Seminars, Reading Groups, and Members Talks

Spring Semester 2026

All sessions held on Zoom. Zoom link and readings sent out via the mailing list.

（Please note the time change for March 18th’s event）

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January 21st

11:00 PT, 14:00 ET, 19:00 BST

Online Reading Group

Shen Fu 沈復, Six Records of a Floating Life (浮生六記), parts 1 and 3

Paul Ropp, ‘Between Two Worlds: Women in Shen Fu’s Six Chapters of a Floating Life’ in Anna Gerstlacher et al. (eds.), Women and Literature in China (1985), pp. 98-140

Suggested further reading:

Dorothy Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in Seventeenth-Century China (1994), ch. 5 (‘Domestic Communities’)

February 25th

11:00 PT, 14:00 ET, 19:00 BST

Online Reading Group

Zhang, Qing. On Western Influences and the Transformation of Chinese Academic Thought, (Brill, 2025), pp. 277-379

Suggested further reading:

Amelung, Iwo. “Naming Physics: The Strife to Delineate a Field of Modern Science in Late Imperial China,” in Mapping Meanings, eds. Michael Lackner and Natascha Vittinghoff (Brill, 2004), pp. 381–422.

Elman, Benjamin A. “Toward a History of Modern Science in Republican China,” in Science and Technology in Modern China, 1880s–1940s, eds. Jing Tsu and Benjamin A. Elman (Brill, 2014), pp. 15–38.

March 18th

9:00 PT, 12:00 ET, 16:00 GMT

Online Seminar

Dr Mårten Söderblom Saarela (Boston College)

‘Jesuit language learning and dialect publications in late-Qing Jiangnan’

April 22nd

11:00 PT, 14:00 ET, 19:00 GMT

Member Talk

Paul Napier (University of Oxford)

‘Shengren Wei: The Influence of Guangdong Traditions of “Learning of the Heart-Mind” (心學) on Kang Youwei’s Utopian Classicism’

May 13th

11:00 PT, 14:00 ET, 19:00 GMT

Online Seminar

Dr Katherine Alexander (University of Colorado Boulder)

Title TBA (on a collection of morality/strange tales published between 1843-1888)

June 10th

11:00 PT, 14:00 ET, 19:00 GMT

Member Talk

Rhonda Huo (University of Illinois Urbana Champaign)

TBA

Fall Semester 2025

All sessions held on Zoom. Zoom link and readings sent out via the mailing list.

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September 25th

11:00 PT, 14:00 ET, 19:00 BST

Online Reading Group

Haiyan Lee, Revolution of the Heart: A Genealogy of Love in China, 1900-1950 (2007), Ch. 1

Daniel Youd, ‘Beyond Bao: Moral authority and the Law in Late Imperial Chinese Narrative Literature’, in Carlitz and Hegel (eds.), Writing and Law in Late Imperial China: Crime, Conflict and Judgment (2015), pp. 215-233

Suggested further reading:

Lynn Struve, ‘Social Relations and Affective States in Classical Chinese Medical Practice: Zhang Jiebin and the Problem of Renqing’, Late Imperial China 41 (2020): 1-44

October 13th

11:00 PT, 14:00 ET, 19:00 BST

Online Reading Group

Katherine Alexander, Teaching and Transformation in Popular Confucian Literature of the Late Qing (2025), Introduction, Ch. 1 and Conclusion

Suggested further reading:

Tobie Meyer-Fong, “Words,” in What Remains: Coming to Terms with Civil War in 19th Century China (2013), pp. 21-63

November 10th

11:00 PT, 14:00 ET, 19:00 GMT

Member Talk

Markus Haselbeck (KU Leuven)

‘Liu Fenglu 劉逢祿 and the Advocacy for Nonviolent Revenge: A Qing reading of an Early Gongyang Idea’

December 1st

11:00 PT, 14:00 ET, 19:00 GMT

Member Talk

Dr Chui-Joe Tham (University of British Columbia)

‘In the Wake of a Changing World: Writing about the Ming-Qing Transition in Early Modern East Asia’

Spring & Summer Semester 2025

All sessions held on Zoom. Zoom link and readings sent out via the mailing list.

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March 27th

12:30 PT, 15:30 ET, 19:30 GMT

Online Reading Group

Jin Huan, The Collapse of Heaven: The Taiping Civil War and Chinese Literature and Culture, 1850-1880 (2024), Ch. 6 and Conclusion

Jin Huan, ‘Authenticating the Renewed Heavenly Vision: The Taiping Heavenly Chronicle (Taiping tianri)’, Frontiers of History in China (2018): 173-192

Suggested further reading:

Vincent Goossaert, ‘Competing Eschatological Scenarios during the Taiping War, 1851–1864’ in Hans-Christian Lehner (ed.), The End(s) of Time(s) : Apocalypticism, Messianism, and Utopianism through the Ages (2021), Ch. 10

April 17th

11:00 PT, 14:00 ET, 19:00 BST

Online Reading Group

Mario Cams, ‘Reimagining Qing Space: Yongzheng’s Eurasian Atlas (1727–29)’, Late Imperial China (2021): 93-129

Wonmook Kang, ‘Xenophobia Among Han Chinese Elites in the High Qing’, Late Imperial China (2024): 81-111

May 29th

9:00 PT, 12:00 ET, 17:00 BST

Member Talk

Soohyun Lee, ‘Performing Ideas and Reforming Society: The South China Study Society in 1898’

June 26th

7:00 PT, 10:00 ET, 15:00 BST

Online Seminar

Dr. Ori Sela (Tel Aviv University), ‘The Qing Confucian Laozi’

July 31st

18:00 PT, 21:00 ET, 2:00 BST

Online Seminar

Dr. Joo-hyeon Oh (University of Minnesota Twin Cities)

‘The Study of the Principles of Things: Fang Yizhi’s Wulixiaoshi 物理小識’

Fall Semester 2024

All sessions held on Zoom at: 9:00 PT, 12:00 ET, GMT/BST 17:00

Sept. 26th

Introduction and Online Reading Group

Ori Sela, ‘The Textual Time Machine: Truth, Facts, and the Shuowen, 1770–1932’, in Sela et al. (eds), Time and Language (2023), pp. 204-219

Oct. 31st

Online Seminar

Kai-Wing Chow (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign), ‘Zhang Xuecheng’s Theory of History and Ritualism in Qing Thought’

Nov. 20th

Online Seminar

Jean Tsui (City University of New York), ‘Affect and emotion in late Qing China’

Dec. 19th

Online Reading Group

Mårten Söderblom Saarela, The Manchu Language at Court and in the Bureaucracy under the Qianlong Emperor (2024), Chs. 6 and 7, ‘Philological Scholarship in Manchu’ and ‘Footnotes to Early Qing History’, pp. 157-225

Jan. 23rd

Member Talk

Woohee Park, ‘Whose Injustice, Which Punishment? Reconceptualizing Morality in the Debate over the New Criminal Code of the Great Qing, 1906-1911‘