Blog Archives

China Seminar 31 October: Paul Vierthaler

Dr. Paul Vierthaler, Leiden University

Experiments in tracing the origin of quotes through late imperial Chinese corpora

In this talk, Paul Vierthaler will present his current attempts to develop machine learning algorithms that accurately predict the source text for quotes found in late imperial Chinese documents. It is possible, even easy, to identify when two texts share information. It is often more difficult to assess which text is relying on which (or if there is a third, unknown text involved). Paul is in the process of developing a method that will aid scholars in evaluating the directionality of such intertextuality and will present the current state of this work at the China seminar.
Paul Vierthaler is a University Lecturer of the Digital Humanities at Leiden University. In his current monograph project, he analyzes how historical events are represented in “quasi-histories” written in late imperial China. In this work, he studies how information transforms in genre- and time-dependent ways across thousands of semi- to un-trustworthy texts. In order to facilitate rapid and rigorous research, Paul is interested in developing and adapting computational methods to analyze and visualize large natural language corpora. Additionally, as a continuation of past work on quantitative bibliographic analysis, Paul is developing an extensible and mineable bibliographic database on public domain Chinese texts. Paul has held postdoctoral fellowships at Boston College and Harvard University and in 2014 was awarded a Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Literatures from Yale University.

31 October 2018, 15.15-17.00
WIJKPL 2-006, Leiden University

https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/events/2018/10/experiments-in-tracing-the-origin-of-quotes-through-late-imperial-chinese-corpora

19 Sept China Seminar: Ting-Fai Yu: Reconfiguring Queer Chineseness

Please, mark your calendars for the next semester’s talks in the China Seminar series.

The first talk of the academic year 2018-2019 is by dr. Ting-Fai Yu and it is titled “Reconfiguring Queer Chineseness: Hong Kong as Method”. You can find the abstract and bio by following this link: https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/events/2018/09/reconfiguring-queer-chineseness-hong-kong-as-method. Everyone is welcome to attend.

 

19 September, 15:15-17:00 LIPSIUS 130 Ting-Fai Yu IIAS
18 October, 15:15-17:00 VRIESH 1-006 Peter Lodge Vanderbilt University
31 October, 15:15-17:00 WIJKPL 2-006 Paul Vierthaler Leiden University
21 November, 15:15-17:00 WIJKPL 2-006 Jiyan Qiao Leiden University
12 December, 15:15-17:00 WIJKPL 2-006 Huei-Lan Xiong Leiden University

 

 

Abstract

In response to the transnational turn of queer studies, the last two decades saw the emergence of queer Chinese studies as a burgeoning field that has actively situated Chinese-speaking communities outside the People’s Republic of China (e.g. Hong Kong, Taiwan) within the transnational frames of what have been described as queer Chinese roots and queer Chinese routes (Martin 2015). Departing from the existing scholarship emphasising either the continuity of Chinese ethnicity or the multiplicity of Chinese identities, this lecture sets up its context by highlighting how the framing of queer Chineseness has perpetuated the assumption that Hong Kong is incapable of producing knowledge to understand itself or generating theories to inform other queer formations outside China. Consequently, it not only subordinates Hong Kong to a peripheral position whose representations always depend on the presence of China, but also prevents the cultivation of local critical efforts towards meaningful understandings of local queer struggles.

 

 

Based on an ethnographic study of the influences of class on the subjective production of Hong Kong gay men, this lecture provides a perspective highlighting the ways in which inequalities are reproduced in local queer culture amid proliferating sexual progress. Anchored in a specific set of compressed economic transformations affecting postwar Hong Kong, the study understands class as a relatively recent formation that is linked to an unprecedented condition of rapid upward mobility and the emergence of Hong Kong identity since the 1970s. Although class was not commonly spoken about by the informants, their understandings of class were nevertheless displaced into other categories of social difference (i.e. age, generation, race and culture) which have come to inform their struggles and aspirations as queer subjects. By examining the inarticulability and displacements of class as symptoms of compressed economic modernisation, this study reveals the locally specific cultural logics that not only safeguarded the reproduction of inequalities but also rendered any resistance impossible.

Arguing for the revitalisation of class as a useful analytic category in enabling a fresh perspective of Hong Kong queer culture beyond the framing of queer Chineseness, this lecture concludes by exploring how Hong Kong can serve as a method towards localising queer studies in other East Asian societies which went through similar trajectories of economic development.

Biography

Ting-Fai Yu received his PhD in gender studies (anthropology) from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2017. He is currently a research fellow at the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS), Leiden University. His work has focused on the intersection of sexuality, social inequality and critical methodologies in Asian studies.

CHANGE IN TIME/VENUE for China Seminar 7 December: James A. Benn

Please note: James A. Benn’s talk has been moved forward two hours: to 7 December (Thursday), 13.15-15.00. The new venue is LIPSIUS 308.

title: The Creation of a Tea Aesthetic in Tang Dynasty Verse

Abstract: The values associated with tea today— that it is natural, health- giving, detoxifying, spiritual, stimulating, refreshing, and so on— are not new concepts. We find them already in the poetry of the Tang dynasty (618-907). In tea poetry we can catch a glimpse of the cultural synergy created by literati, poets, and Buddhist monks gathering to share and construct new standards of connoisseurship and creativity, as well as to develop new themes and imagery. Surviving poems describe the color, aroma, and taste of the beverage; methods for preparing tea; the shape of teaware; settings for drinking tea; appreciation of the various aesthetic, medicinal, and psychoactive qualities of the beverage; as well as the world of tea growing, picking, and preparation.

 

27 September CHILL! Chinese Linguistics in Leiden: Liu Zenghui

CHILL!

Chinese Linguistics in Leiden

 

Program for Fall 2017

 

All welcome!

 

All lectures Wednesdays 15:15-16:30, Wijkplaats 4 /005, unless indicated otherwise

All lectures in English, unless indicated otherwise

 

27 September 2017

Liu Zenghui (Utrecht): “The development of prosodic focus-marking in early bilinguals’ L2: A study of the Mandarin of Bai-Mandarin bilingual children”

 

abstract This presentation reports about investigations into the developmental trajectory of prosodic focus-marking in Mandarin produced by Bai-Mandarin bilingual children (age 6-13 yoa), in comparison with that of monolingual Mandarin speaking peers. The research concerns Subject-Verb-Object sentences, which were elicited with varied focus conditions in a semi-spontaneous setting. The results show similarities and differences in the acquisition rate and route in Bai-Mandarin early bilingual children’s L2 and that in monolingual Mandarin-speaking peers’ L1.

 

28 September 2017

Two PhD defenses in Chinese linguistics (Senaatskamer, Academy building):

10:00  Zou Ting will be defending her dissertation, entitled: “Production and perception of tones by Dutch learners of Mandarin”

13:45  lu Man will be defending her dissertation, entitled: “The morpho-syntax of aspect in Xiāng Chinese”

 

11 October 2017

Lin Jing (Leiden): “Do speakers really benefit from linguistic markedness in hypothetical reasoning?”

 

1 November 2017

Joren Pronk (Leiden): “A corpus-based description of kong2 in Taiwanese Southern Mǐn”

 

23 November 2017 [Thursday!! Location: to be announced]

Rint Sybesma (Leiden): “VO-OV and Voice and little v

 

29 November 2017

Liu Min (Leiden): “Processing of tone and intonation in Mandarin”

 

6 December 2017

Hu Han (Leiden) (title to be announced)

 

If you have questions, comments, suggestions: write to r.p.e.sybesma@hum.leidenuniv.nl

 

30 November China Seminar: Matt Ferchen: Political risk assessment

Political Risk Assessment with Chinese Characteristics: Venezuela and Beyond

Matt Ferchen (Tsinghua University)

Beginning around 2011, when Chinese investments and citizens were caught up in unexpected turmoil and political change in places like Libya and Myanmar, Chinese government officials, academics and business leaders began to focus on better understanding and managing “political risk”. Yet at this same time China was building up its largest overseas loan portfolio, and a close diplomatic relationship, with arguably the highest risk country in the Americas: Venezuela. This talk will discuss how the concept, and management, of political risk has evolved in China in recent years and how despite these efforts China’s relations with Venezuela highlight the difficulties and contradictions in China’s new risk management efforts. The discussion will include a focus on how the political economy of “stability”, both in China’s domestic and foreign affairs, is central to understanding how risk is conceptualized and, at least in the case of Venezuela, (mis)managed.

Matt Ferchen is an associate professor in the Department of International Relations at Tsinghua University in Beijing and also a resident scholar at the Carnegie-Tsinghua Center for Global Policy. Professor Ferchen has lived, studied and worked in China since 2000 and his research and teaching focus on the domestic and international political economy of China’s evolving development model. He has a Ph.D. in Government from Cornell University and a Master’s in international affairs from Johns Hopkins SAIS.

 

When & where: Wednesday 30 November 15:15-17:00 p.m. De Vrieshof 4/006 Leiden University, Leiden

23 November China Seminar: Michael Keevak: How did East Asians become yellow?

Wednesday 23 November; 15:15-17:00 p.m. Location: De Vrieshof 3/ 104 (Verbarium), Leiden University

How Did East Asians Become Yellow?

Michael Keevak

In their earliest encounters with East Asia, Europeans almost uniformly characterized the people of China and Japan as white, yet by the end of the seventeenth century the category of whiteness was reserved for Europeans only. When and how did Asians become “yellow” in the Western imagination? Looking at the history of racial thinking, this talk will explore the notion of yellowness and show that the label originated not in early travel texts or objective descriptions, but in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scientific discourses on race. The conceptual relationship between East Asians and yellow skin did not begin in Chinese culture or Western readings of East Asian cultural symbols, but in anthropological and medical records that described variations in skin color. Eighteenth-century taxonomers such as Carl Linnaeus, as well as Victorian scientists and early anthropologists, assigned colors to all racial groups, and once East Asians were lumped together as members of the “Mongolian race” they began to be considered yellow.

Michael Keevak is a professor of foreign languages at National Taiwan University. His books include Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking (Princeton, 2011); The Story of a Stele: China’s Nestorian Monument and its Reception in the West, 1625-1916 (Hong Kong, 2008); and The Pretended Asian: George Psalmanazar’s Eighteenth-Century Formosan Hoax (Detroit, 2004). A new book, Embassies to China: Diplomacy and Cultural Encounters Before the Opium Wars, is forthcoming next year from Palgrave Macmillan.

19 October China Seminar: Prof. Max K.W. Huang on the Transformation of Knowledge in Modern China

China Seminar 2016-2017 19 October

From 15.15-17.00 in Vrieshof 3 – Verbarium, Leiden University, Witte Singel 25, Leiden. All are welcome.

 

Evolution and Ethics and the Transformation of Knowledge in Modern China

Professor Max. K. W. Huang

Distinguished Research Fellow at the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, Taiwan, R.O.C.

Abstract

Yan Fu’s Theory of Natural Evolution, a translation of Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics, was an important work and famous for its inaccuracy. It was widely read and encouraged Chinese people to understand natural evolution to strengthen themselves and to save their race. In this talk I will analyze the features of this Chinese translation and its impact on knowledge transformation in modern China. Yan’s translation was strongly influenced by his prior study of The Book of Changes and Xunzi. Yan emphasized the importance of ethical values in the process of evolution. He criticized Spencer for overemphasizing natural evolution at the expense of moral autonomy, and established a link between his emphasis on ethics, individual freedom, and Huxley’s theory of social cooperation. In this way, Yan’s understanding of evolution placed equal emphasis on self and group and led to an accommodative approach to policy and cultural reform. His ideas influenced both revolutionaries and constitutionalists in the late Qing, as well as liberals and New-Confucians in the Republican period. Moreover, Yan’s view of natural evolution along with his other translations of J. S. Mill, Adam Smith and Herbert Spencer led to the widespread adoption of a linear view of historical studies, as well as the rise of sociology, economics, political sciences, and religious studies in Modern China.

  

About the Speaker:

Dr. Max K. W. Huang was born in Taipei, Taiwan in 1957. He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in History from Nation Taiwan Normal University. He subsequently pursued his studies in the United Kingdom and the United States, receiving a second master’s degree from Oxford University and his Ph. D degree from Stanford University. He is a distinguished research fellow at the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica. His major fields are Ming-Qing studies and Modern Chinese intellectual history. He has published six books and more than 80 articles. Dr. Huang’s most recent book is If It’s not Dirty, It’s No Joke: Humor, Desire, and the Body in the World of Modern Chinese Masculinity. His latest book is Government and Politics in Taiwan (Rouledge, 2011). He has a new co-edited volume titled Migration to and from Taiwan (Routledge, 2014).

《天演論》與近代中國的知識轉型

黃克武 教授

中央研究院近代史研究所特聘研究員

《天演論》乃嚴復譯自赫胥黎的《演化與倫理》一書,此書在近代中國影響深遠,鼓舞國人自立圖強,然該書乃「達旨」而非忠實之翻譯。本次講座將分析此譯書的思想特點及其對近代中國知識轉型的影響。嚴譯深受《易經》與荀子之影響,以此來詮釋西方天演觀念。他強調天演過程之中倫理的價值,並結合了倫理、個人自由與赫胥黎所強調的社會合作,而批評斯賓塞「任天為治」的想法。他的觀念影響了晚清的革命黨與立憲派,以及民國之後的自由主義者與新儒家。他所譯介的天演觀念以及他對穆勒、亞當斯密與斯賓塞著作的翻譯促成線性觀點的歷史研究,以及近代中國社會學、經濟學、政治學與宗教學的興起。

 

講者簡介:

黃克武博士1957年生於臺灣臺北,臺灣師範大學歷史學系學士、碩士,英國牛津(University of Oxford, U.K.)大學東方系碩士(1989),美國史丹佛(Stanford University, USA)大學歷史系博士(2001)。現任中央研究院近代史研究所特聘研究員。研究領域為明清史、中國近代思想史。主要著作:《一個被放棄的選擇:梁啟超調適思想之研究》(1994)、《自由的所以然:嚴復對約翰彌爾自由思想的認識與批判》(1998)、The Meaning of Freedom: Yan Fu and the Origins of Chinese Liberalism(2008),《惟適之安:嚴復與近代中國的文化轉型》(2010),《近代中國的思潮與人物》(2013),《言不褻不笑:近代中國男性世界中的諧謔、情慾與身體》(2016),以及有關明清文化史、嚴復、梁啟超、胡適、蔣中正等之學術論文八十餘篇。

Fri 16 Sept lecture by Prof. Ik-sang Eom: Siblings or Neighbors: Chinese and Korean

On Friday 16 September 2016

14.15-16.00

in Lipsius 235b

 

Professor Ik-sang Eom

from Hanyang University, Seoul

 

will give a lecture entitled

 

Siblings or Neighbors: Chinese and Korean

 

 

abstract

Typologically as well as lexically, Korean shares quite a number of properties with Chinese. The similarities go beyond the Sino-Korean part of the lexicon: we also find them with (seemingly?) indigenous Korean words. In this presentation, we will discuss why Chinese and Korean look similar and how they are related.

 

 

About the speaker

Professor Ik-sang Eom, now at the department of Chinese Language and Culture at Hanyang University, received his Ph.D. in East Asian linguistics from Indiana University in 1991. His areas of research include Chinese phonology, pedagogy, dialectology, and Sino-Korean linguistics. His publications include Chinese Linguistics from a Korean Perspective (2002, 2005) and Sino-Korean Phonology from a Chinese Linguistics Perspective (2008), both in Korean, and many other books and articles in Korean, English and Chinese.

 

all welcome!

Save the dates: China Seminar 2016-2017

China Seminar 2016-2017

From 15.00-17.00 in Vrieshof 1 – 6

 

28 Sep 2016

Frank Pieke (LIAS): “Party Spirit: Producing Communist Belief in Contemporary China”

 

19 Oct 2016

Max K.W. Huang (Academia Sinica): “Evolution and Ethics and the Transformation of Knowledge in Modern China”

 

9 Nov 2016

Weiyu Zhang (NUS): TBA

N.B.: This session starts at 16.00.

 

30 Nov 2016

Xiao Chi (NUS): TBA

 

15 Feb 2017

Rogier Creemers (LIAS): TBA

 

8 Mar 2017

Ka Kin Cheuk (LIAS): TBA

 

29 Mar 2017

Jue Wang (LIAS): TBA

 

19 Apr 2017

Svetlana Kharakova (LIAS): TBA

CHILL! cancellation talk planned for 4 May

The Chinese Linguistics talk planned for Wednesday 4 May has been cancelled.

Apologies for any inconvenience caused.