China Humanities Seminars

Sponsored by the Fairbank Center, with additional support from the Humanities Center and the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University



Monday, February 23, 2009 4:00 pm
China Humanities Seminar
Corrupting Cultures: How to Dispose Chinese and Greek Ornament in Early Japan and Rome
Wiebke Denecke, Assistant Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures, Barnard College

About the Talk: Early Japanese and Latin writers were “latestarters.” They could build on the sophisticated repertoire of Chinese, respectively Greek, literary genres and diction. Yet, they also desired to lay claim to literary merits of their own. Notions about simplicity, ornateness, and decline, which could be blamed on foreign influence, became one of the arenas in which this ambiguous psychology of the younger literary cultures unfolded. What is the relation between ornamentation and simplicity in early Japanese and Latin texts, and how do practice of and debates about ornate style play out differently in Japanese and Latin literary cultures? In her talk, Professor Denecke explains that Latin writers had good reasons to be more aggressive, more diplomatic, and more embarrassed vis-à-vis Greek precedent than their Japanese colleagues vis-à-vis the Chinese tradition.

About the Speaker: Wiebke Denecke, Assistant Professor in Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures at Barnard College/Columbia University, received her PhD from Harvard in 2004. She was a member of the Society of Fellows at Columbia University after receiving her PhD, and currently, is a member of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton University. Her recent articles appear in the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies and Journal of Japanese Studies.



Monday, March 2, 2009 4:00 pm
China Humanities Seminar
 An Icon of ... What? Another Visit to Wang Xizhi’s Xingrangtie
Martin Kern, Professor of Chinese Literature, Princeton University

About the Talk: Since early Tang times, Wang Xizhi’s (303-361) Xingrangtie, or Prayer Ritual for a Good Harvest, has been a tiny yet monumental cultural icon. However, Prayer Ritual, now housed in the Princeton University Art Museum, is an unlikely candidate to carry such weight: a paper slip of 24.4x8.9 cm, its partly unintelligible text of 15 characters seems trivial; it is one half of a letter, but poorly matches the known other half in style; and it is not an original by Wang Xizhi but an anonymous copy made some three centuries later. What is it an icon of?

About the Speaker: Martin Kern, Professor of Chinese Literature, Princeton University, received his PhD from Cologne University, Germany, in 1996. Author of numerous publications, his work cuts across the fields of literature, philology, history, religion, and art in ancient and medieval China, with a primary focus on poetry. His publications include The Stele Inscriptions of Ch’in Shih-huang (2000), The Hymns of the Chinese State Sacrifices (1997, in German) and the edited volume Text and Ritual in Early China (2005).



Monday, March 9, 2009 4:00 pm
China Humanities Seminar
Female Alchemy: Transformations of a Gendered Body
Elena Valussi, Adjunct Faculty, Humanities, History, and Social Sciences, Columbia College Chicago

About the Talk: Professor Valussi discussed the religious tradition of female alchemy, or nüdan, a textual tradition describing bodily techniques, meditation, and visualization practices directed solely at women. The texts discuss the female body, its physiology, and its means to transcendence. Some questions that Professor Valussi is trying to answer are: What can the nüdan tradition tell us about the interaction between power and subservience in gender relations? What does this tradition reveal about the level of agency Chinese women in the seventeenth and eighteenth century had on their bodies, on their world, and on society? Was nüdan tailored to women’s bodies in order to satisfy the needs of a specific historical time or was its emergence a response to women’s desires and demands?

About the Speaker: Elena Valussi received her PhD from the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London in 2003, with a dissertation on the history of female alchemy in China. She currently teaches at Columbia College Chicago and also holds a visiting professorship in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Venice, Italy.



Monday, March 30, 2009 4:00 pm
China Humanities Seminar
The First Emperor as a Historical Junction: A "Messianic" Interpretation
Yuri Pines, Associate Professor, East Asian Studies, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

About the Talk: Among the many controversies related to the short-lived Qin dynasty (221-207 BCE), its position within the course of Chinese history appears most enigmatic. The Qin symbolizes both continuity and rupture: it synthesized the legacy of the preceding centuries of the Warring States period (475-221 BCE), but also explicitly rejected it; contributed decisively toward the formation of the Chinese imperial polity, but also was repeatedly reviled as a transgressive and "illegitimate" dynasty. So, was the year 221 BCE a true watershed in China's history–or is it just a later misperception? And if it was a watershed, then in what respect? In his talk, Professor Pines shed new light not only on the Qin's position in China's history, and also elucidated important aspects of China's monarchism.

About the Speaker: Yuri Pines, Associate Professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, received his PhD from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1998. His numerous publications are concerned with the political and cultural history of pre- and early-Imperial China and include The Foundation of Confucian Thought (Hawai’i, 2002) and the forthcoming Envisioning Eternal Empire: Chinese Political Thought of the Warring States Era (Hawai’i, 2009).



Monday, April 13, 2009 4:00 pm
 China Humanities Seminar
The Late Ming Dream Bubble: How Come?
Lynn Struve, Professor of History and East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Indiana University

About the Talk: The ubiquity of dream reports, images, and tropes during the Ming era—especially in the late Ming—has long been noted. In the history of Chinese dream culture, it is particularly distinguished by the number and intensity of autobiographical dream records. In her talk, Professor Struve probed the sources of this multifaceted phenomenon in such thought trends as the blending of religio-spiritual creeds, the transvaluation of qi, and epistemological subjectivity, as well as in socio-political conditions that heightened people’s uncertainties about life, death, and social status.

About the Speaker: Lynn Struve, Professor of History and EALC at Indiana University at Bloomington, received her PhD from University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in 1974. She is interested in the political, intellectual, and cultural history of the seventeenth century in China, and in comparing Chinese phenomena of the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries with contemporaneous phenomena in other parts of the world. Professor Struve’s major works include The Southern Ming, 1644-1662 (1984) , Voices from the Ming-Qing Cataclysm (1993) and The Ming-Qing Conflict, 1619-1683: A Historiography and Source Guide (1998).


Friday, April 24, 2009 4:00 pm
China Humanities Seminar
Legal Knowledge in Ming and Qing Administrative and Popular Culture
Pierre-Etienne Will, Chair, History of Modern China, Collège de France

About the Talk: Some magistrates in the Qing dynasty claimed that administering justice took the greater part of their time. Rather than an especially high incidence of crime in Chinese society, such statements suggest a high propensity on the part of the citizenry to go to court. Assuming this to be true, the question must be raised about the level of legal competence, or at least awareness, among the populace. Professor Will discussed some themes revolving around the general notion of a shared legal culture involving both the public at large, including the private specialists known as “litigation masters,” and the various strata of personnel in the local yamens. His emphasis was on the late Ming and early Qing dynasties.

About the Speaker: Professor Will holds the chair in Chinese modern history at the Collège de France in Paris. A specialist on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century China, he has published extensively in French and English on Qing dynasty political and legal institutions. His books include Bureaucracy and Famine in Eighteenth-Century China and Nourish the People.


Monday April 27, 2009 4:00 pm
China Humanities Seminar
From the Heart: The workings of Xin in Early Chinese Thought
Andrew Plaks, Professor Emeritus, East Asian Studies and
Comparative Literature, Princeton University

About the Talk: Professor Plaks revissted a series of early Chinese texts dealing with the substance and functioning of the human “heart” (xin) as the seat of both the emotive and cognitive faculties. His primary aim was to set the conceptual parameters of the xin with respect to its contradictory role in both impeding and enabling spiritual or moral cultivation.

About the Speaker: Andrew Plaks, Professor Emeritus of East Asian Studies and Comparative Literature, received his PhD from Princeton in 1973. He is interested in various aspects of classical Chinese literature, including Ming-Qing fiction and early Chinese philosophical and historical texts, as well as topics in pre-modern Japanese literature. His major works include Archetype and Allegory in the Dream of the Red Chamber (1976) and The Four Masterworks of the Ming Novel (1987).
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