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Reischauer Lecture Series – Stephen Owen

October 16, 2018 @ 4:00 pm 6:00 pm

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Speaker: Stephen Owen, James Bryant Conant University Professor, Emeritus, Harvard University

Stephen Owen is a sinologist specializing in premodern literature, lyric poetry, and comparative poetics. Much of his work has focused on the middle period of Chinese literature (200-1200), however, he has also written on literature of the early period and the Qing. Owen has written or edited dozens of books, articles, and anthologies in the field of Chinese literature, especially Chinese poetry, including An Anthology of Chinese Literature: Beginnings to 1911 (Norton, 1996); The Making of Early Chinese Classical Poetry (Harvard Asia Center, 2006); and The Late Tang: Chinese Poetry of the Mid-Ninth Century (827-860) (Harvard Asia Center, 2006). Owen has completed the translation of the complete poetry of Du Fu, which has been published as the inaugural volumes of the Library of Chinese Humanities series, featuring Chinese literature in translation. Owen earned a B.A. (1968) and a Ph.D. (1972) in Chinese Language from Yale University. He taught there from 1972 to 1982, before coming to Harvard.  In acknowledgment of his groundbreaking work that crosses the boundaries of multiple disciplines, Owen was awarded the James Bryant Conant University Professorship in 1997. He has been a Fulbright Scholar, held a Guggenheim Fellowship, and received a Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award (2006) among many other awards and honors.


October 16, 2018:

Flavors of Truth and Claims of Authority

Discussant: Michael Puett, Harvard University

Michael Puett is the Walter C. Klein Professor of Chinese History and Anthropology, as well as the Chair of the Committee on the Study of Religion, at Harvard University. His interests are focused on the inter-relations between philosophy, anthropology, history, and religion, with the hope of bringing the study of China into larger historical and comparative frameworks. He is the author of The Ambivalence of Creation: Debates Concerning Innovation and Artifice in Early Chinaand To Become a God: Cosmology, Sacrifice, and Self-Divinization in Early China, as well as the co-author, with Adam Seligman, Robert Weller, and Bennett Simon, of Ritual and its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity.

October 17, 2018:

How Can One Say the Unprecedented in Pre-modern East Asia: Su Dongpo and Ink Bamboo

Discussant: Stephen H. West, Foundation Professor of Chinese, Head of East and Southeast Asian Section, School of International Letters and Cultures, Arizona State University; Louis Agassiz Professor of Chinese, Emeritus, University of California, Berkeley

Stephen West is a Foundation Professor of Chinese in the School of International Letters and Cultures. West works in the textual culture of late medieval and early modern China (1000–1600), with specialties in performance literature, drama, urban literature, and garden studies.

The Reischauer Lecture Series is co-sponosred by:
Fairbank Center For Chinese Studies
Harvard University Asia Center
Korea Institute
Mittal South Asia Institute
Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies

CGIS South S020, Belfer Case Study Room

1730 Cambridge St.
Cambridge, MA 02138 United States

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