Harvard-Yenching Library

01/17/2023

Curating a Museum of Stones: The “Forest of Stelae” (Beilin) and the Politics of the Past in Middle Period China

We hope you can join us in person or via Zoom on Monday, February 13th for a lecture by Prof. Xin Wen from Princeton University.

China Humanities Seminar and Inner Asian and Altaic Studies presents:
Curating a Museum of Stones: The “Forest of Stelae” (Beilin) and the Politics of the Past in Middle Period China
Prof. Xin Wen, (RSEA '11, IAAS '17)
Princeton University

Abstract:
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 million. Unlike other pre-modern cities such as Rome and Tenochtitlan that contained many monumental stone buildings, Chang’an’s walls, palaces and houses were made of rammed earth and supported by wooden structures. As a result, little remains of this mammoth city are still visible above ground now in modern Xi’an. The only monuments that survived the centuries of erosion after Chang’an’s abandonment in 904 were stone commemorative stelae that once accompanied almost every significant urban construction, from palaces and monasteries to private residences and tombs. In this lecture, I explore the diverse lives of these stone monuments in Chang’an during the Song, the Jin and the Yuan dynasties. Some stones were destroyed or buried, but others were re-carved and reused. A select few, including the ninth century Stone Classics (shijing) and stelae bearing the handwriting of masters like Yan Zhenqing and Liu Gongquan, were assembled at the Provincial School and the Confucius Temple. This collection of stone monuments began to take shape in the eleventh century and continued to expand and change in the subsequent centuries. By exploring the curatorial agenda, maintenance personnel, and visitor profiles of this collection, I argue that its social and cultural roles in the urban landscape of post-Tang Chang’an resembled those of a modern museum. What this medieval museum exhibits is a uniquely literary reading of the history of the Tang dynasty, and of China.

Monday, February 13, 2023
4:00 pm EST
In person: Yenching Common Room, 2 Divinity Avenue, Cambridge MA
Online: Zoom registration

Welcome! You are invited to join a meeting: China Humanities Seminar Feb. 13. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about joining the meeting.

12/07/2022

Social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook have become flashpoints for what ails democracy. But what if the technologies that power public discourse could serve society’s best interests instead of undermining them? Join William Powers, CEO of Public Mind, best-selling author, and former Wash...

12/05/2022

Monday, December 12, 11:00 am - 12:30 pm
Mitigating COVID disinfodemic: Health misinformation, digital literacy and vaccination in Taiwan
Prof. Trisha Tsui-Chuan Lin (National Chengchi University; HYI Visiting Scholar 2022-23)
Chair/discussant: Prof. Winnie Yip (Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health)
Common Room ( #136), 2 Divinity Ave.

This is a hybrid event (held in person and via Zoom). To attend via Zoom, please register https://harvard.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_jiV82_fKQtafSgLHhmYnyg
Co-sponsored with the Fairbank Center

12/05/2022

Friday, December 9, 11:00 am - 12:30 pm
Hey, Dad, what is modernism to you after all?
Prof. Tsuyoshi Namigata (Kyushu University; HYI Visiting Scholar 2022-23)
Chair/discussant: Prof. Karen Thornber (Harvard University)
Common Room ( #136), 2 Divinity Ave.
In person talk - seating is limited
Co-sponsored with the Reischauer Institute and the Asia Center

11/21/2022

VISITING SCHOLAR TALKS

HEY, DAD, WHAT IS MODERNISM TO YOU AFTER ALL?
11:00 AM - 12:30 PM
Common Room ( #136)

Speaker
Tsuyoshi Namigata | Professor Of Modern Japanese Literature, Graduate School Of Social And Cultural Studies, Kyushu University; HYI Visiting Scholar, 2022-23

Chair/Discussant
Karen Thornber | Harry Tuchman Levin Professor In Literature And Professor Of East Asian Languages And Civilizations, Harvard University

Please note that seating is limited, and masks are required for all audience members.

11/21/2022

The Harvard-Yenching Institute in-person Visiting Scholar talks

Monday, November 21, 11:00 am - 12:30 pm
Trials Heard by a Foreign Ear: A Study of Chinese Jurors’ Comprehension of English Trials in Hong Kong
Prof. Eva Nga Shan Ng (University of Hong Kong; HYI Visiting Scholar 2022-23)
Chair/discussant: Prof. Nicholas Harkness (Harvard University)
Common Room ( #136), 2 Divinity Ave.
In person talk - seating is limited
Co-sponsored with the Fairbank Center and East Asian Legal Studies

Please note that seating is limited, and masks are required for all audience members.

11/14/2022

Nov 28, 4pm ET: The Grid and the Buddha Body: Measurement, Cloth, and Embodiment

The talk, by Dr. Yong Cho, Assistant Professor of History of Art at the University of California, Riverside, will take place via Zoom (https://yale.zoom.us/j/8472619307) on November 28th (Monday), at 4pm EST.

Dr. Cho's talk is titled “The Grid and the Buddha Body: Measurement, Cloth, and Embodiment," an abstract of which is included below:
Focusing on a group of unusual paintings produced on checked cloths from Khara Khoto, this presentation reconstructs the history of how the grid emerged as a powerful visual tool for makers of Buddha icons in twelfth-to-thirteenth-century Central Asia. On the one hand, the grid’s usefulness lay in its ability to effectively aid in the measurement and scaling of the Buddha image. On the other hand, the grid, by merging the image with its physical support that is the woven cloth, facilitated the making of a living Buddha icon that had an embodied presence in the real space.

Dr. Cho is a specialist in the art and architecture of East and Central Asia from the medieval and early modern periods. He focuses on the question of how artistic creativity emerges when people, objects, and ideas move or become displaced from their place of origin. His research interests cover a broad range of topics: theories of cross-cultural contact, multiculturalism, and multilingualism in visual arts, the visual and material cultures of mobile societies, sacred objects and their relationship to ritual, the relationship between making and meaning, and the historiography of Silk Road art and archaeology.

09/22/2022

Chinese Buddhist Book Art in the Age of Printing
This talk will introduce select Buddhist woodcuts from rare books in The Claremont Colleges Library collection, including the liturgical frontispiece Cibei Daochang Chanfa and the illustrated book featuring Child Sudhana’s pilgrimage. By highlighting these woodcut’s artistic qualities and religious meaning, Huang will place them in the larger historical context of Chinese book and print culture and shed light on the dynamic continuity and transformation of Chinese Buddhist book art in the age of printing. This talk is offered in conjunction with the exhibition, Enlightenment in Ink: the Art of Buddhist Prints, presented by the Asian Library and co-curated by Xiaoxing Yu, a sophomore at Pomona College.

Join us for a talk on Chinese Buddhist Book Art in the Age of Printing by Shih-shan Susan Huang, Associate Professor of Transnational Asian Studies at Rice University. This talk will introduce select Buddhis...

09/19/2022

Please join us this Wednesday, September 21st at 5pm in the Thompson Room of Barker Center. At around 6:30pm, after the lecture is over, attendees are welcome to stay for food and casual conversation with the speaker in the Thompson Room.

If you plan to attend, please respond to this email TODAY; this will help us know how much food to prepare.

Speaker: Dr. Victor Fan (King's College London)
Talk title: "The Insight-Image: Illuminating the Reality of Deleuze's Time-Image"

Talk Abstract
In Zen Buddhism, the notion of here and now is the key to attain––or return to–– paññā/prajñā (insight). On a day-to-day basis, we live each moment with a preoccupation of the past and an anticipation for the future. Our retrospection and expectation produce afflictions such as avarice, anger and frustration, as well as delusion. Our penchant for living every moment as a recollection of the past and an anticipation for the future is also propelled by our belief that our existence endures in time; that such afflictions and suffering are both inevitable; and that our self and all the other sentient beings and objects arise out of their self-natures. But as Nāgārjuna (150–250 CE) argues, the past does not exist, as its existence has already perished; the future does not exist, as its existence has yet to arise. If the present is an extension of the past, and if it extends itself to become the future, the present does not exist either. Rather, it is a lived point-instant that instantiates an assemblage of interdependent conditions. But how does the cinema, as an image-consciousness, disconceal insight? In Cinema Illuminating Reality [2022], I conduct a comparative reading of here and now with Gilles Deleuze’s reading of Henri Bergson’s notion of time. I do so in order to reconfigure Deleuze’s notion of the time-image into the insight-image. For Deleuze, the time-image is characterized as a pure optical and sound situation, which draws the consciousness’s attention to the present of the present as a sense-formation and a thought-formation. In other words, Deleuze’s time-image is capable of generating a mindfulness of the here and now: that each moment is an instantiation of an ecology of interdependent conditions that affect, and are affected by, one another. In my presentation, I will demonstrate how insight can be attained or returned to via the formational process of the image-consciousness. I will also conduct a close reading of Pema Tseden’s Tharlo [2015] to examine how mindfulness is mobilized as a technology that gives the consciousness an agency over its own becoming.

Speaker Bio
Victor Fan is Reader in Film and Media Philosophy, King’s College London and a film festival consultant. He is the author of Cinema Approaching Reality: Locating Chinese Film Theory (University of Minnesota Press, 2015), Extraterritoriality: Locating Hong Kong Cinema and Media (Edinburg University Press, 2019), and Cinema Illuminating Reality: Media Philosophy through Buddhism (University of Minnesota Press, 2022). His articles appeared in journals including Camera Obscura, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Screen, and Film History.

This event is sponsored by the Committee on the Study of Religion, the Mahindra Humanities Center, the Asia Center, and the Department of History of Art & Architecture.

09/15/2022

Inner Asian and Altaic Studies at Harvard University Fall 2022 Lectures Series.

We look forward to gathering together to hear the presentations of these expert guest speakers. For more information about the 2022-23 IAAS Lecture Series, visit https://iaas.fas.harvard.edu/pages/iaas-lecture-series.

08/18/2022

Digital Teaching Methods: Tools for Assignments and Activities (for people with valid Harvard ID)

The Digital Teaching Methods seminar provides a hands-on introduction to several approaches that have been used successfully at Harvard, all grounded in specific pedagogical examples and use cases. Whether you will be teaching with digital tools for the first time in the coming semester, or have already been doing so for some time, this workshop provides a focused and supportive environment for improving your practice.

Tools and techniques covered in the workshop include online exhibitions, annotations, timelines, mapping, multimedia, visualization, and polling/classroom response tools.
This workshop is in person, 9am-12pm on Monday August 22nd and Tuesday August 23rd in Lamont Room B30. Advance registration requested.

Fundamentals of Digital Scholarship
Fundamentals of Digital Scholarship introduces participants to the core stages of digital scholarship’s research workflow: the acquisition, manipulation, analysis, and presentation of data. This two-day seminar serves as a springboard for faculty, students, and staff who wish to explore the potential of digital scholarship. It will provide a solid foundation from which participants can continue to develop these skills whether on their own or through a series of advanced, subject-specific follow-up seminars.

Day 1:
Getting Data and Data Sources
Cleaning Data in Google Sheets
Day 2:
Visualization for Exploratory Data Analysis
Digital Scholarship Methods and Projects
Hosting & Displaying

This workshop is in person, 9am-12pm on Monday August 29th and Tuesday August 30th in Lamont Room B30. Advance registration is requested.

Text Analysis in R with Quanteda
Are you interested in using natural language processing or text analysis in your research? R is one of the most recommended languages for TA/NLP, partly because of an ecosystem of libraries designed to tackle common tasks such as corpus creation, cleaning and preprocessing, modeling, analysis, presenting, and exporting. In this workshop, we will compare some of these options (tm and tidytext for R, NLTK and Spacy for Python, etc.) before exploring quanteda, an R package for managing and analyzing textual data.
Quanteda is designed for R users needing to apply natural language processing to texts, from documents to final analysis. Its capabilities match or exceed those provided in many end-user software applications, many of which are expensive and not open source. The package is therefore of great benefit to researchers, students, and other analysts with fewer financial resources. While using quanteda requires R programming knowledge, its API is designed to enable powerful, efficient analysis with a minimum of steps. By emphasizing consistent design, furthermore, quanteda lowers the barriers to learning and using NLP and quantitative text analysis even for proficient R programmers.

Pre-Requisites: Basic familiarity with R. We will be focusing on teaching the fundamentals of text analysis and the Quanteda package, rather than introductory R.

This workshop is in person, 9 am – 12 pm on Wednesday, September 21, 2022 in Lamont Room B-30. Advance registration is requested.

Visual Eloquence: A Participatory Workshop on Creating Effective Data Visualizations
Are you interested in using data visualizations to explore your data or as part of your research output, but unsure of where to start? Are you already using data viz, but want to learn to create more effective presentations with different applications or programming languages?
Consider attending Visual Eloquence, a participatory workshop on visualizing data and understanding the powerful role it plays in analysis and presentation for digital scholarship. You will learn some fundamentals principles for presenting data and work with others to put them into action. The workshop will feature brief presentations, a collaborative small-group exercise working with a dataset and visualization tools to create a visual presentation, and a discussion.

No programming or data science expertise is necessary. This workshop is in person, on Wednesday, October 5, 2022 in Lamont Room B-30. Advance registration is requested.