China Humanities Seminar
China Humanities Seminar Featuring Tina Lu – The Politics of Li Yu’s Xianqing ouji (Casual Expressions)
Speaker: Tina Lu, Colonel John Trumbull Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures, Yale University When it comes to an understanding of the politics of literature and literary production, our field is still largely dominated by Craig Clunas’ framework (itself largely adapted from Bourdieu). I am interested in considering the politics of Li Yu’s Xianqing […]
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 Wu Hung – Unearthing Wu Daozi (c. 686 – c. 760)
Speaker: Wu Hung, University of Chicago Worshipped by later folk artists as the God of Painting, Wu Daozi (c. 686 – c. 760) was also praised by Tang art historian Zhang Yanyuan as someone who “did not look back and will have no successors.” But alas this Sage of Painting (Hua Sheng) left no work to […]
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 David Mozina – Ritual and Relationship in Daoist Practice
Speaker: David Mozina, Author, Knotting the Banner More information coming soon!
China Humanities Seminar featuring Yiqun Zhou – A Book for Hard Times: Wu Mi and Dream of the Red Chamber
Speaker: Yiqun Zhou, Stanford University This talk examines the role that Dream of the Red Chamber played in the life and work of Wu Mi 吳宓 (1894-1978), a pioneer in the study of Comparative Literature in China and a cultural conservative known for his staunch resistance to the prevailing New Culture Movement. Long condemned to infamy and […]
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, […]
China Humanities Seminar featuring Ronald Egan – Su Shi Beyond Poetry: The Invention of a New Kind of Informal Prose
Speaker: Ronald Egan, Stanford University Su Shi 蘇軾 (1037-1101) is remembered first as a poet in various forms (shi 詩, ci 詞, and fu 賦) and only then as a prose stylist. Even among his prose writings Su Shi is remembered primarily, to judge from modern selections of his works, for his output in the traditional literary […]
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 StatesSpeaker: 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