Topic: The Cultural Politics of Old Things in Mid-Tang China
Speaker: Prof Tian Xiaofei (Professor of Chinese Literature, Harvard University)
Date: 5 November 2019 (Tuesday)
Time: 4:30pm – 6:00pm
Venue : WLB205, Wing Lung Bank for Business Studies, Shaw Campus, HKBU (Updated on 5.11.2019)
Abstract: 以中唐時期對「物」的一個亞類也即破舊器物的態度為中心，探討八世紀末九世紀初一系列不同文體的作品中反映出來的人與物之間關係的轉型及其文化意義。
About the speaker:
Xiaofei Tian is Professor of Chinese Literature at Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. Her English monographs include Tao Yuanming and Manuscript Culture: The Record of a Dusty Table (named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title in 2006), Beacon Fire and Shooting Star: The Literary Culture of the Liang (502-557), Visionary Journeys: Travel Writings from Early Medieval and Nineteenth-century China, and most recently, The Halberd at Red Cliff: Jian’an and the Three Kingdoms. Her Chinese publications include, among others, Qiushuitang lun Jinpingmei, a book on the sixteenth-century novel The Golden Lotus, and Red Fort (Zhe cheng), a literary travelogue about the Moorish Spain. Her translation of a late nineteenth-century memoir, The World of a Tiny Insect: A Memoir of the Taiping Rebellion and Its Aftermath, was awarded the inaugural Patrick D. Hanan Translation Prize in 2016. Her edited volumes include, among others, The Oxford Handbook of Classical Chinese Literature (1000BCE–900CE) (co-edited; named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title in 2017), Reading Du Fu (712–770): Nine Views (forthcoming from Hong Kong University Press in 2020). She was named a Walter Channing Cabot Fellow at Harvard University in 2012, and received the Everett Mendelsohn Excellence in Mentoring Award by Harvard University in 2017. She is awarded Donald J. Munro Centennial Fellow in Chinese Arts and Letters by American Council of Learned Societies in 2019–2020. Currently she is working on a book manuscript tentatively entitled Writing Empire, Writing Self: Cultural Transformation in Early Medieval China, as well as a project on Tang dynasty tales.