“Global Reception of the Classic Zhuangzi: Song to Ming”
Reed College, March 23-25, 2023
Workshop Participants
(Gray Lounge and ETC 208)
Jean ANGLES, PhD-Student, École Pratique des Hautes Études
Jean Angles is a PhD student at the École Pratique des Hautes Études. He studies the relationship between Pre-Qin Daoist classics and inner alchemy, focusing on the late-Ming alchemical reception of the Zhuangzi. He is a lecturer on Philosophy and Chinese studies at the University of Toulouse Jean-Jaurès. His article “Why and How to Read the Zhuangzi ? Late Ming Neidan Master Cheng Yining’s answer” has been published by the Journal of National Taiwan Normal University.
Jesse CHAPMAN, Visiting Lecturer, University of California, Los Angeles
Email Address: contactjchapman@gmail.com
Jesse Chapman earned a PhD in Chinese Language from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2015, and he has since served as a postdoctoral fellow in Chinese Studies at the Center for East Asian Studies at Stanford University and taught courses at the University of Oklahoma-Norman, the University of California-Merced, and NYU. His scholarly interests center on exegesis, the interpretation of signs, and the relationship between technical texts and historical and literary writing. His publications include “Unwholesome Bodies: Reading the Sign of the Amputated Foot in Early China” (Asia Major, 2017), “Lao-Zhuang in the Vernacular: Two Evolutionary Readings,” (Journal of Modern Chinese History, 2017), and “Celestial Signs in Three Historical Treatises” (in Technical Arts in the Han Histories, SUNY, 2021). He is currently working on a monograph, entitled Celestial Signs and Classical Rhetoric in Early Imperial China.
Mark CSIKSZENTMIHALYI, Professor, University of California, Berkeley
Webpage: http://ealc.berkeley.edu/people/csikszentmihalyi-mark
Mark Csikszentmihalyi is Eliaser Chair in International Studies and Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his PhD in Asian languages from Stanford University and has published on the culture and history of early China. His publications include Readings in Han Chinese Thought and Material Virtue: Ethics and the Body in Early China. He also co-founded the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion.
Alia GOEHR, Associate Professor, Saint Louis University
Alia Goehr is a postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in the MA Program in the Humanities at the University of Chicago and will be Assistant Professor of Chinese Literature in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Minnesota starting in fall 2023. She earned her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Chicago in 2021. Her research examines how Ming-dynasty literati synthesized religious and literary thought to articulate innovative moral worldviews and renders legible the politically charged reception of these syntheses from the Qing dynasty to the present day. Her current book project, tentatively titled "Bodies of Truth" illuminates the Suzhou literatus Jin Shengtan's (1608–1661) long-obscured Buddhist hermeneutics and proposes a pluralistic definition of literary realism inclusive of diverse conceptions of the real. Her other projects include excavating a late-Ming literary network of moral-philosophical innovators and a book-length study of how the diplomatic and religious imperatives of the Qianlong period shaped our received understanding of late-Ming religio-literary thought through the Siku Quanshu.
Pauline LEE, Associate Professor, Saint Louis University
Webpage: https://sites.google.com/a/slu.edu/pauline-lee/home
Pauline Lee 李博鈴 is an associate professor of Chinese Thought and Cultures at Saint Louis University. She received her PhD in Religious Studies from Stanford University. She has published broadly on the 16th century iconoclast Li Zhi 李贄 including a monograph Li Zhi, Confucianism, and the Virtue of Desire, and with Rivi Handler-Spitz and Haun Saussy, a co-translation, A Book to Burn and A Book to Keep (Hidden). Her current major project, Play in China, examines changing views of play through a study of religious and philosophical classics, commentaries on these works, as well as paintings and playthings. She is the co-founding director of the Asian and Middle Eastern Studies (AMES) Center, and a co-founding co-director for the initiative Lived Religion in the Digital Age supported by a Henry R. Luce Foundation Grant for Advancing Public Scholarship on Religion and Theology.
LO Yuet Keung, Associate Professor, National University of Singapore
Webpage: https://profile.nus.edu.sg/fass/chsloyk
Lo Yuet Keung is Associate Professor of Chinese Studies at the National University of Singapore. He specializes in Chinese intellectual history and religions covering Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism and their interactions from the classical period to late imperial times. He authored six books in Chinese, including Intratextual and Extratextual: Interpretations of Classics in Chinese Intellectual History (National Taiwan University Press, 2010). He also edited two books and co-edited four others, including Philosophy and Religion in Early Medieval China and Interpretation and Literature in Early Medieval China (SUNY, 2010). In addition, he published dozens of book chapters and articles in English and Chinese, such as “The Authorship of the Zhuangzi” and “The Zhuangzi and Wei-Jin Xuanxue” in the Dao Companion to the Philosophy of the Zhuangzi (Springer, 2022). Currently, he is completing a book on Buddhist storytelling in early medieval China and two others on the Laozi and Zhuangzi.
Mark MEULENBELD, Associate Professor, University of Hong Kong
QIU Peipei, Professor, Vassar College
Webpage: https://vassar.edu/faculty/peqiu
Peipei Qiu is Louise Boyd Dale and Alfred Lichtenstein Chair Professor of Chinese and Japanese at Vassar College. She received BA and MA from Peking University and PhD from Columbia University. A specialist in Japanese literature, her research interests include Japanese poetry, comparative studies of Japanese and Chinese literature, the Daoist tradition in East Asian literature, women in East Asian literature and societies, and Japanese language pedagogy. Her previous publications include Bashô and the Dao: The Zhuangzi and the Transformation of Haikai and Chinese Comfort Women: Testimonies from Imperial Japan’s Sex Slaves. Her media appearances include BBC, The Wall Street Journal, and Voice of America, among others.
Richard J. SAGE, Research Fellow, Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg
Email address: richard.j.sage@fau.de
Richard J. Sage is a Research Fellow at the International Consortium for Research in the Humanities of the Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg and Visiting Lecturer at the Institute of Sinology, Ludwig-Maximilians University of Munich. He earned a PhD in Chinese Language and Literature from Hong Kong Baptist University. His primary areas of research are early Daoist traditions and texts and their interaction and interconnection with early Chinese Buddhist thought, with a special focus on commentarial literature produced up until the 13th century. His current research projects include a re-evaluation of the classic Liezi within the context of Wei-Jin era (220-420) thought, and the political instrumentalization of Daoist exegetical literature during the rule of Song Huizong (r. 1100-1125). Initial results of the latter are about to be published in T’oung Pao.
Dennis SCHILLING, Professor, Renmin University, Beijing
Dennis Schilling is a professor at the School for Philosophy of Renmin University of China in Beijing. He received his PhD in Sinology, Japanese Studies, and Philosophy from Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich with a study on the imitations of the Yìjīng and his habilitation in Munich with a study on Yogācāra Buddhism in political activism at the end of the Qīng period. He published a new German translation of the Yìjīng and published on various topics of Chinese philosophy and sinology.
Josh STENBERG, Senior Lecturer, University of Sydney
Webpage: https://www.sydney.edu.au/arts/about/our-people/academic-staff/josh-stenberg.html
Josh Stenberg is a senior lecturer in the School of Languages and Cultures at the University of Sydney. After many years of working in Chinese and diasporic theatres as liaison and translator, he completed his PhD at Nanjing University in 2015 and has published the monographs Minority Stages: Sino-Indonesian Performance and Public Display (2019) and Liyuanxi: Chinese 'Pear Garden' Theatre (2022), as well as edited 南戏域外传播研究 (2021) and Kunqu Masters on Chinese Theatrical Performance (2022). In addition to his work on Chinese theatre, he has translated or edited five volumes of contemporary Chinese literature.
Tobias Benedikt Zürn, Visiting Assistant Professor in Religion and Humanities, Reed College
Webpage: https://tobias-zuern.org
Tobias Benedikt Zürn is a scholar of Chinese literature and a historian of religion who explores various forms and practices of embodiment, powerful texts, and ritual theory in early and medieval Daoism and Buddhism. In 2016, he earned his PhD in Chinese studies from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. In his first monograph, provisionally titled Text/Bodies: The Huainanzi’s Construction as a Powerful Scripture of the Way, Tobias Zürn asks what are texts and what did people historically do with them? By drawing on book history, material culture and religious studies, he argues that the Huainanzi, one of the most important texts from the early Han dynasty (206 BCE-220 CE), was created to serve as a textual embodiment of the Way that could actualize cosmic order by its mere presence. Beyond these explorations, he engages in the multidisciplinary and multimedia reception history of “Zhuangzi’s Butterfly Dream,” one of the most influential vignettes in East Asian religious and cultural history. Tobias Zürn’s research has been published in the Journal of Asian Studies and Early China, as well as in various edited volumes. He is also the co-founder of the international research project “Global Reception of the Classic Zhuangzi” and the “Global Daoist Studies Forum,” a virtual venue that seeks to promote the study of Daoism and foster a global community of scholars in Daoist studies.