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Lecture Series “China in Global Context” Lecture Series 2009-2010 Autumn Quarter 2009 Friday, October 30, 2:30 pm 2009 Kun Shi has a graduate degree in anthropology from OSU. He has been the director of the OSU K-12 Chinese Flagship Program since its inception in October 2006. Previously, he served in various capacities including program evaluator of the Ohio Legislative Office of Education Oversight (2000-2005) and development director of the Asian American Community Services in central Ohio (1996-1999). He has taught in universities in Ohio and China, conducted field research in East Asia and Scandinavia, and published in Chinese and English in the areas of cultural anthropology and Chinese language education. (Kun Shi can be reached at shi.7@osu.edu) Lecture Abstract: The talk will introduce the current status of research and practices of shamanism in China, including several new museums focused on the Tungus shamanic tradition. It will describe the presenter's fieldwork with some shamans of the Tungus-speaking peoples in Northeast China, and attempt to provide an explanation for the revival of shamanism in today's political environment. The presentation will be accompanied by photo slides and video clips. Monday, November 2, 5:30 pm 2009 Saturday, November 7, 8:30 am through Sunday, November 8, noon Keynote Address: Daniel C.K. Chow, Joseph S. Platt-Porter Wright Morris & Arthur Professor of Law, OSU More information at www.acpssus.org Friday, November 20, 2:30 pm 2009 Christopher Agnew is a social and cultural historian of late imperial China. He has published articles concerning the early modern maritime culture of north China, and the use of collective memory in the formation of Chinese lineage identity. He is currently preparing a manuscript on the late imperial history of the Kongs of Qufu, the family recognized as the official descendants of Confucius. After earning his Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 2006 he moved to the University of Dayton where he is currently an assistant professor of history. Lecture Abstract: This lecture will detail the way in which the Kongs of Qufu, the recognized descendants of Confucius, used ritual practice and collective memory to reinforce a lineage identity and social hierarchy centered on the “Duke for Fulfilling the Sage.” To elucidate the relationship between social power and cultural practice, the lecture will focus on three moments—each suggestive of the way the descendants of Confucius weathered the social and political crises of late imperial Chinese history. In the first moment of the early fourteenth century, a revived ducal institution emerges under the auspices of Mongol domination with a new narrative about the collective family past. In the second moment, elite members of the family respond to the challenges posed by the rising commercial wealth of the late Ming dynasty. In the third moment of the early nineteenth century, the Kongs find new patrons among the popular religious societies of north China in the years before the regional upheaval of the Eight Trigrams rebellion. Tuesday, December 8, 7:00 pm 2009 “Future of the Past” Lecture Series 2008-2009
Spring Quarter 2009 Thursday, April 2, 4:30pm 2009 Dr. Nick Kaldis is Associate Professor of Chinese Cinema, Language, and Literature in the Department of Asian & Asian-American Studies at Binghamton University (SUNY). He has published essays on modern Chinese literature, Taiwan nature writing, contemporary Chinese film (from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the PRC), and numerous translations. He recently completed a manuscript on Lu Xun’s Yecao, and is co-editing and a translated collection of nature writing essays by Taiwanese author Liu Kexiang. Lecture Abstract: Widely and often wildly praised by international audiences and film critics, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000, dir. Ang Lee; hereafter also referred to as CTHD) is one of the most successful Chinese-language films of all time. Much of the academic scholarship on the film explores its global dimensions; the director himself and his long-time collaborator James Schamus have likewise stated in interviews and articles that the film is an authentically transnational co-production, with Chinese, Taiwanese, Japanese, American, and other constituents contributing to its funding, personnel, locations, languages, audiences, profits, and awards. It is also, famously, the first Chinese-language film with record-breaking international box office and video profits. While transnational in its production and reception, CTHD is thoroughly “Chinese” in its diegesis, taking place entirely within the (imagined) historical, geographical, and linguistic boundaries of Qing Dynasty China. This combination of localized content with global box office success and international film awards has led many Chinese viewers to praise the film for attracting a world-wide audience with an edifying representation of Chinese people and culture while simultaneously establishing an influential Chinese presence in the global film market. In CTHD, cultural globalization and cultural nationalism are wed harmoniously, embodying what Fran Martin has aptly characterized as the film’s construction of a new “Pan-Chinese cultural nationalism that constructs a triumphal, post-modern version of ‘Chineseness’ (149).
Friday, April 3, 3:30pm Friday, April 10, 2:30 pm 2009 Dr. Marsha Haufler, who publishes as Marsha Weidner, is Professor of Art History at the University of Kansas, where she has taught since 1991. She is also Chair of the Editorial Board of Archives of Asian Art. She holds an M.A. and Ph.D. in the History of Art from the University of California, Berkley. Her area of specialization is Chinese painting, with emphases on Mongol patronage, women as artists and patrons, and, most recently, Buddhism in the history of later Chinese painting. Her publications related to her lecture topic include the exhibition catalogue Latter Days of the Law: Images of Chinese Buddhism (1994) and the edited volume Cultural Intersections in Later Chinese Buddhism (2001), as well as two articles, “Sino-Tibetan Thangkas of the Chenghua and Zhengde Periods in Western Collections” in Palace Museum Journal (October 2007) and "A Vaishravana Thangka from the Ming Dynasty" in Orientations (Nov/Dec. 2008). She is working on a book on Buddhist monasteries as centers of aesthetic engagement in the Ming dynasty (1368-1644). Lecture Abstract: The production of Tibetan Buddhist art for the Chinese court of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) reached a high point during the Yongle period (1403-24), as is well known and often illustrated. This talk looks “beyond Yongle” to the Chenghua (1465-87) and Zhengde (1506-21) periods by examining a number of thangkas that came out of China in the early twentieth century. The Chenghua paintings illustrate the exquisite culmination of the 15th-century Tibeto-Chinese tradition. The early-16th century thangkas not only represent a significant departure from this tradition, but also a unique moment in the history of Ming imperial patronage of Tibetan Buddhism. Monday, April 20, 4 pm 2009 Friday, April 24, 2:30 pm 2009 Friday, May 8, 2:30 pm Tuesday, May 12, 4:30 2009 Friday, May 15, 11:30 am 2009 Friday, May 22, 2:30pm 2009 Friday, May 29, 2:30 pm Spring Quarter 2009 Friday, October 3, 2:30 pm 2008 William R. Sargent is the H. A. Crosby Forbes Curator of Asian export art at the Peabody Essex Museum. He has been with the collection, considered the largest and most comprehensive of its type in the world, for over thirty years. Before focusing on Asian export decorative arts he published exhibition catalogs on American art and contemporary prints. He has delivered lectures throughout the United States, as well as in Australia, Canada, England, Portugal, France, the Netherlands, Sweden, China (Guangzhou and Jingdezhen) and Hong Kong. He attended the Winterthur Summer Institute and the Attingham Summer School, and received two International Partnership Among Museum (IPAM) Awards. His publications include The Copeland Collection: Chinese and Japanese Ceramic Figures (1991) and Views of the Pearl River Delta: Macao, Canton and Hong Kong (1996). He is currently preparing a catalog of the Chinese export porcelain in the collection of the Peabody Essex Museum. Lecture Abstract: In the early seventeenth century the Portuguese trading ships San Jago and Santa Catarina were captured by the Dutch and the contents of blue and white porcelain were sold at auction to tremendous success, creating a hungry audience for China trade ceramics and other wares. Most Dutch painters of still-lifes in the early to mid-seventeenth century incorporated the “kraakware” porcelains from ships such as these as evidence of worldly knowledge, wealth and power. By the eighteenth century the desire of Europeans and Americans to acquire the luxuries of China led to the massive trade in Chinese export porcelain, furniture, lacquer, silver, paintings, textiles, and wall-coverings. The influence of these arts became highly important facets of interior design in England, on the Continent, and in the American colonies. While the artistic interaction between Asia and the West often resulted in misunderstanding, misinterpretation and humor, it just as often resulted in an enrichment of the art in question so that it is not what is lost in translation that’s lasting, but what is often altered, occasionally improved, sometime gained, and always engaging. The history and art of the China trade remains one of the most fascinating and relevant, though often neglected, aspects of contemporary Western culture. Friday, October 10, 2:30 pm 2008 Margaret Wan is Assistant Professor of Chinese Literature in the Department of Languages and Literature at the University of Utah. She has published on Chinese fiction, the interaction of Chinese ballad texts and the novel, and local literature, including “The Chantefable and the Novel: The Cases of Lü Mudan and Tianbao tu” in Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies (2004). Her forthcoming book, “Green Peony” and the Rise of the Chinese Martial Arts Novel (State University of New York Press, 2009), illuminates the world of popular fiction around the turn of the nineteenth century, examining a wide range of novels and ballad texts. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University. Lecture Abstract: Drum ballad texts (guci 鼓詞) form a large corpus of popular literature in the Qing dynasty. Recorded in a format that invokes oral performance, these prosimetric ballads circulated in manuscript, woodblock, and lithographic editions. By the early twentieth century, more than 2,300 known titles existed. Despite their great numbers, drum ballad texts have garnered little scholarly attention. What are these texts? Who read them? More specifically, what can the material texts of these drum balladstell us about their audiences? How much do these Qing drum ballad texts rely on knowledge of the conventions of the living oral performance tradition? Have they become purely “desktop” entertainment? Friday, October 17 and Saturday, October 18 2008 Click here for more details on the conference. Click here for the link about the Mershon Center from the Mershon Center's website. Monday, October 27, Time: 12:30-2:30 2008 Celine Parrenas Shimizu will be screening her film and taking questions and answers. THE FACT OF ASIAN WOMEN --Contemporary Asian American female actors re-enact scenes from popular Hollywood films. Featuring three generations of Asian American femme fatales in Hollywood, the film re-examines the fantastic figure of the “lotus blossom” and “dragon lady” exemplified in the roles played by Anna May Wong in the 1920s’-1940s, the “prostitute with a heart of gold” embodied by Nancy Kwan in the 1960s’ and the contemporary “dominatrix” Lucy Liu. Performing these characters, young contemporary actors collide with the “ghosts” of Asian women in Hollywood through the revised endings of their major films performed on the streets of San Francisco. The actors then discuss sexuality in their roles and in terms of their own self-formation as actresses of color. For the website of the film, click here. Friday, October 31, 2:30 pm 2008 Elana Chipman is the Postdoctoral Researcher at the East Asian Studies Program for 2008-09. She is a socio-cultural anthropologist with a long-standing commitment to the study of Chinese cultures and has conducted field research in both Taiwan and Fujian Province. Her dissertation research focused on local and national identity production through cultural activism and on popular religious practice in Chinese cultures. Her current research project entails a move into the field of environmental anthropology through an investigation of the relationship between transnational environmental discourses and transforming ritual practice in East Asia. Lecture Abstract: In this presentation, I examine the way "tradition" is deployed as a form of value in Taiwanese culture activism. Local activists in Beigang, a pilgrimage town in rural Taiwan, devote much of their energies to documenting local ritual traditions as a way of staking claims in the context of both local and translocal poltiical-economic competition. Their publications and conversations situate Beigang as a source of traditional authenticity and piety, while their competitors are presented as fakes. Using the discourses, debates and competitions surrounding one specific figure which is central to contemporary local ritual, I will illuminate the multiple meanings of "tradition" and "authenticity" that are at play and in conflict in present-day Taiwan, as the island's politics and culture continue to transform. Friday, November 7, 2:30 pm 2008 I will examine Edmond de Goncourt's collection of Chinese porcelain in Paris and Albert Smith's display of “China” in London. The former, an important writer and cultural authority, took part with other French collectors in the identification and classification of Chinese porcelain. Although Goncourt’s private collection was restricted to only friends and acquaintances, he shared his philosophy and system of display in his book, La Maison d’un artiste of 1881. On the other side of the English Channel, Albert Smith disseminated a series of images of China and Hong Kong after a brief visit in 1858. He presented ‘China’ in public performances at the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, London that could be subsequently replicated in private through the purchase of an optical device. Smith had a different, expanded sense of China, one that was less literal and material than Goncourt’s collection. I wish to examine these two displays in terms of their diverse media, format and space. Both the static presentation of aesthetic objects in glass cabinets and the dynamic transformation of images through a stereoscope were underpinned, I suggest, by fantasies of “China”.
Friday, November 14, 2:30pm 2008 Professor Zhang earned his M.A. and Ph.D. in Folklore and Folklife from the University of Pennsylvania, along with Urban Studies Certificate. He also attended the graduate programs in Dartmouth College and in Shenyang Normal University in China. His academic training has led his research interests to topics such as, Chinese ritual studies, folklore performance, ethnic identity, humor, material culture, popular culture, and Chinese/Asian American folklore. His current research is on the Rites of Passage in Chinese Societies and Filmic Folklore. Lecture Abstract: From the formation of the concept of “Folk-Lore” in Britain to the rising wave of safeguarding intangible cultural heritage through the United Nations, there is an essential strand of force that results from and is still impacting the idea of nationalism. However, that concept of nationalism has gained new meanings in new contexts, either in the sense of specific local nativism or broad globalism. This transition of meaning in China from the traditional nationalism to the current neo-nationalism is the central concern in this talk. This talk points out that folklorists face the challenge of re-orienting themselves to identify the core of the issue and to seek the right methodology, and suggests that studying such ideas as “core marker” and “arbitrary marker” in constructing local and national identity help us seek methods to understand the process of claiming identity to local folklore or intangible cultural heritage. Friday, January 23, 2:30pm 2009 Dr. Qi SUN is an associate professor in Tongji University, Shanghai, China and Fulbright Scholar in Residence in Central State University, Ohio, at present. She gained her Ph.D. degree for Cultural Study of Theater in East China Normal University, Shanghai and her master degree in Fudan University in China. Her college study was done in Qiqihar Normal University, Heilongjiang, China. She has been engaged in teaching for 24 years in various universities of China, in a wide range of subjects from theater, movie to English for MBA and Law. She won the research fellowship of Chinese State Council for young teachers for her Visiting Scholarship in Limerick University, Ireland. Her doctoral dissertation, “Game on A Quicksand—A Discourse Study of Harold Pinter’s Plays”, was honored a doctoral thesis of excellence and is in the process of publication. She also published broadly in various academic journals in China. Lecture Abstract: The motif of women in the images of mother—deprived mothers, underprivileged mothers, sacredified mothers, independent and courageous mothers—never ceases to be a subject of depicting Chinese reality in Chinese film-making history. Viewing a group of movies in the strand of mother-child relationship, we find the historical continuity of complex and subtle signification in the works, by which we see a vein of women’s victimization as well as their strategic bouts of wriggling and grappling for their rights that runs deep from the past to the present. Wednesday, January 28, noon 2009 Thomas J. Christensen is Professor of Politics and International Affairs and Director of the Princeton-Harvard China and the World Program at Princeton University. From 2006 to 2008 he served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, with responsibility for China, Taiwan, and Mongolia. Friday, January 30, 2:30 pm 2009 Dr. Bonnie Cheng is currently Assistant Professor of Art and East Asian Studies at Oberlin College. She is currently working on a book manuscript titled, The Status of Authority: Tombs and Political Spaces of the Northern Dynasties, which examines the funeary art of the Northern Dynasties, focusing broadly on tombs of ruling imperial families and associated officials. Lecture Abstract: Modern interpretations of art from medieval China occupy a peculiar two-pronged perspective. On one hand, the period is hailed for innovations in painting and Buddhist sculpture. On the other, it is also derided because nomadic tribes conquered and ruled the Central Plains region, forcing the Han-Chinese to relocate to the south and disrupting the "continuity" of Chinese culture. While recent studies of later conquest dynasties assert a position that counters this Sinicization model, standard categorization of art into cultural traditions of the Chinese and non-Chinese still persists in writings on this period, despite widespread recognition of the intermingling of populations and artistic practices. Friday, February 6, 2:30 pm 2009 Dr. Michel Hockx studied Chinese language and literature at Leiden University and Liaoning University. He obtained his PhD from Leiden University in 1994. In 1996 he joined the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. In 2002 he was appointed to the Chair of Chinese in the University of London. He is a Visiting Professor at Harvard for the Spring term. Michel Hockx’s research covers two main areas of interest: modern Chinese poetry and poetics, and the sociology of modern Chinese literature. His 1994 monograph A Snowy Morning: Eight Chinese Poets on the Road to Modernity discusses the literary ideals and practices of China’s earliest modern poets. His work on sociological aspects of modern Chinese literature began with the publication of an edited volume, The Literary Field of Twentieth-Century China, in 1999, and culminated in his 2003 monograph Questions of Style: Literary Societies and Literary Journals in Modern China, 1911-1937. More recently he has turned his attention to contemporary Chinese literature, especially the texts and practices of internet literature. Some of this research is presented as a chapter in his Culture in the Contemporary PRC (2005, co-edited with Julia Strauss). Lecture Abstract: This paper discusses electronic poetry featuring aspects of the Chinese language, including original Chinese-language works, Chinese translations of western works, as well as interactive e-poems that can be displayed in various languages. The emphasis is on ways in which aspects of the Chinese language are used to produce poetic experiences that rely less on the semantic value of words and more on visual stimuli and unconventional sound effects. Visual techniques to be showcased include the “textual morphing” of western writing into Chinese writing and back, used in the work of John Cayley; animated text in work by Jim Andrews and its Chinese-language translations by the Taiwanese e-writer Shuen-shing Lee; and multimedia effects in works by the Chinese-American concrete poet Dajuin Yao. Recent experiments with the use of Flash technology in online poetry from the PRC will also be discussed. Friday, February 13, 2:30 pm 2009 Dr. Jianqing Shen, Professor of Comparative Literature, is a faculty member of Chinese Department, College of Humanities, Beijing Language and Culture University (China). She is a Fulbright Senior Research Scholar, now affiliated with Department of Comparative Literature, Harvard University, and, Department of English, University of Texas-Arlington. In the year 2005, as a Visiting Professor, she taught Chinese contemporary culture and language at East Asian Department, the Ohio State University. She has published several books and many essays on drama and fiction. Her research interests include comparative studies of Chinese and American theaters, and, studies of gender, race and ethnicity issues. Her recent research is focused on Eugene O’Neill and China. Lecture Abstract: The main theme of this lecture stems from the speaker’s recent research project of O’Neill’s drama and its interaction with Chinese theater. It is focused on examining the acceptance, transformation and localization of O’Neill’s drama in mainland China. It aims to make philosophical and aesthetical analysis of the conflicts and compromise between American and Chinese cultures in the theater, and, to discuss the necessities as well as possibilities of mutual tolerance and understanding between two different cultures and harmonious co-existence in this world of diversity. Friday, February 20, 2:30 pm 2009 Jennifer Feeley is an Assistant Professor of Modern Chinese Literature and Culture at the University of Iowa. She received her PhD in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures from Yale University in 2008, where she completed a dissertation on early twentieth-century Chinese women poets and canonicity. Her translations of contemporary Chinese poetry have been published in various books and journals, and her article on Hong Kong poet Yau Ching is forthcoming from the Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese. Lecture Abstract: In late imperial China, the rapid expansion of the popular press, combined with the proliferation of girls’ schools and the unprecedented appearance of women’s organizations, fostered an intellectual climate that helped usher in a revolutionary journalistic enterprise, the women’s press (nübao). Following the 1898 debut of Chinese Girl’s Progress (Nü xuebao), women came to publicly engage in publishing and writing, acts that contributed to the formation of a new political culture and construction of a newly gendered public sphere. Poised at the threshold of a transitional era, educated women found themselves negotiating the relatively private role of the traditional talented woman (cainü) from the inner chambers with that of the public self-invention of the modern woman. Approximately thirty different women’s periodicals emerged during the first decade of the twentieth century, many of which devoted sections to classical-style poetry. Composed in literary Chinese and adhering to traditional forms, these poems incorporated a new lexicon and content reflective of the politically charged context of the late Qing dynasty, demonstrating a new social function for women’s poetry signaled by the merging of revolutionary thought with poetic skill. A hundred years after the founding of Chinese Girl’s Progress, poets Zhou Zan and Zhai Yongming established the unofficial women’s poetry journal Wings (Yi) in Beijing with the intention of showcasing female-authored works primarily on the basis of their artistic merit. Originally a print publication, Wings is now also available online and has expanded to include various electronic discussion forums on topics concerning gender, literature, culture, and world affairs, creating a virtual assemblage of international readers and writers. Ten years prior to Wings, another unofficial women’s poetry publication, The Women’s Poetry Paper (Nüzi shibao), was established in Sichuan. Like Wings, it has now extended into the digital realm; unlike Wings, however, gender consciousness, more than literary quality, is one of the main determinants for inclusion. This talk will explore the evolution of Chinese women’s poetry groups over approximately the last hundred years, beginning with the loosely formed imagined print communities of the early twentieth century and continuing to female poetry circles of the present day. Particular attention will be given to groupings from three historical junctures: the turn-of-the-century late Qing women’s press; the Wild Rose Society and Shanghai Women’s Bookstore of the Republican era; and contemporary women’s poetry journals and online communities such as Wings and The Women’s Poetry Paper. Questions to be addressed include the changing definitions and dynamics of such groups; how standards for assessing women’s poetic production have progressed during the past century, if at all; and the transformation of the relationship among poetry, gender, and media in modern and contemporary China. Friday, February 27, 2:30 pm 2009 Dr. Andrea Bachner is an Assistant Professor of Comparative and World Literatures in the Department of Comparative Studies at the Ohio State University. She has published articles on critical theory, interculturality, literature and cinema in journals such as Comparative Literature Studies and Modern Chinese Literature and Culture and is currently working on a book project: Alterity, Mediality, and the Sinograph investigates how contemporary sinophone writers and artists reshape, decenter, and reflect upon the Chinese writing system and its cultural archive from positions of diaspora, interculturality, as well as regional, ethnic, and cultural difference, and how they engage with, translate, and contest Western theories of writing and mediality. Lecture Abstract: Primitivism, understood as an aesthetic and philosophical strategy that draws inspiration from nature or so-called pre-civilized cultures, is usually linked to Western, especially modernist cultural paradigms. After Rey Chow’s invocation of primitivism in her discussion of China’s Fifth-Generation film, but more forcefully after the unprecedented success of Jiang Rong’s novel Wolf Totem (Lang tuteng) in 2004, a fascination with the primal has to be acknowledged as an important creative force in contemporary Chinese culture as well. This talk will discuss three Chinese primitivist novels from different sinophone contexts: Jiang Rong’s PRC novel Wolf Totem, The Remains of Life (Yusheng, 1999) by Taiwanese writer Wuhe, and Monkey Cup (Houbei, 2000) by Malaysian-Chinese novelist Zhang Guixing. It will focus on how these texts use primitivism to renegotiate the complexity of “Chineseness” from their specific cultural contexts in the face of interculturality. Friday, March 6, 2:30 pm 2009 Dr. David R. Knechtges is Professor of Chinese Literature at the University of Washington. He also has taught at Yale, Wisconsin, and Harvard. He is the author of over 100 articles and nine books including Two Studies of the Han Fu (1968), The Han Rhapsody: A Study of the Fu of Yang Hsiung (53 B.C. –A.D.18) (1976), The Han shu Biography of Yang Xiong (1982), Wen-xuan or Selections of Refined Literature. Volume One. Rhapsodies on Metropolises and Capitals (1982), Wen xuan or Selections of Refined Literature. Volume Two. Rhapsodies on Sacrifices, Hunts, Travel, Palaces and Halls, Rivers and Seas (1987), Wen xuan, Volume Three, Rhapsodies on Natural Phenomena, Birds and Animals, Aspirations and Feelings, Sorrowful Laments, Literature, Music and Passions (1996), Editor and co-translator, Gong Kechang. Studies of the Han Fu (1997), Court Culture and Literature in Early China (2002), Co-editor, with Paul Kroll. Studies in Early Medieval Chinese Literature and Cultural History (2003), Co-editor, with Eugene Vance, Rhetoric and the Discourses of Power in Court Culture, East and West, 2005. He is a recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Lecture Abstract: The shi poems in the Wen xuan are classified into twenty-three categories. There is one troublesome category designated “Bai yi” 百一, which literally means “one hundred one” or “one of a hundred.” The “Bai yi” category in the Wen xuan contains only one poem by a single poet, Ying Qu 應璩 (190–252). Li Shan 李善 (d. 689) in his commentary to the Wen xuan records four explanations of title “Bai yi” all of which state that Ying Qu’s poems contained veiled criticisms of contemporary affairs. In this paper, I examine the extant fragments of Ying Qu’s poems. I also consider the question of why some sources designate his poems not as “Bai yi,” but xin shi 新詩 or “new poems.” I adduce evidence to show that Ying Qu was considered throughout the Wei, Jin, Nanbeichao period the premier author of poems critical of contemporary affairs, and his poems were called “new” because he was the first poet to use the pentasyllabic form to write a series of critical poems. I also reconsider Ying Qu’s “Bai yi” poem included in the Wen xuan and argue that it may actually contain an implicit criticism of the court.
November 2, 2007 Steven Miles is an assistant professor in the History Department at Washington University in St. Louis. His research interests encompass the social and cultural history of early modern China, including the geographical and social mobility in the creation of a Cantonese frontier along the West River basin during the early modern era. In his presentation, Prof. Miles will revisit the main themes of his recent book, The Sea of Learning: Mobility and Identity in Nineteenth-Century China (Harvard University Asia Center, 2006). Prof. Miles describes how he came to focus on Guangzhou’s famous Xuehaitang academy as part of a shift from intellectual history to local social and cultural history. He argues that the group of scholars most closely associated with the Xuehaitang was largely composed of urban, in-migrating, socially ascendant elites. Through the production of localist texts celebrating “Cantonese” culture, literati associated with the Xuehaitang articulated a local identity different from that found in texts produced by the lineage-based elites of the Pearl River delta hinterland.
“RealWorlds” Lecture Series Recent Ohio State alumnus, Orian Williams, has made it his life's passion to become a leading expert on the Asian Pacific Rim. During his time as an undergraduate he was able to become involved in a number of activities and programs both within and outside of the traditional classroom, which would ultimately prepare him for a career including a number of international travel assignments in Asia and elsewhere. Since graduating from OSU his work in financial audit in the Pacific Rim and domestically for a Fortune 100 company has taken him to Taiwan, China, South Korea, and Japan. Orian will describe the components of his collegiate experiences that best prepared him for his role as a financial analyst working globally, including coursework, international study, language study and tutoring, internships, and extracurricular activities that were integral to his future in global business markets. Orian holds dual degrees in Business Administration (Fisher) and International Studies (Arts & Sciences). Orian looks forward to the chance to share his story with students and members of the university community interested in international studies and international careers.
April 13, 2007
April 26-27, 2007
May 3, 2007 Dr. Sagart is Directeur de Recherche at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS, Paris, France). His research interests encompass Chinese dialectology, especially the Gan-Hakka dialects; Old Chinese reconstruction; morphology and etymology; Chinese loanwords into neighboring languages; and genetic relationships of Chinese-Tibeto-Burman with Austronesian. He has been Visiting Professor and Visiting Scholar at Tsinghua University (1987-89), at the University of Hawai'i (1992-1993), at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (2000, 2001), and at La Trobe University in Australia (1999). He is currently a visiting professor at Cornell University. Dr. Sagart is the author of The Roots of Old Chinese, and serves as a member of the editorial committees of Cahiers de Linguistique - Asie Orientale, and of Bulletin de la Société de Linguistique de Paris.
May 11, 2007
May 30, 2007
Previous 2006-2007 “Rethinking China” Lectures This talk will address the historical relationships between China and pre-Islamic and Islamic societies. The presentation will explore the early contacts between the Chinese and Muslims, with particular attention to the formation of the Muslim (Huihui) minority group in China. The lecture will cover the social status and language practices of Muslims in medieval China.
“Silver Butterflies: Displaying Miao (Hmong) Folklife in China” Wu Yifang is a public sector folklorist in the ethnic minority division of the Guizhou Provincial Museum in mountainous Guizhou province in southwest China. Numbering about 8 million, the Miao (or Hmong) are one of the largest ethnic minority groups in China, with strong traditions of folk song and story, folk dance, and a material culture that includes weaving and silver work. Along with PowerPoint presentation images, Wu will demonstrate a number of these folk traditions and discuss how they are integrated into museum and tourist displays. The daughter of Miao scholar and epic singer, Jin Dan, Wu will also perform a short segment of a Miao antiphonal epic recently translated by Prof. Mark Bender, DEALL. Everyone is welcome to this exciting presentation which will enhance our understanding of the diversity of China.
“Shamanistic Remains as Seen from Xinjiang Archaeology” The Institute for Chinese Studies is proud to present Dr. Wang Binghua, renowned scholar and specialist of Xinjiang archaeology. Dr. Wang is currently a visiting scholar at Yale University, and his research on the mummies of Xinjiang, China has been featured in both NOVA and Discovery Channel documentaries.
“Translating the West” The Institute for Chinese Studies is proud to present Dr. Kuei-fen Chiu, Professor of Taiwan Literature in the Graduate Institute of Taiwan Literature at National Tsing-Hua University. Since the early 1990s, she has been teaching and conducting research on postcolonial theories, feminist literary criticism, and Taiwan women’s fiction. Her recent areas of research include documentary studies, historiography and popular culture from below. “Translating the West”
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