his recent research has focused on Buddhist meditation practices\, including the history of the transmission on Indian meditation practices to China\, the development of distinctly Chinese forms of Buddhist meditation\, and Buddhist rituals of confession and atonement. He is currently writing a book on the uses of meditative visionary experience as evidence of sanctity within early Chinese Buddhism. In addition to these topics\, he has published articles on the early history of Chan (Zen) Buddhism\, Buddhist paintings from the Silk Roads\, and the influence of modern psychological terminology on the Western interpretation of Buddhism. He is also presently working on a new project concerning the practice of translation – from Indian languages to Chinese – in early Chinese Buddhism. He teaches undergraduate classes on Buddhism in East Asia\, Zen Buddhism\, ritual in East Asian Buddhism\, and mysticism and meditation in Buddhism and East Asia\, and graduate seminars on Chinese Buddhist studies and Chinese Buddhist texts. \nAfter completing his Ph.D. in 2012\, Eric took a position at the University of Bristol (UK)\, where he taught East Asian Religions until coming to Yale in 2015.
URL:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/buddhist-studies-forum-2018-03-05/
CATEGORIES:Buddhist Studies Forum,China Humanities Seminar
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=:
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20180129T160000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20180129T180000
DTSTAMP:20260518T024838
CREATED:20170831T132116Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20170831T132116Z
UID:5811-1517241600-1517248800@fairbank.fas.harvard.edu
SUMMARY:Paul W. Kroll - Personal Moments in Medieval Chinese Poetry
DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Paul W. Kroll\, University of Colorado \nMedieval 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 a deeper level. It is for these irregular but personally cherished splendors and miseries that one continues to read throughout a lifetime. In this lecture readings and interpretations will be offered especially from two medieval poets with rather contradictory histories—Lu Zhaolin 盧照鄰 from the mid-seventh century and Jiang Yan 江淹 from the late fifth century. Reflecting on their works may also prod us to consider the critical limits latent in the reputed “death of the author.” \nPart of the Fairbank Center China Humanities Seminar Series
URL:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/china-humanities-seminar-2018-01-29/
LOCATION:CGIS Knafel K262\, 1737 Cambridge Street\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02138\, United States
CATEGORIES:China Humanities Seminar,Events of Interest
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=:
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20171204T163000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20171204T183000
DTSTAMP:20260518T024838
CREATED:20170831T132116Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20170831T132116Z
UID:5810-1512405000-1512412200@fairbank.fas.harvard.edu
SUMMARY:CANCELED: Jing Tsu - Key Strokes: What Made the Chinese Script Revolution?
DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Jing Tsu\, Yale University \nIt 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 was simplified and romanized into pinyin in the twentieth century–both claimed as Mao’s achievements–merged readily with the narrative of China’s rise in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries\, especially with the new emphasis on “innovation.”  In contrast to this satisfying story\, I will talk about the underside of this history\, one that did not enjoy big moments or one-time victories in telegraphy\, typewriting\, or the digital age but drew from the energy and failures of Chinese and non-Chinese alike\, who each put a different arc on how this history could have developed–but sometimes did not.  Emerging from this process is the one change that truly changed everything\, which will be the focus of this lecture. \nJing Tsu\, a new Guggenheim Fellow\, is a literary scholar and cultural historian of modern China at Yale University. She is the first person to be tenured and become Professor of Chinese Literature and Comparative Literature at Yale\, and author of four books (two co-edited). She is currently writing a new book about how China entered the IT era\, The Kingdom of Characters: Language Wars and China’s Rise to Global Power\, a remarkable tale that uncovers what happened to the Chinese script in the age of the Western alphabet (under contract with Riverhead at Penguin Random House). Her research spans literature\, linguistics\, science and technology\, typewriting and digitalization\, diaspora studies\, migration\, nationalism\, and theories of globalization\, and she has written for The New York Times.  \nAt Yale\, Tsu is also a Senior Research Fellow at the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies\, a member of the Executive Committee of both the Whitney Humanities Center and the Humanities Program\, as well as a faculty affiliate of WGSS (Women’s\, Gender\, and Sexuality Studies) and ER&M (Ethnicity\, Race\, and Migration).
URL:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/china-humanities-seminar-2017-12-04/
LOCATION:CGIS Knafel K262\, 1737 Cambridge Street\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02138\, United States
CATEGORIES:China Humanities Seminar,Events of Interest
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=:
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20171117T160000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20171117T180000
DTSTAMP:20260518T024838
CREATED:20170831T132116Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20170831T132116Z
UID:5809-1510934400-1510941600@fairbank.fas.harvard.edu
SUMMARY:David Palmer & Elijah Siegler - Enchanting Huashan in the Global Spiritual Circuit: Intersecting Modes of Making Sacred Space
DESCRIPTION:Speakers:\nDavid Palmer\, University of Hong Kong\nElijah Siegler\, College of Charleston \nThis 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 co-authors will describe how the mountain is a source of enchanting experiences for both American “Dream Trippers” and the Daoist monks of the Order of Complete Perfection. \nMany American practitioners perceive these experiences within a framework of ontological individualism\, while others use Qigong practice to connect and attune to the ‘energies’ of the mountain within the framework of a Daoist cosmology that has been extracted from its historical and cultural context. For the monks\, on the other hand\, the cosmological attunement of Daoist cultivation occurs through enchanted connections with the Immortals of Daoist history and lineage. What happens when\, through encounters between the two groups\, these different narratives of enchantment confront each other\, or become imbricated with each other? \nDr. David A. Palmer is an Associate Professor of Anthropology\, Department of Sociology and Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences\, at the University of Hong Kong. After completing his PhD in the Anthropology of Religion at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris\, he was the Eileen Barker Fellow in Religion and Contemporary Society at the London School of Economics and Political Science\, and\, from 2004 to 2008\, director of the Hong Kong Centre of the French School of Asian Studies (Ecole Française d’Extrême-Orient). His books include the award-winning Qigong Fever: Body\, Science and Utopia in China (Columbia University Press\, 2007); The Religious Question in Modern China (co-authored with Vincent Goossaert\, University of Chicago Press\, 2011; awarded the Levenson Book Prize of the Association for Asian Studies); and Dream Trippers: Global Daoism and the Predicament of Modern Spirituality (co-authored with Elijah Siegler\, University of Chicago Press\, 2017). \n Dr. Elijah Siegler is a Professor of Religious Studies at the College of Charleston in South Carolina. He has degrees from Harvard University and the University of California at Santa Barbara. He has published an introductory textbook on New Religious Movements (Routledge\, 2007)\, and articles about religion in film and television\, on American Daoism\, and on religious studies pedagogy. He recently edited Coen: Framing Religion in Amoral Order (Baylor University Press\, 2016) and co-wrote\, with David Palmer\, Dream Trippers: Global Daoism and the Predicament of Modern Culture (University of Chicago Press\, 2017)
URL:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/china-humanities-seminar-2017-11-17/
LOCATION:CGIS Knafel K262\, 1737 Cambridge Street\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02138\, United States
CATEGORIES:China Humanities Seminar,Events of Interest
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=:
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20171023T160000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20171023T180000
DTSTAMP:20260518T024838
CREATED:20170831T132116Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20170831T132116Z
UID:5807-1508774400-1508781600@fairbank.fas.harvard.edu
SUMMARY:China Humanities Seminar - Huaben and the Mind
DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Tina Lu\, Yale University \nAs 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 in which they repeatedly explore both minds and experience within a cultural and philosophical backdrop that emphasized the problems of immediacy and free will. How does experiencing events differ from experiencing a story? \nTina Lu is a Professor of Chinese Literature in Yale’s Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures. She currently serves as department chair and is also inaugural head of Pauli Murray College (this is the equivalent of dean at one of the Harvard Houses). She is the author of Persons\, Roles\, and Minds: Identity in Peony Pavilion and Peach Blossom Fan; Accidental Incest\, Filial Cannibalism\, and Other Peculiar Encounters in Late Imperial Literature; and the forthcoming A Coin\, A Severed Head: Object Experiences in Seventeenth-Century China. This paper is part of a new project tentatively entitled “What the Hell Were They Thinking.” \n. \n 
URL:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/china-humanities-seminar/
LOCATION:CGIS Knafel K262\, 1737 Cambridge Street\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02138\, United States
CATEGORIES:China Humanities Seminar,Events of Interest
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=:
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20170501T160000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20170501T180000
DTSTAMP:20260518T024838
CREATED:20170404T145953Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20170404T145953Z
UID:5099-1493654400-1493661600@fairbank.fas.harvard.edu
SUMMARY:China Humanities Seminar: Forging a Master Key: Li Yu’s 李漁 Theory of Universal Theater
DESCRIPTION:Speaker: S.E. Kile\, University of Michigan \nStudies 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 as an analytical category to examine Li Yu’s linguistic and generic experimentation in his plays and in Xianqing ouji (Leisure Notes\, 1671) reveals calculated and strategic efforts to make it possible for his products – in this case\, his plays – to be most easily transmitted across the entire empire. \nI begin by presenting some of Li Yu’s efforts to cater to an empire-wide audience in his theorization of the language of plays: I consider first his prioritization and standardization of dialogue\, and second\, his updating of old plays and “generic translation” of plays of Northern provenance into new\, universal forms. In creating an ever more regulated generic form\, these changes made theater more accessible for audiences\, but not for playwrights or performers. To conclude\, I examine the innovative ways in which Li Yu sought to transmit performance itself through generic and technological experimentation. \n  \nS.E. Kile is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Michigan. A specialist in late Ming and early Qing literature and culture\, Kile is currently finishing a monograph on the maverick literatus Li Yu. This manuscript approaches texts as material objects and technological innovations: as things that can enfold imagined worlds and transport those lively and inventive worlds across time and space. Recent publications have appeared in differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies and Chinese Oral and Performing Literatures (CHINOPERL).
URL:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/china-humanities-seminar-forging-a-master-key-li-yus-%e6%9d%8e%e6%bc%81-theory-of-universal-theater/
LOCATION:CGIS Knafel K262\, 1737 Cambridge Street\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02138\, United States
CATEGORIES:China Humanities Seminar,Events of Interest
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=:
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20170320T160000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20170320T180000
DTSTAMP:20260518T024838
CREATED:20161024T144819Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20161024T144819Z
UID:4107-1490025600-1490032800@fairbank.fas.harvard.edu
SUMMARY:China Humanities Seminar: Perceptions of China's Sexual Economy
DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Harriet Zurndorfer \nAbstract: 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 young women who trade their femininity and sexuality for material wealth and financial security from these men. Drawing on analyses of the popular 2009 television serial\, Woju (Dwelling Narrowness)\, coupled with recent ethnographic studies\, the lecture aims to demonstrate how this sexual economy thrives in the increasingly competitive and commercial urban landscape of present-day China. It will also attempt to view gender dynamics within the context of the socioeconomic changes during the past three decades and to investigate how gender inequality became assimilated into both official and popular discourses of Chinese life\, thereby facilitating the ascendancy and power of the sexual economy. \nHarriet Zurndorfer is affiliated with the Leiden Institute for Area Studies in the Faculty of Humanities\, Leiden University where she has worked since 1978. She is the author of Change and Continuity in Chinese History: The Development of Hui-chou Prefecture 800 to 1800 (Brill\, 1989)\, China Bibliography: A Research Guide to Reference Works about China Past and Present (Brill\, 1995; paperback edition\, University of Hawaii Press\, 1999)\, and editor of the compilation Chinese Women in the Imperial Past: New Perspectives (Brill\,1999). She has also published more than 200 scholarly articles and reviews. She is the founder and editor-in-chief of the journal Nan Nü: Men\, Women and Gender in China\, issued since 1999. Currently\, she is serving as one of the editors to the four-volume Cambridge World History of Violence\, and is a contributor to the Cambridge Economic History of China.
URL:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/harriet-zurndorfer-lecture/
LOCATION:CGIS Knafel K262\, 1737 Cambridge Street\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02138\, United States
CATEGORIES:China Humanities Seminar,Gender Studies
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=:
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20170227T160000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20170227T180000
DTSTAMP:20260518T024838
CREATED:20170209T161752Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20170209T161752Z
UID:4800-1488211200-1488218400@fairbank.fas.harvard.edu
SUMMARY:China Humanities Seminar: The Poetry Demon - Tensions within Chinese Buddhist Monks’ Literature
DESCRIPTION:Speaker: 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 Taipei and at Hanazono and Ryukoku universities in Kyoto. \nBuddhist monks in Song dynasty China were visited by a literary impulse that interrupted religious activities and ritual. This unwelcome muse was sometimes referred to as the demon of poetry. In this talk\, I explore some lesser-known intersections of Chinese poetry and the Buddhist path. I read monks’ verse together with prescriptive texts that restricted literary activity\, including legal codes\, primers\, and hagiography. I hypothesize that at the heart of monastic verse culture was the negotiation of competing commitments to Buddhist monasticism and to literary expression.
URL:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/china-humanities-seminar-the-poetry-demon-tensions-within-chinese-buddhist-monks-literature/
LOCATION:CGIS Knafel K262\, 1737 Cambridge Street\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02138\, United States
CATEGORIES:China Humanities Seminar
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=:
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20170130T160000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20170130T180000
DTSTAMP:20260518T024838
CREATED:20170111T154638Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20170111T154638Z
UID:4652-1485792000-1485799200@fairbank.fas.harvard.edu
SUMMARY:Xie Lingyun and Imperial Performance: Deploying the Language of the Chuci
DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Harrison Huang\,  Assistant Professor\, East Asian Languages and Cultures\, Columbia University \nThe reception of the Chuci anthology has been largely framed around the representation of the attributed author Qu Yuan as a loyal subject.\nThis talk instead traces Qu Yuan ‘s earlier reception and contested status during the Han dynasty\, to show how the Chuci repertoire can be adopted for imperial performance\, as seen in Xie Lingyun’s poetry.
URL:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/xie-lingyun-and-imperial-performance-deploying-the-language-of-the-chuci/
LOCATION:CGIS Knafel K262\, 1737 Cambridge Street\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02138\, United States
CATEGORIES:China Humanities Seminar
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=:
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20170123T160000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20170123T180000
DTSTAMP:20260518T024838
CREATED:20170111T154017Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20170111T154017Z
UID:4649-1485187200-1485194400@fairbank.fas.harvard.edu
SUMMARY:"Underworld Law and Leeway:  Summoning the Earth God in Journey to the West"  鬼律與故縱：《西遊記》中的召喚土地
DESCRIPTION:***This event will be conducted in Chinese*** \nSpeaker: Li Fengmao 李豐楙 \, Chair Professor\, National Chengchi University; Professor Emeritus\, Academia Sinica\, Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy \n鬼律與故縱：《西遊記》中的召喚土地〉簡介 \n李豐楙 \n在西遊的奇傳敘述中，神魔鬥法前時常出現的，就是孫行者頻繁召喚土地，方能問明妖精、妖魔出處，其頻率雖高卻較少受到關注，原因應是被視為陪襯的小神。世德堂本敘述其出場方式，應該有其創作的用意，乃交互使用兩種聲音：顯聲音與潛聲音。前者借遊戲筆調表現滑稽的趣味，其實在掩飾其真實的潛聲音，主要即借此諷喻、影射明代、尤其世宗朝皇室。由於兩種聲音之間交織運用，若隱若現，亟待解讀。作者雖曾吸收先行材料，但其突破在其創意，乃化用了道、佛二教的文化資源。此處即從「召喚土地」情節切入，文本解讀配合文化解讀，其手法皆有宗教、尤其道教知識支持。在敘述層次上，顯聲音即召喚土地的方式，軟硬兼施，從喚出到拘得，形成表層聲音的滑稽趣味；唯關鍵的召喚動作簡繁俱有，即捻訣與念真言–從唵字到唵㘕淨法界，在此發現採用明代流行的准提信仰，因其盛行於文人中，作者即挪用密教的准提咒，並未襲用道教召土地神咒。而在召喚過程中，行者對待土地、山神的態度，即任意使喚；相對土地、山神則表現得異常惶恐。這種顯聲音背後隱藏的潛聲音，所運用的「故縱之嫌」筆法，乃化用道教法派的鬼律、黑律知識，用於規範城隍–土地：境內有精邪而未能通告者，即有故縱之嫌而會被杖或流放。作者所敍寫的當境土地，既知妖精、妖魔卻任令其行動，懼而未曾通報，此即「故縱之嫌」的敘寫手法。其目的則是諷喻，明代中葉以前實行里甲制，小說家影射當時事：其一明初洪武三年禮部官僚依禮定制里社壇制，即自然神；唯里甲居民仍崇拜人格神的土地，以致里社壇荒廢不用。其二里長、甲首負責里甲事務，即催稅、徴糧及徭役，但至中葉因稅役過重，導致里民逃脫，小說既有「逃門戶」、「大戶負擔元宵燈油」等，此種敘述即為潛聲音。其三敘述妖精、妖魔據洞稱王、差使土地，妖魔俱從天界私下凡間，此種顯聲音即試煉五聖、尤其唐僧的取經意志；並諷喻明代王府與地方豪族，在地方據土稱霸，使喚里長甲首。西遊交錯使用顯、潛兩種聲音，即可知荒唐、滑稽語底下，乃掩飾當世習知的社會怪現狀，當時人領會其諷喻手法的影射旨趣，今人則需重新解讀「故縱與鬼律」，方能深刻理解滑稽文學的嚴肅性，確定多層聲音所形成的交響，乃奇傳文體具有語言藝術的價值。 \n國立政治大學中國文學研究所國家文學博士，曾經擔任中央研究院中國文哲研究所研究員，其後轉任政治大學宗教研究所，擔任文學院講座教授，政治大學華人宗教研究中心主任；2015年退休後擔任中國文哲所兼任研究員、政治大學文學院榮譽講座教授。曾經訪問巴黎法蘭西學院、哈佛燕京學社；擔任中華民國「國科會」中國文學門召集人、「臺灣宗教學會」第二任理事長。
URL:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/underworld/
LOCATION:CGIS Knafel K262\, 1737 Cambridge Street\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02138\, United States
CATEGORIES:China Humanities Seminar
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=:
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20161128T160000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20161128T180000
DTSTAMP:20260518T024838
CREATED:20161109T174326Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20161109T174326Z
UID:4423-1480348800-1480356000@fairbank.fas.harvard.edu
SUMMARY:Working with Looted Manuscripts: A Vindication of the Peking University Han Bamboo Strips
DESCRIPTION:Over the last two decades\, remarkable collections of Warring States\, Qin and Han manuscripts have been purchased on the behalf of major academic institutions in China\, offering exciting new materials that have the potential to dramatically impact the study of early China. By the same token\, these collections also present a great risk to our field\, should they prove to be forgeries. With so much at stake\, it is important not only to discuss candidly the authentication of purchased manuscripts\, but also to reflect upon the role our scholarship plays in enticing continued looting. In this talk\, I introduce the immense value of one such collection\, the Peking University Han bamboo strips\, and make an argument for both its antiquity and further study. Recently\, it has been proposed that the Peking University Laozi 老子manuscript is in fact a forgery. Drawing in part from my own observations of the artifact\, I refute this accusation. An initial methodology for positively authenticating the Peking University Han manuscripts is also offered\, and content from the Cang Jie Pian 蒼頡篇– another manuscript in this cache that is the focus of my research – is raised in particular as a case study. Having established confidence in the antiquity of these texts\, ethical concerns over the study of purchased artifacts are then addressed\, giving voice to the “rescue archaeology” orientation largely adopted in Chinese scholarship. My hope is to inspire a more open dialogue over how to engage the Peking University Han manuscripts responsibly in our research\, as they are simply too important for scholars to ignore. \nSpeaker: Christopher Foster is a PhD candidate in Harvard University’s East Asian Languages and Civilizations Department. His dissertation\, “Textual Production in Early China: A Study of the Cang Jie Pian Character Book\,” utilizes newly excavated manuscript sources to evaluate the role of writing during the Western Han period.
URL:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/working-with-looted-manuscripts-a-vindication-of-the-peking-university-han-bamboo-strips/
CATEGORIES:China Humanities Seminar
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=:
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20161118T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20161118T130000
DTSTAMP:20260518T024838
CREATED:20160909T222812Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20160909T222812Z
UID:3394-1479466800-1479474000@fairbank.fas.harvard.edu
SUMMARY:To Ransom Destiny: The Daoist Search for Deliverance in Medieval China
DESCRIPTION:Daoist destinies were mortgaged from birth – by guilt inherited from the past\, debts owed to one’s parents\, and the initial endowment of vitality. To live meant to inexorably augment the original burden. Accumulated liabilities accounted for suffering\, disease\, and ill fortune met with in this world. They presaged a diminished life span and an adverse afterlife. To ransom destiny was to make amends for liabilities incurred through a person’s own fault or by exposure to external malignant forces. The questions this talk addresses are: what was the nature of the liabilities weighing in the balance of human destiny? Which ritual measures were envisaged to obtain deliverance or improve an unfavorable outcome? How did constituencies of collective destiny form? Who were the agents of the redemptive process and what were their roles? \nSpeaker: Franciscus Verellen\, professor in the History of Daoism\, Ecole Française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO)\, and member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres\, served as director of the EFEO from 2004 to 2014. He is currently head of the EFEO Hong Kong Center and a senior research fellow in the Institute of Chinese Studies\, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Verellen has published widely in the fields of regional history and Daoism. He was co-editor with Kristofer Schipper of The Taoist Canon: A Historical Companion to the Daozang (Chicago\, 2004). A new book manuscript on the notion and practice of “redeeming destiny” in medieval Daoism is currently in preparation. \n\n 
URL:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/franciscus-verellen-seminar/
LOCATION:CGIS Knafel K262\, 1737 Cambridge Street\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02138\, United States
CATEGORIES:China Humanities Seminar
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=:
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20161114T160000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20161114T180000
DTSTAMP:20260518T024838
CREATED:20161018T200012Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20161018T200012Z
UID:3984-1479139200-1479146400@fairbank.fas.harvard.edu
SUMMARY:The Master Branches Out: Images of Confucius in Contemporary China
DESCRIPTION:As Confucius (551-479 BCE) has returned to political favor in recent years\, his image has become ubiquitous in mainland China and increasingly used abroad to symbolize Chinese culture.  Represented in a great variety of media\, both traditional and modern\, depictions of the ancient teacher serve new purposes and address a much wider audience than ever before.  Sometimes based on imagery from the dynastic era\, when Confucius was meaningful to just the educated elite\, his recent portrayals range from monumental public statues and paintings to movies\, cartoons\, and avant-garde installations.  Using examples from contemporary Chinese visual culture\, this talk will explore issues of patronage\, source\, reception\, and significance in light of current cultural and political concerns. \nSpeaker: Julia K. Murray is Professor Emerita of Art History\, East Asian Studies\, and Religious Studies at the University of Wisconsin\, and an Associate in Research at the Fairbank Center for China Studies at Harvard University.  Before entering academe\, she worked in curatorial positions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art\, the Freer Gallery of Art\, and the Harvard University Art Museums\, She has taught courses on many aspects of the history of Chinese art\, in a variety of media\, from Neolithic times to the present\, with particular emphasis on late-imperial pictorial art.  Her numerous research fellowships include awards from the Guggenheim Foundation\, American Council of Learned Societies\, National Endowment for the Humanities\, Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation\, Asian Cultural Council\, and the Metropolitan Center for Research on Far Eastern Art.  Her current research focuses on the visual and material culture associated with the veneration of Confucius\, particularly his portraits and illustrations of his life.  Her publications include Mirror of Morality: Chinese Narrative Illustration and Confucian Ideology (2007); Ma Hezhi and the Illustration of the Book of Odes (1993); Last of the Mandarins (1987); and A Decade of Discovery (1979); as well as numerous articles on Chinese pictorial art and narrative illustration.  In 2010 she served as the guest-curator and catalogue co-author for the exhibition Confucius: His Life and Legacy in Art at the China Institute Gallery in New York\, organized jointly with the Shandong Provincial Museum.  The Chinese-language edition of  Mirror of Morality was published in 2014 by Beijing’s Sanlian Press\, under the title 道德镜鉴：中国叙述性图画与儒家意识形态 .
URL:https://fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/the-master-branches-out-images-of-confucius-in-contemporary-china/
LOCATION:CGIS Knafel K262\, 1737 Cambridge Street\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02138\, United States
CATEGORIES:China Humanities Seminar
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=:
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR