A recent Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Henry Luce Foundation/ACLS Program in China Studies will allow me to be on leave during the 2017-18 academic year. I will be based in Nashville to complete my first book on costuming and personhood in the unstageable world that is the early Qing China.

Me: I’m going to be on leave next year and will not offer courses.
My students: Are you going to be on vacation?!

Title of My Presentation: “Modern Accident: Representing the Sensational Train Wrecks in Late Qing China”

Title of Panel: Technologies of the Modern: Space, Vision, and Power in China

Panel Scheduled Day/Time*: Sat, March 18 8:30am to 10:30am, Sheraton Centre Toronto Hotel, Davenport

I’ll be presenting a chapter of my book manuscript at the 2017 MLA annual convention in Philadelphia. Below is the info about the panel and my presentation:

Session 755. Bodies, Clothing, and Spaces in Early Modern China
12:00 noon+1:15 p.m. on 08-JAN-17 in 410, Philadelphia Marriott.

My presentation:

Seamless Clothing: Boundaries of the Female Body in a Seventeenth-century Chinese Drama

The Manchu invasion into central China in the mid-seventeenth century disrupted traditional gender relations. Chinese drama in this period constituted an especially rich space for representing this disruption. This paper examines the depictions of the female body in an early Qing drama Hai Liefu chuanqi (Chaste Lady Hai). The drama is based on a real event in 1667 when a lady surnamed Hai stitched together her entire outfit to defend against sexual assault before committing suicide. After her death, Lady Hai received public worship from the local community and commendation from the Manchu state. By looking at the drama’s descriptions of the chaste lady’s stitched clothes, her body, her coffin, her statue, and her shrine, the paper argues that women’s socially constructed body became a mediator to reconcile the ethnic conflicts during the dynastic change in the seventeenth-century China.

Imperial commendation of Chaste Lady Hai,
stele 1667, reproduced in woodblock print 1844

Post election, I changed the paper assignment in my class “Self and Society in Premodern Chinese Literature” to a poster session. The topic is about “the other” in traditional China. The other involves the relation between people of different gender, ethnicity, geographical areas, and involves communications in culture and technology. We hope those in power will have a decent understanding of the diversity of people and culture in our shared world.

Here are a few examples:

Foreign influence in Chinese history

Resisting the Manchu hair policy during the Ming-Qing transition

I was so impressed by my students’ recent performance of Cao Yu’s Thunderstorm in class. Since we only had one female student in the group, two boys volunteered to perform Fanyi and Mrs. Lu. I especially liked the use of thunderstorm as background music. It was an intensive 50 minutes. So unforgetable.

On Dec. 5, we were fortunate to have Fei Wu, the renown musician and singer, to perform Chinese music in my class Chinese Drama. Fei is an expert on Chinese guzheng and is familiar with many Chinese performance genres. In our class, Fei performed a kunqu song from the Peony Pavilion 牡丹亭, a song she composed with sanxian (the three string instrument), Summer Palace 頤和園, and the Manchu chaqu 岔曲.

With Abigail Washburn, Fei just performed at the National Immigrant Integration Conference 2016 in Nashville.
http://www.niic2016.org/blog/from-banjos-to-guzhengs

I am thrilled to welcome the incoming participants of Manuscript Workshop: New Directions in Chinese Studies, a workshop on the parameters and practices of manuscript development on topics regarding China and the larger Sinophone sphere. Sponsored by the Asian Studies Program at Vanderbilt University, the workshop will take place on October 20th-22nd 2016 (Thursday-Saturday), at Vanderbilt University.

With the Manuscript Workshop, we seek to provide a space in which scholars from different disciplines can share innovative ideas and approaches, and engage in in-depth discussion of each other’s works. This 2016 workshop features the challenges and solutions of developing book manuscripts. Participants will reflect on the general issues regarding conceiving, structuring, and materializing book manuscripts, and will provide specific comments on each other’s works from interdisciplinary perspectives. The workshop consists of a method session followed by discussions of individual projects.

June 6, 2016, I was invited to give a talk at Hong Kong Baptist University. The talk was in Chinese, and the title is “Across Genders and Ethnicities: The Dilemma of Crossdressing in Early Qing Drama Lovebirds Switcheroo” (剃髮易服與男女易裝： 清初傳奇《倒鴛鴦》中的服飾與性別). It is about a book chapter I am working on.

May 27-28, 2016, I attended the Forgotten Books and Cultural Memory conference hosted by the English Department at Taipei Tech. It is an international conference on book culture, with scholars sharing their studies on books in different cultural contexts.

I presented a paper titled “Recollecting Body and Clothing: The Shifting Meaning of Female Chastity in the Reproduction of a Chinese Drama.” It is from a chapter in my current book manuscript.

Link to the conference: https://forgottenbookstaipei.wordpress.com