We are pleased to announce that Carl Gabrielson has successfully defended his dissertation, “Ambassadors, Apples, and Adversaries: American Military Narratives of the U.S. Japan Alliance,” an ethnographic exploration of the ways that U.S. military personnel in Japan make sense of Japanese culture and their place in it, and the intended and unintended consequences of encountering a foreign culture within a militarized context. Please join us in congratulating Carl on earning his PhD!
We are pleased to host “New Approaches to Traditional Chinese Food Culture: A Workshop” on March 9-10, 2024, organized by Thomas Mazanec and Wandi Wang. This in-person workshop, featuring papers by 15 leading scholars from 11 institutions across the globe, will bridge sinology and food studies, presenting innovative approaches to the intersection of food and culture in China from the fifth to the twentieth century. It will demonstrate how food studies can enrich the understanding of historical Chinese literature, religion, history, medicine, and material culture, and how methods from these disciplines can bring new questions to food studies.
UCSB’s Chinese language program is pleased to offer the Taiwan Huayu Best Scholarship to study Mandarin Chinese at the Mandarin Training Center at National Taiwan Normal University. Applicants should plan to take the Test of Chinese as a Foreign Language (TOCFL). For more information, please contact Shieh Laoshi or Chen Laoshi.
Please join us this Thursday, February 15, to celebrate Lunar New Year with the Chinese Language Program. There will be games and prizes, painting, tea tasting, a photo booth with costumes, performances, raffle drawings, drinks and food, and more!
Date: Thursday, February 15
Time: 4:00–6:30pm
Place: HSSB Courtyard
Hosted by the Chinese Language Program and sponsored by the Center for Taiwan Studies. Special thanks to NTNU Huayu Best Program, the Taiwanese Student Assocation, and Jasmines Echo.
Prof. Thomas Mazanec’s book, Poet-Monks: The Invention of Buddhist Poetry in Late Medieval China, is now available from Cornell University Press.
Poet-Monks focuses on the literary and religious practices of Buddhist poet-monks in Tang-dynasty China to propose an alternative historical arc of medieval Chinese poetry. Combining large-scale quantitative analysis with close readings of important literary texts, Thomas J. Mazanec describes how Buddhist poet-monks, who first appeared in the latter half of Tang-dynasty China, asserted a bold new vision of poetry that proclaimed the union of classical verse with Buddhist practices of repetition, incantation, and meditation.
Mazanec traces the historical development of the poet-monk as a distinct actor in the Chinese literary world, arguing for the importance of religious practice in medieval literature. As they witnessed the collapse of the world around them, these monks wove together the frayed threads of their traditions to establish an elite-style Chinese Buddhist poetry. Poet-Monks shows that during the transformative period of the Tang-Song transition, Buddhist monks were at the forefront of poetic innovation.
You can download an open-access digital edition for free here, or you can purchase a physical copy from the publisher’s website (30% off with code 09BCARD).
