Calder Lounge, Uris Hall
The Critical Chinese Humanities Colloquium in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Columbia University
Institute for Comparative Literature and Society
The Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia is thrilled to announce the launch of a new colloquium series, the Critical Chinese Humanities Colloquium (CCH), a platform designed to foster thought-provoking discussions among faculty, students, and the wider academic community. The CCH encourages critical approaches and new methods and modes of inquiry to the study of Chinese humanities across established disciplinary, temporal, and regional boundaries. We have curated a lineup of scholars who will share their most recent research and insights with our community.
November 9, 2023, 6:00PM-7:30PM
Place: Calder Lounge, Uris Hall (first floor)
The China That Could Have Been:
Rhetorical Learning and Political Thought of the Early Modern World
Speaker: Shoufu Yin (The University of British Columbia)
This event is a hybrid event, open to the public. Zoom webinar information will be provided soon at this link: https://www.columbiaucch.org/cch. We look forward to welcoming you to the CCH and embarking on this intellectual journey together!
What could a person speak, do, and aspire to be within a complex political society? By the
beginning of the seventeenth century, millions of individuals in China and other parts of the
Sinitic world were ruminating over this question as a part of the rhetorical training they received.
This talk is devoted to the educational experiences and intellectual activities of those individuals
living in modern-day China, Korea, and Vietnam, with a particular focus on the transformative
period from the late eleventh to the early seventeenth centuries. It excavates their efforts in
search of lost, alternative, and better ways of speaking, acting, and existing within a political
society they deemed as “China.” Overall, employing a wide array of documents and manuscripts
in Sinitic, Mongolian, Persian, and various European languages, this talk explores how the
history of political thought could have been written and how it might be rewritten.
Shoufu Yin is an assistant professor of history at the University of British Columbia. His recent
projects and publications explore three directions of inquiry: (1) rewriting Sinitic intellectual and
literary histories with a focus on seemingly formulaic official documents; (2) rethinking global
intellectual history and political thought through the lens of Manchu and other Inner Asian
language writings; and (3) retracing the development of democratic ideas and practices with the
long-overlooked Sinitic and Inner Asian documents.
Please email disability@columbia.edu to request disability accommodations. Advance notice is necessary to arrange for accessibility needs.
