China Humanities

CHINA HUMANITIES SPEAKER: Nicolas Standaert, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium) The Chinese gazette as a publicly available government publication was distributed in a variety of formats since the twelfth century. Little is known, however, about its...

CHINA HUMANITIES SPEAKER: Ariel Fox, University of Chicago This talk explores the way in which commercial identities are recast and recreated in the plays of the Suzhou circle, a group of collaborative playwrights active in the mid-seventeenth century. In...

CHINA HUMANITIES SPEAKER: Xin Wen, Princeton University Chang’an, the capital of the Tang dynasty (618–907), was the largest city in the medieval world. The walled area of the city measured 84 square kilometers and the population likely reached one...

CHINA HUMANITIES SPEAKER: Anne Feng, Boston University This paper investigates the relationship between Buddhist meditation and images in medieval China by reconsidering the development of Pure Land transformation tableaux in Dunhuang caves. Working...

CHINA HUMANITIES SPEAKER: Lu Kou, Columbia University For imperial officials, “work” – fulfilling duties in the office, traveling for business, or managing lawsuits, taxation, or infrastructure – was a common subject matter for poetic treatment. Yet...

CHINA HUMANITIES SPEAKER: Jeffrey Riegel, UC Berkeley, Emeritus Mengzi 2A2 consists of Master Meng’s answers to questions put to him by a follower named Gongsun Chou. The first few of these replies relate to bu dong xin, “unmoved heart,”—i.e., mental...

CHINA HUMANITIES SPEAKER: Kaijun Chen, Brown University This project responds to a candid question I had while reading Jin Ping Mei. The novel is packed with luxurious things, but why do the characters show little attachment to them? This lack of...

CHINA HUMANITIES SPEAKER: Tian Yuan Tan, University of Oxford 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...