- Date: Saturday, November 11, 2023
- Time: 9:00am – 2:15pm
- Format: Virtual – via zoom
“Voices from Tang (618-907) through Northern Song (960-1127) China: Encounters across Boundaries”
First lecture: 9:00 – 10:15, includes 15-minute discussions
Anna Shields is Professor of East Asian Studies and Chair of the Department of East Asian Studies at Princeton. She specializes in classical Chinese literature of the Tang, Five Dynasties, and Northern Song eras. Her recent book, One Who Knows Me: Friendship and Literary Culture in Mid-Tang China, explores the literary performance of friendship in ninth-century China through a wide range of genres, including letters, prefaces, exchange poetry, and funerary texts.
“The Silk Road in World History”
Second lecture: 10:30 – 11:45, includes 15-minute discussion.
Xin Wen (Ch. 文欣), Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies and History at Princeton, is a historian of medieval China and Inner Asia. His work goes beyond the dynastic units of Tang and Song and situates “China” in the connected world of Eurasia. His current book, The King’s Road: Diplomacy and the Remaking of the Silk Road, project examines the ways people traveled between Northwestern China and Central Asia in the ninth and tenth centuries.
“The Mongol invasions of Japan”
Third lecture: 1:00 – 2:15, includes 15-minute discussion.
Thomas Conlan, Professor of East Asian Studies and History, and Director of the Program in East Asian Studies at Princeton, explores how processes such as warfare, or ritual performance, determined the politics, ideals, and social matrix of Japan from the tenth through the sixteenth centuries. In his book In Little Need of Divine Intervention: Scrolls of the Mongol Invasions of Japan, he introduced new sources about the Mongol Invasions.
