Home

Welcome to the home page of the Society for Ming Studies. The Society is a scholarly organization that promotes the study of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). It publishes a journal and a book series, as well as sponsoring panels on Ming topics at the annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies. This site includes both information about the Society and its activities and material of wider interest to scholars of the Ming.

This page is hosted by the Faculty of Arts, University of British Columbia, with support from the Department of Asian Studies. The Society is an independent organization not affiliated with or sponsored by UBC.

Latest News

Ming and Ming-Adjacent Panels at the 2025 AAS Annual Meeting

Ihor Pidhainy has generously compiled a list of papers on and related to the Ming at the 2025 AAS Annual Meeting in Columbus, Ohio (March 13-17).

Thursday, March 13
7:00-8:30 PM
1-007 – Between Materiality, Genre, and Media: Rethinking Li Yu’s (1611-1680) Corpus as a
Transmedial Project (Clark, 2nd Floor Hyatt)

  • Kangni Huang, University of Southern California, “Toward a Theory of the Theater: Li Yu’s Drama Criticism and Self-Conscious Playwriting”
  • Yi Zhang, Harvard University, “Words for Display: Li Yu’s Multimedia Placard Design in Xianqing ouji
  • Tina Lu, Yale University, “Genre, Media, and Repetitions in Li Yu’s Writing”
  • Maria Franca Sibau, Emory University, “Rescrambled Families: Material, Medium, and Message in Li Yu’s Qiao tuanyuan

1-009 – The Arts of Detection: Emerging Visions of Techniques in Early Modern Chinese Culture
(Knox – 2nd Floor, Hyatt)

  • Guojun Wang, McGill University, “From “Five Observations” to Forensic Examinations: Modalities of Truth Discovery in the Court-case Drama of Imperial China”
  • Wenfei Wang, Harvard University, “The Grotesque Body in Surgical Imaginations: An Alternative Epistemology of Anatomy in Early Modern Chinese Narrative”
  • Joo-hyeon Oh, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, “Investigating Illusion: Clam Towers and the Nature of Natural Knowledge in Late Imperial China”

1-018 – The Blurring of Social and Familial Relationships in Late Imperial East Asia (Rm A213)

  • Mark McNally, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, “Foreign Expectations and Native Realities: Parent-Child Relationships in the Ryukyuan Royal Histories”
  • Jing Shen, Eckerd College, “Friendships and Conflict during the Lantern Festival”
  • Kuan Liu, University of Minnesota, “Friendship in Print: Du Jun’s Commentaries in Li Yu’s Chuanqi Drama and Short Story Collections”
  • Sungoh Yoon, Korean Science Academy of Kaist, “Negotiating Subjecthood and Sovereignty in a Ming Loyalist Discourse: Hwangjo Yuminrok 皇朝遺民錄 (Records of the Loyalist Subjects of the August Dynasty) By Wang Tŏkku 王德九 (1788–1863)

1-024 – Anxiety, Communication, and Cartography in the Making of Modern East Asia (Room B244/245)

  • Daniel Said Monteiro, Trinity College “Civilizational Anxiety: Positioning Tokugawa Japan on the Early Modern Globe”

 
 
Friday, March 14
9:00-10:30 AM
2-001 – The Politics and Aesthetics of Transnational Art (Room A221)

  • Diana X Yang, University of Texas, Dallas, “Seaborne Splendor: Translatability and Vitality of Zhangzhou-Style Designs on Japanese Ceramics Created by Okuda Eisen and Inuyama Workshops”

2-010 – Formulaic Texts and the Technics of Living in Late Imperial China (Hyatt, 2nd Floor)

  • Fei-Hsien Wang, University of Indiana, Bloomington, “Let’s Eat More Sweet Potatoes: Recipes, Statecraft, and Food Management”
  • Xiaoqian Ji, Duke University, Kunshan, “Beard Blackening Medicine: Recipes, Artifice, and Virile Power in Late Imperial China”
  • Ying Zhang, Independent Scholar, “Meanings of “Proven” (yan) in Medical Recipes in Late Imperial China”
  • He Bian, Princeton University, “From Accumulation to Historicization: How Ming Physicians Investigated Past Medical Formulas”

2-013 – Living at the Fringes of the Empire: State Policies, Commercial Ventures, and Urban Life
in the Frontiers of Early Modern China (Knox- 2nd Floor, Hyatt)

  • Sunkyu Lee, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, “Walls, Warfare, and Welfare: The Social and Political Dynamics of City Wall Reconstruction Along the Northern Frontier

2-032 – Transregional Colonial and Commercial Interactions of Northeast Asia in Manchuria:
From the Fifteenth Century to the Twentieth Century (Room A123)

  • Rui Ding, University of British Columbia, “Ploughing the Ming’s Land with Korean Oxen: Draught Cattle Trade and 14th-15th Century China-Korean Borderland Agriculture”
  • Yirui Ma, University of Wisconsin, Madison, “Raiders or Traders?: Liaodong Military Officers and Jurchen Merchants in Northeast Asian Cross-border Trade from the Mid-15th to Mid-16th Centuries”

Friday March 14
11:00-12:30
3-003 – Building and Transforming the State in Imperial China (Morrow, 2nd Floor Hyatt)

  • Hao Peng, Kyoto University, “Fiscal Reforms, Partisan Politics, and Statecraft Thought during the Late Ming Period: On the Minister of Revenue, Ni Yuanlu (1593–1644)”
  • Zhaoshen Wang, University of Wisconsin, Madison, “The Unfading Memory of a Fallen Dynasty: Emperor Chongzhen in the Discourse of the Chinese Communist Party”

3-009 – Time Passing By: Gender, Temporality, and Writing of Age in Middle and Late Imperial
China (Fairfield, Hyatt 2nd floor)

  • Jingya Guo, Cornell University, “The Politics of Age and Medicalization of In-Chamber Girls’ Bodies in Late Imperial China”
  • Tianyu Shi, University of Hamburg, “Vanishing Fragrance, Shattered Jade: Defining Social Identity through the Death Rituals of Young Women”

 
3-013 – Constructing the Sacred in Daoist Visual Art (Union E, 2nd Floor, Hyatt)

  • Mengyuan Chai, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, “Picturing the Atemporality: Illustrations in Mount Luofu Gazetteers in the Late Ming Dynasty”

Friday March 14
1:30 – 3:00 PM
4-006 – The Authority of Lowly Intermediaries in Late Imperial China (Rm A-125)

  • Tristan Brown, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, “Between God’s Messenger and Heaven’s Emperor: Muslim Eunuchs in Ming China”
  • Ying Zhang, Leiden University, “Jailers as Officials’ Intermediaries in the Ming”

 
4-010 – How to Do Wonders with Places: Rethinking Literary Geography through Late Imperial
Chinese Literature (Rm A-122)

  • Rania Huntington, University of Wisconsin, Madison, “Dark Paths and Sinister Courts: Space and Place in the Netherworld”
  • Yinghui Wu, University of California, Los Angeles, “The Poetics of Placemaking in the Pan Zhiheng’s Essays on Performance”
  • Roland Altenburger, Julius Maximilian University of Würzburg, “Altered Literary Geographies: Place and Space in 16th- and 17th-Century Novels with a Shandong Setting”

4-011 – Bones, Books, Stalks, and Sky: Magic and Divination through Ancient Chinese Texts
(Rm A 115)

  • Jingyi Chen, University of Hong Kong, “From Opposition to Advocacy: The Attitude of Johann Adam Schall von Bell Toward European Judicial Astrology During the Late Ming and Early Qing Dynasties”

 
Friday, March 14
4:00-5:30 PM
5-054E Poster Session (Exhibition Hall Foyer)

  • Yajo (Ya-Chiao) Joyce Li, University of Oregon, “Monetary Value, Political

Implications, and Shifting Perceptions: The Duality of Colored-Pupils in The Eunuch
Sanbao’s Journeys in the Western Seas
5-007 – Migration and Empire Building: New Insights into Movement Dynamics in Qing
Dynasty Manchuria (Rm A-125)

  • Xiao Chen, University of California, Riverside, “Frontier, Convicts, and Slavery in the Early Qing Empire”
  • Chenxi Luo, Reed College, “Leaving Manchuria: Imperial Artisans and Post-Conquest Migration in the Early Qing Dynasty”

5-011 – Bureaucracies of Shit: Excremental Technologies in Chinese History from the Tenth to
the Twenty Century (Rm B233)

  • Sijia Cheng, Friedrich-Alexander-University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, “The Profits of Manure: Excremental Economy and Agronomic Ethics in Ming-Qing China”

 
 
 
Friday, March 14
7:30-9:30 PM
Society of Ming Studies – Annual Meeting:  Morrow, 2nd Floor (Hyatt)
Presentations:

  • Leigh Jenco (London School of Economics): Ming Intellectual History
  • Sean Feng (University of Toronto): Ming literature
  • Chen Sijia (Nuremberg): Ming agricultural history

Ming Book Prize Award
 
SATURDAY, MARCH 15
8:30-10:00
6-002 – AI, LLMs and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) for Sinology and Beyond (Rm
A211)

  • Hongsu Wang, Peking University, “Discovering Social Networks in Chinese History”

6-003 – Reflections: The Adaptation of Image, Artifact, and Practice in Forging Identity (Rm
B233)

  • Sherry Pan, University of Michigan, “Pilgrimage and Power: Ming Eunuchs and the Goddess of Mount Tai”

6-010 – Literature Beyond Literature (Rm A112)

  • Paul A. Vierthaler, Princeton University, “The Cross-Pollination of Literary and Historical Information in Late Imperial China”
  • Thomas Kelly, Harvard University, “A Poetics of Book Burning, circa 1645”

6-014 – Rethinking Gender and the Uncanny in Early Modern Chinese Cultures (Rm A224)

  • Chengjuan Sun, Kenyon College, “Uncanny Coexistence of Passion and Duty: Grafting the Late Ming Literati-Courtesan Romance onto the Qing Companionate Marriage”
  • Dan Luo, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, “Ghostly Talents: Transmitting Ideal Femininity in Late Imperial and Cross-Cultural Contexts”
  • Li Guo, Utah State University, “Women Warriors as Uncanny Exterritorial Heroines in the Late Ming Tanci Jade Bracelets”

6-026 – China in the Eurasian World: Military, Diplomacy, and Rulership in Comparative
Perspectives, circa 1200-1400 (Rm A212)

  • Yiming Ha, Pomona College, “The Great Military Transition: The Mongol-Yuan and Ilkhanate Army in Comparative Perspective”
  • Yiwen Li, City University of Hong Kong, “Constructing the Heavenly Realm: A Nanjing Monastery in the Yuan-Ming Transition”
  • Haiwen Liu, Shanghai Tech, “Follow Their Own Customs: Mongol Rulership in Chinese and Persian Sources”
  • Sharon Z Zang, University of Pittsburgh, “Celestial Horses and Gift Diplomacy: Mongol Yuan China and the Making of Global Eurasia”

 
 
Saturday March 16
10:30 AM-12:00 PM
 
7-050C Poster Session (Exhibition Hall Foyer)

  • Mengzhen Xue, Shanghai Theatre Academy, “Recalling the Stage: The Reading and Readership of Drama Anthologies in the Late Ming Dynasty”

 
7-013 – Re-Examining Woodblock Printing in Premodern East Asia: Plurality, Flexibility, and
Creativity (Rm A2223)

  • Scott Gregory, University of Arizona, “Carving the Western Seas”
  • Huan Jin, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, “Modularized Interpersonal Letters: A Study of The Brocade Sack of Letters”
  • Xin Yu, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, “Uniformity with Differences: The Cultural Meanings of Woodblock Printing in the Production of Family Genealogies in Late Imperial China”

 
Saturday, March 16
2:00-3:30 PM
8-010 – Mappings of Authority and Identity—The Interplay between Geography and Culture in
Texts on Urban Space from Early to Late Imperial China (Rm A223)

  • Jeffrey Liu, University of South Dakota, “Praying Under Emperor and Elites: Measuring Commoners’ Involvement in Buddhism in Ming-Dynasty Hangzhou with Proxy Indicators”

8-012 – Resource Management in Qing China (1644-1912) (Rm B140-141)

  • Yijun Wang, New York University, “The Power of Sweetness: The Tribute of Orange in Late Imperial China”

8-015 – Cultural Dynamics and Textual Fluidity in Late Imperial Chinese Narratives (Knox)

  • Amy Zhang, Harvard University, “Anthologizing Romance: Three Editions of a Mid-Ming Classical Tale”
  • Chuyan Ye, Minzu University of China, “Evolving Episodicity: Narrative Subdivision and Structural Verse in the Chantefable Tale of Yunmen”
  • Canaan Morse, University of Virginia, “A Transmedial Idyll: Mapping Traditional Space Across Media in the Dream at Qiantang”
  • Xiaoqiao Ling, Arizona State University, “Praying to the Moon: A Spatial Understanding of Reading for Leisure”

Saturday, March 16
4:00-5:30 PM
9-004 – Seeking New Legitimacy: Producing Confucianisms in Early Modern and Contemporary
China (Rm 214)

  • Huiqiao Yao, Trinity University, “Assembling Wang Yangming the Sage: The Intertextuality of the Confucian Genealogy in Late Ming China”

9-011 – Revisiting Rulership and Imperial Order of Ming China (1368-1644) (Madison, 2nd Fl, Hyatt)

  • Sean Cronan, University of California Berkeley, “The Scholar-Envoys: Early Ming Diplomacy with Đại Việt, 1368-1404”
  • Yuanyuan Duan, Cornell University, “Brokering Buddhist Statecrafts of Dali Kingdom: Esoteric Buddhist Masters from Southwest Ming China Frontier in the Ming Court, 1400-1424”
  • Ting-chih Wu, Academica Sinica, “Securing Farmlands and Pasturelands: The Construction of Border Walls and Forts along the South Edge of Ordos in Northwest Ming China, 1450-1550”
  • Lina Nie, Texas A&M, “Before the Tally Trade: Diplomacy Exchanges between Japan and Ming China in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries”

9-014 – Poetry in the Making: Textual Variants, Fluidity, and Reception in Premodern China
(Champaign, 2nd Floor, Hyatt)

  • Jing Chen, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, “Tracing Textual Variants via Digital Humanities Analysis: Metadata Fluidity in Late Imperial Anthologies of Early Classical Chinese Poetry”

9-020 – Circulatory Systems: The Chinese Diaspora in the Making and Unmaking of States
(Rm A121)

  • Peter Thilly, University of Mississippi, “Maritime China and the Final Battle for Ming Restoration”

 
Sunday, March 16
9:00-10:30 AM
11-002 – Image, Object, and Ethos in Visual Representation (Rm A114)

  • Fuwei Li, University of Arkansas, “The Princess’s Elegant Gatherings: A Dialogue between the Participation of Yuan Aristocratic Women in Kuizhangge(奎章阁) and the View of Jiefu (节妇) in 14th Century Neo-Confucianism”
  • Yifan Zhang, Columbia University, “Playing with Cards: Surface, Substance, and the Ludic Space of Card Playing in Early Modern China”

11-007 – The Poetics and Politics of Information in China: From the Ming Dynasty to the Present
(Rm A121)

  • Xiangjun Feng, University of Toronto, “How to Transmit a Heavenly Scroll: An Informatic Reading of Quelling the Demons’ Revolt from the Fourteenth Century to Contemporary China”
  • Jiaqi Wang, Columbia University, “Recounting the Recent History of Manchu Invasions: Rumor, Storytelling, and Local Community in 17th-Century Jiangnan”

11-008 – Printing and the Production of Everyday Knowledge in Late Imperial and Modern
China (Rm A125)

  • Ren-yuan Li, Academia Sinica, “Creating Your Own Documents: Commercial Publishing and the Emergence of Document Manuals in the 14th Century”
  • Joan Judge, York University, “New Conceptions: Modes of Knowing in Chinese Encyclopedias for Everyday Life”
  • Yiran Xiao, Arizona State University, “The Evolution of Legal Knowledge in Everyday Encyclopedias in Late Imperial China”

11-015 – Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them: Transmitting and Transforming Symbolic Animals Within and Beyond the Sinosphere (Rm B235)

  • Brian Dott, Whitman College, “Bearing the Weight of the World: The Enduring Presence of Stone BixiStelae Carriers”
  • Yuxi Pan, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, “Myth, Mystique, and Meaning: The Cross-Cultural Evolution of the Qilinin Fourteenth- to Eighteenth-Century Export Porcelain”

Sunday, March 16
10:45 AM -12:15 PM
12-005 – Eunuchs in Chinese History: Identities, Fantasies, and Legacies (Rm A211)

  • Keith McMahon, University of Kansas, “The Powerful Eunuch”

12-006 – Push and/or Pull: Textual Forces in Literary Sinitic Cultures (Rm A124)

  • Young-kwon Oh, Arizona State University, “Writing in the Moment: Politics and Textual Physicality”
  • Mengling Wang, Furman University, “Textual Forces and Affective Affinities: The Paratextual Dynamics of Yutai xinyong玉台新詠 in Early Modern China”

12-007 – Jealousy, Hatred, and Resentment: The Representation and Utilization of Unsettling
Emotions in Pre-Modern East Asia (Room A210)

  • Shiau-Yun Chen, Ball State University, “Celebration and Suspicion: Women’s Exemplary “Non-Jealousy” in Ming China (1368-164)”

12-009 – Bodies of Knowledge: Learning from Emotions, Play, and Desire in Late Ming China
(Rm A-123)

  • Leigh Jenco, London School of Economics, “Transmitting Voices: Folksong Collecting and its Register of Non-Elite Experience”
  • Pauline C. Lee, Louis University, “Play and Virtue in Late-Ming China”
  • Alia Goehr, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, “The Moral Mind’s Outrage in Zhang Nai’s Must-Read Classical Literature (Bidu guwen 必讀古文)”
  • Cheuk Yee Wai, Warwick University, “Recreating a Discourse of Female Bodies in Fictional Narratives”

Ming-related panels at AAS Boston 2023

Ihor Pidhainy has kindly compiled a list of panels with Ming content at the 2023 Association for Asian Studies annual meeting.

AAS Ming and Ming-Related Papers at 2023 Annual Meeting (Boston)
Thursday, March 16, 2023

7:00-8:30
Panel: Unexpected Voices Against Military Excess: Mitigating State Violence in China, Korea, and, Japan, 1592-2015. (Hynes Convention, Room 204)

  • Barend Noordam, Autonomous University of Barcelona

War and the Non-Combatant in the Late Ming: The Case of the Imjin War (1592-1598)

Friday, March 17

9:00-10:30 AM

Panel: Revisiting the Jin from Digital, Political, Geocultural, and Long-Term Perspectives (Hynes Convention Center, Room 111, Plaza Level)

  • Julia Schneider, University College Cork

Telling Jurchen Jin History: The Qianlong Emperor’s Censorship of Ming Books

Panel: Vernacular Healing: Practical Knowledge and Chinese Medicine, Ca.1500-1950: A Panel in Honor of the Memory of Nathan Sivin (1931-2022). (HCC, 203, 2nd level)

  • Andrew Schonebaum, University of Maryland, College Park

The Stuff of Life: Animating Forces in Early Modern China

  • Ying Zhang, Hunan University

Healing with Recipes in the Home: Experience, Skills, and Virtue in Late Imperial China

Panel: Worldmaking, Worlds’ Edges, and Constructions of Zheng He (HCC, Room 209, 2nd level)

  • Rania Huntington, University of Wisconsin, Madison

The Edges of the World in Late Ming Tales of the Strange

  • E. Kile, University of Michigan

The Ends of the Early Modern World: Worldmaking in China (1592-1842)

  • Tom Hoogervorst, Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies

Remembering, Representing, and Reinventing Zheng He in Late-Colonial Java

  • Pashmina Murthy, Kenyon College

Zheng He’s Postcolonial Geography

Panel: Empty Intestines: Hunger and Metaphor in Middle Period Chinese Poetry (HCC, 205)

  • Wandi Wang, University of California, Santa Barbara

Good Taste in Gastronomy, Aesthetics, and Material Culture: On the Evolution of “Pure Offerings” (qinggong) from the Southern Song to the Qing

 

11:00-12:30

Panel: New Ways to Exploit the Works of Nature: Popularizing Elite Material Culture (HCC, Room 107, Plaza level)

  • Quincy Ngan, Yale University

The Human and Nonhuman Agencies in Popularizing Azurite’s Versatility and Transmediality in Ming China

  • Lucille Chia, University of California, Riverside

Ceramics for Everybody: Folk Kilns in Fujian

Panel: Colonial Encounters between Taiwan and the World (HCC, 201, 2nd Level)

  • Yaru Yang, National Taiwan University

The Spanish Empire in Taiwan: Missionaries, Their Writings, and Contemporary Taiwanese Literature from a Colonial Perspective

Panel:  Book and Belief: Textual Culture and Religious Landscape in Early Modern East Asia (HCC, 110, Plaza Level)

  • Xu Ma, Lafayette College

Printing for Power: The Textualization of Popular Religions in the Ming Leishu

  • Noga Ganany, University of Cambridge

Geography and Hagiography in Late-Ming Commercial Publishing

  • Mengxiao Wang, University of Southern California

Practicing Buddhism in Dramatic Paratexts: An Early Qing Edition of the Play Xixiangji

2:00-3:30

Panel: New Spaces for the Dead: Rethinking Developments in Later Chinese Funerary Art (Sheraton, Constitution B, 2nd Floor)

  • Nancy Steinhardt, University of Pennsylvania

Architectural Mingqi: Yuan to Ming

  • Aurelia Campbell, Boston College

Inscribing Immortality: The Use of Buddhist Writing in Ming Tombs

  • Zhuolun Xie, Princeton University

Was Hell so Bad? Perspectives from a Rare Yuan-Ming Album

Panel: Crafting Memories: The Social and Political Meaning of Personal Histories in Pre-Modern East Asia (Hynes Convention Center, Meeting Room 210)

  • Shiau-Yun Chen, Ball State University

Narrating Violence: Gendered Remembrances in Ming China (1368-1644)

Panel: Intersectionality and Plurality: Otherness in Chinese Visual and Material Culture (Hynes Convention Center, Meeting Room 209)

  • Yutong Li, Princeton University

The Gendered Frontier: (Re)Presenting Border-Crossing Women in Seventeenth-Century China

Panel:  Engaging with the Other: Catholic Missions and Epistemic Encounters in Early Modern Asian Cities (Boston Sheraton Hotel, Arnold Arboretum -5th floor)

  • Wenlu Wang, University of Tokyo

Locality, Spectra, and the Scope of Exchange: On the Manila Dominicans’ Encounters with Chinese Knowledge on the Periphery

4:00-5:30

Panel: Framing the Change of an Era: Eurasian Perspectives on the Rise and Fall of the Chinggisids (13th-14th Centuries) (Sheraton Hotel, Back Bay A, 2nd Floor)

  • Lex Jing Lu, Clark University

Yao Guangxiao and Fang Xiaoru: An Ideological Proxy War between Buddhism and Neo-Confucianism in the Early Ming Dynasty

Panel: Environmental History (Boston Sheraton Hotel. Berkeley – 3rd floor)

  • Ting-chih Wu, University of Pennsylvania

Crop Cultivation, Animal-Rearing and the Making of the Chinese Empire’s Borders: Ningxia at the Edge of the Desert, 1400-1600

Panel: Changing Visual and Material Cultures of Early Modern-Modern China and India (Sheraton, Dalton, 3rd Floor)

  • Xiaolin Duan, North Carolina State University

Visualizing Famous Places: A Tourist Book in Seventeenth-Century China

 

 

Friday, March 17, 7:30-9:30

 

Society for Ming Studies (Boston Sheraton Hotel, Back Bay A, 2nd Floor)

Presentations

  • Wandi Wang, UC Santa Barbara

Taste and Gastropoetics in Traditional China (11th–17th Century)

  • Joey Low, Brandeis

State and Society in Early Modern China-Vietnam Borderland

  • Joo-hyeon Oh, Harvard,

Seeing the World Through Things: Explaining the Natural World in 16-18th Century China

  • Sean Cronan, UC Berkeley,

Diplomacy and Political Thought in the Making of an Eastern Eurasian Interstate Order, 1200–1500

  • Yifan Zhang, Columbia,

Embodying the ‘Airs’ of Suzhou: Local Knowledge, Hybrid Soundscape, and Feng Menglong (1574-1646)’s Popular Song Collection

  • Jiajun Zou, Emory,

Sino-Foreign Difference and Ming Examination System

  • Yuan Ye, Columbia,

Vernacular Chinese Fiction and Ming-Qing Transition in East Asia

  • Jasmin Wai Tan Law, KU Leuven

Writing Ming-Qing Transition from a Local-Global Perspective

  • Kangni Huang, Harvard,

Toward a Poetics of Writing: Representing Literary Creation in Late Imperial Chinese Literature

 

 

SATURDAY, MARCH 18

8:30-10:00

Panel: Technologies of Locating, Part I: Mediating the Self in Fictional Cartography from China and Japan (Hynes Convention Center, Meeting Room 201)

  • Paize Keulemans, Princeton University

Mapping the Real without Realism: The Ludic and Literary Aesthetics of the Game of Go in Song Poetry and Ming Fiction

  • William C. Hedberg, Arizona State University

Civilization Remapped: Chikamatsu Monzaemon’s Latter Battles of Coxinga and the Edo-Period Discovery of Manchuria

Panel: Sensing the Body: On Touch from Late Imperial to Contemporary China (Hynes Convention Center, Meeting Room 202)

  • Peng Liu, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

Invisible Touch and Family Politics in Jin Ping Mei

2:00-3:30

Panel: Chang’an in the Longue Durée (Sheraton, Constitution A, 2nd Floor)

  • Fei Huang, University of Tubingen

Transformations within Continuity: The Post-Tang Life of the Huaqing Hot Springs (1000-1900)

Panel: Aging and the Care of the Elderly from Song to Qing: Perceptions, Experiences, and Self-Representations (Boston Sheraton Hotel, Fairfax A, 3rd Floor)

  • Lu Weijing, University of California San Diego

Aging, Memory, and Self-Representation: The Case of You Tong (1618-1704)

Panel: Elephants and Ginseng: Environments, Commodities, and Power in Early Modern East and Southeast Asia (Sheraton Hotel, Berkeley, 3rd Floor)

  • Chushan Chiang, Taiwan National Central University

Medicine, Commerce, and Cultural Encounters: The Medical Exchanges between China and Korea in the Ming and Qing Dynasties with the Circulation of Ginseng

4:00-5:30

Panel: New Perspectives on Urban Identities in Late Imperial and Republican China (Boston Sheraton Hotel, Back Bay A, 2nd Floor)

  • Minoru Takano, University of British Columbia

Regionality at and Localness of the Center: Commemoration of Li Dongyang (1447–1516) in Late Imperial Beijing

Panel: Multivalence of the Body in Premodern Asian Societies: Cross-Cultural Perspectives (Boston Sheraton Hotel, Gardner B, 3rd floor)

  • Sophia Ying Wang, Bard College at Simon’s Rock

The Mute Body: Sickness and Family Crisis in Late Imperial Chinese Fictional Medical Narratives

Panel:  Craft and Innovation in the Chinese Material and Dramatic Arts (Hynes Convention Center, Meeting Room 200)

  • Regina Llamas, IE University

To Kill a Dog and the Craft of Comedy

5:45-7:15

Panel: Local Daoism and Local Cults, from Tang to Qing (Sheraton Hotel, Republic B, 2nd Floor)

  • Jingyu Liu, Wheaton College

Enroll in the Blue Sheet and Delist from the Black Book (qingpiao jizi, heiji xiaoming 青篇紀字,黑籍消名): The Yellow Register Ritual of Preparatory Cultivation in Late Imperial Jiangnan 江南

  • Norifumi Sakai, Keio University

How Did Daoist Priests Provide Ritual Services to the Local Community?

  • James Robson, Harvard University

Gilded Gods: Images and Manuscripts Associated with Guild Cults in the Hunan Region

 

 

SUNDAY, MARCH 19

9:00-10:30

Panel: Ritual Sincerities in Chinese Literature: From Early China to the Twentieth Century (Boston Sheraton, Boston Common, 5th Floor)

  • Elizabeth Smithrosser, Leiden Institute of Area Studies

Going Deaf in the Ming: Sincerity Meets Humor in a Retiree’s Account of Hearing Loss

Panel: Understanding Horses in Early Modern China and Inner Asia (Sheraton, Hampton, 3rd Floor)

  • Gyatso Marnyi, Yale University

Horse Power: An Economic Explanation of the Geluk Monastic Growth on the Tibetan, Chinese, Mongolian, and Manchu Frontier, 1570–1770

  • Lan Wu, Mount Holyoke College

The Dilemma of Raising Strong Horses in the Ming

Panel: Who Shaped China’s Technoscapes? A Longue Durée Perspective (1600-1980)  (Sheraton, Gardner A, 3rd Floor)

  • You Wang, University of Chicago

Working with Farming Communities: Scholarly Explorations of Dike-Building Techniques in the Lower Yangzi Delta, 1600-1850

  • Yiyun Peng, Cornell University

Fine-Shred Smoke: How Tobacco Changed the Agricultural and Technological Landscape in Upland Southeast China, 1600-1900

10:45-12:15

Panel: Towards an Intersectional Discourse: Vernacular Theatricality in Ming Qing Fiction and Drama (Sheraton, Gardner A, 3rd floor)

  • Jing Zhang, New College of Florida

“I Thought It Was My Old Friend Coming”: Adaptation, Repetition, and Theatrical Excess in Tang Xianzu’s The Purple Flute

  • Maria Franca Sibau, Emory University

“Please Allow Me to be so Bold As to Tell You a Story”: Framing and Reframing the Filial Beggar in Fiction and Drama

AAS Panels on Ming Topics

Ihor Pidhainy, editor of Ming Studies, has created a helpful list of Ming-related panels and papers at the 2019 AAS annual meeting in Denver.

AAS 2019 Annual Meeting – Ming Papers

Thursday March 21, 2019

7:30PM-9:15PM

Panel 23

Book Matters: The Circulation of Literature and Organization of Knowledge in Pre-Modern China

Terrace, Tower Building

  • Yunshuang Zhang, Wayne State University, “A Diversity of Voices: The Collected Commentaries on Su Shi’s Poetry”
  • Naixi Feng, University of Chicago, “Inhabiting the Northern Landscape: Beijing and the Collected Travelogues in the Late Ming”
  • Yanmei Cai, University of Tokyo, “‘Mountain Men’ and Epistolary Collections in the Late Ming: A Case Study on Wang Zhideng’s Collected Letters”
  • Joseph Dennis, University of Wisconsin-Madison, “Donating Books to School Libraries in Ming and Qing China”

Panel 30

In Search of Artisans in China: Reading Words and Objects

Beverly, Tower Building

  • Susan Naquin, Princeton University, “Names on Things: Working-Class Artisans in Late Imperial North China”

Panel 34

Tear and Repair: How Rebellions Strengthened the Ming-Qing State

Columbine, Tower Building, Terrace Level

  • Haiwei Liu, University of Southern California, “Heterodoxy or Orthodoxy: Confucian Elements in a Messianic Rebellion”
  • George Israel, Middle Georgia State University, “How and Why Wang Yangming Strengthened the State”
  • Yiming Ha, University of California, Los Angeles, “Trade, War, and the Court: The Hidden Significance of the 1521 Gansu Mutiny”

Discussant: Sarah Schneewind, University of California, San Diego

FRIDAY MARCH 22, 2019

9:00 AM – 10:45      

Panel 42

The Swirling Winds: Cultural Exchange in East Asia, 8th-16th Centuries

Grand Ballroom 1, Tower Building

  • Huiping Pang, Art Institute of Chicago, “The Voyaging Dragon: How Ming-Era Diplomacy Inspired the Painting Style of Muromachi Japan (14th-16th c.)”

Panel 61

Confronting Displacement: Responses to War, Violence, and Trauma in Premodern China PTower Court C, Tower Building

  • Najung Kim, Stanford University, “Empty Pavilions: Two Landscapes by Ni Zan (1301-1374) during China’s Yuan-Ming Dynastic Transitional Era”
  • Ka-Yi Ho, Chinese University of Hong Kong, “Invitation to Reclusion: Xiang Shengmo (1597-1658) and His Art beyond the Ming-Qing Transition”

 

Panel 67

The Impact of Visual and Material Cultural Networks in the Mongol Empire and Beyond

Tower Court B, Tower Building

  • Shih-Shan Huang, Rice University, “Elite Uighurs as Cultural Middlemen of Buddhist Books and Woodcuts in the Mongol Empire”
  • Yong Cho, Yale University, “Carving a Multicultural Empire on Stones: Juyongguan from a Trans-Regional Perspective”
  • Yusen Yu, University of Heidelberg, “Paper on the Move in Mongol and Post-Mongol Eurasia”

11:15 am – 1:00 pm

Panel 106

The Sixth Relationship: Representations of Mentor-Disciple Relationships in Late Imperial China PSpruce, Tower Building

  • Ying Zhang, Ohio State University, “Spirituality of the Shi-Sheng Relationship in the Ming Literati World”
  • Rivi Handler-Spitz, Macalester College, “Nobody’s Disciple, Nobody’s Master: Li Zhi as Student and Teacher”
  • Yinghui Wu, University of California, Los Angeles, “When the Mentor’s Daughter Becomes the Protégé’s Wife: A Woman’s Voice in Master-Disciple Relationships
  • Maram Epstein, University of Oregon, “The Sixth Relationship and Constructing a Matriarchal Community in Mengying yuan”

Panel 107

The Social World of Late Ming Military Knowledge

Savoy, Tower Building

  • Barend Noordam, Freie Universitat Berlin, “Singleton No More? The Socio-Cultural Embeddedness of Qi Jiguang’s Military Manuals”
  • Sarah Basham, University of British Columbia, “Navigating Deep Waters: Military Encyclopedism and the Donglin Faction”
  • Yang Xie, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, “The Gap of Knowledge: Xu Rijiu and the Formation of Military Knowledge for the State”

1:30 pm -3:15 pm  

Panel 114

Smuggling, Violence, and State in East Asian Maritime World

PPlaza Court 7, Plaza Building

  • Jing Liu, Syracuse University, “Evaders, Castaways, and Pirates: Chinese-Korean Maritime Security in the Sixteenth Century”
  • Sunkyu Lee, University of California, Los Angeles, “Jiangnan’s View of Pirate Traders in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century China”

Panel 134

Accounting and Governmentality in Late Imperial China

Plaza Court 2, Plaza Building

  • Dagmar Schäfer, Max Planck Institute, for the History of Science, “The Value of Work: Time and Modal Choices in Ming”
  • Noa Grass, Tel Aviv University, “Corvée Labour Counting Horses in Early Ming China”
  • Bin Shen, Peking University, “The Heritage of the Ming Dynasty: The Formation of The Complete Book of Land Tax and Services in the Shunzhi Reign (1644-1662)”

Panel 135

Eurasia and the Mid-14th-Century Crisis: The Collapse of the Mongol Empire

Plaza Court 3, Plaza Building

  • Vered Shurany, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, “The Collapse of the Yuan Dynasty: Military Commanders between the Qa’an’s Army and the Local Militias”
  • Ishayahu Landa, Hebrew University of Jerusalem International, “Between Loyalty, Chinggisid Principle and Self-Aggrandisement: Regional Jochid Elites in “The Times of Troubles” (1359-1390)”
  • Màrton G. Vèr, Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, “Overland Communication and the Mongol Empire’s Mid-14th-Century Crisis”

Panel 136

Gender, Locality, and Cultural Politics: An Expanded “Localist Turn” from Ming to Republican China

Plaza Court 6, Plaza Building

  • Yongtao Du, University of Oklahoma, “The State and the Hometown: Statesmen from Anyang in Late Imperial and Republican China”

 

3:45 pm -5:30 pm

Panel 156

Writing on the Margin: Women and Cultural Dynamics in Premodern East Asia

Director’s Row J, Plaza Building

  • Jiani Chen, SOAS University of London, “Thrilling and Threatening: The Images of Knight-Errant Courtesans in the Ming Dynasty

Panel 172

Authors, Editors, Encyclopedists and the Reconstruction of Knowledge in Chinese and Inner Asian History (600-1600)

PPlaza Court 5, Plaza Building

  • Zuoting Wen, Arizona State University, “Encountering Transoxiana: Yelü Chucai’s Poems from Thirteenth-Century Samarkand and Bukhara”
  • Noga Ganany, Boston University, “Divine Landscapes: Geography, Print Culture, and Religious Practice in Two Late-Ming Encyclopedias”

Panel 179

Rock Formations: Stone as Material, Medium, and Metaphor in China

Plaza Court 3, Plaza Building

  • Thomas Kelly, University of Michigan, “He Zhen’s Corpse: Inventing the “Soft Stone Seal” in Late Ming China”
  • Phillip Bloom, Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens,“Medium and Materiality in Wu Bin’s Ten Views of a Lingbi Stone”

7:30 PM – 9:30 PM

 ******Society for Ming Studies Event*****

Governor’s Square 11

“Thanks to a grant from the James P. Geiss and Margaret Y. Hsu Foundation, in addition to our usual business, we will also hear pechakucha-style (read: six minutes per person) research presentations from nine Ming scholars. The presenters will highlight their primary argument, key sources used, and explore the ways in which their research connects to the Ming. It should be an interesting evening! Afterwards, we will adjourn for drinks and continued conversation”

Brigid Vance, President, Society for Ming Studies.

  • Monica Klasing Chen, Leiden University, “Profitable Memory: Publishing Memory Aids for Calligraphy and Painting during the Ming Dynasty.”
  • Shiau-Yun Chen, Cornell University, “Mothers of Loving-Kindness: Authorizing and Maximizing Mothers’ Legitimate Violence in the Disciplining of Children in Ming Families.”
  • Ilsoo David Cho, Harvard University’s Korea Institute, “The Ming-Choson Relations after 1592.”
  • Christopher Eirkson, Franklin and Marshall College, “The Yuan, Ming, and Cross-Eurasian Connections.”
  • Xiaobai Hu, University of Pennsylvania, “Unruly Mountain: Transformative Encounters in the Chinese-Tibetan Borderland, 1371-1701.”
  • Sunkyu Lee, University of California, Los Angeles, “Jiangnan’s View of Pirate Traders in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century China.”
  • Haiwei Liu, The University of Southern California, “Confucian Elements in a Messianic Rebellion: Rethinking the Origins of the Dynastic Name ‘Ming.’”
  • Jing Liu, Syracuse University, “Border Controls and Maritime Interactions between China and Korea, 1500-1637.”
  • Eloise Wright, University of California, Berkeley, “Writing about the Locality in Dali, Yunnan, 1253-1675.”

SATURDAY, MARCH 23, 2019

9:00 Am – 10:45 am  

Panel 183

China beyond China: Inter-Circulation of Chinese and Southeast Asian Ceramics, 14th-18th Cs

Sponsored by Society for Ming Studies

Director’s Row I, Plaza Building

Chaired by Lucille Chia, University of California, Riverside

  • Rie Ong, New York University, “When Temasek Met China: Trade and Consumer Culture in Singapore, 14th-16th Centuries”
  • Pariwat Thammapreechakorn, Freer|Sackler Galleries, Smithsonian Institution, “Thai Trade Ware in the 14th-18th Centuries: Inspiration from and Competition with Chinese Ceramics”
  • Xiaoyi Yang, Bard Graduate Center, ”A Color and Brush Duet: Reading Zhangzhou Polychrome Dishes with the “Split Pagoda” Motif”
  • Lucille Chia, University of California, Riverside, “The Rise and Decline of Export Ceramics Production Centers in South China, Sixteenth-Eighteenth Centuries”

Discussant: Katharine Burnett, University of California, Davis

Panel 208

Bodies in Transition: Corporeal Perspectives on Premodern and Modern China

PPlaza Court 8, Plaza Building

  • Guojun Wang, Vanderbilt University, “Washing Away Wrongs: Dead Bodies in Yuan-Ming Crime Dramas”

Panel 210

Cartography and Cultural Identity in Ming-Qing China

Director’s Row E, Plaza Building

  • Yonglin Jiang, Bryn Mawr College, “Mapping Zhongguo, Mapping Ming: Identity Building in Ming Cartography”
  • Kenneth Hammond, New Mexico State University, “Visual Representations of Urban Space in Ming Local Gazetteers”
  • Christopher Eirkson, Franklin & Marshall College, “Do Maps Make an Empire? Defining “Empire” on the Ming Frontiers”
  • Discussant: Edward Farmer, University of Minnesota

Panel 212

Literature, Gender, and Politics: The Construction of Regional Culture in Late Imperial China Director’s Row H, Tower Building

  • Kin-yip Hui, City University of Hong Kong, “Hu Yinglin’s (1551-1602) Construction of the Literary and Scholarly Traditions in Jinhua County during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644)”

Panel 218

Where the Truth Lies: The Art of Qiu Ying 218 (ca. 1495-1552)

Governor’s Square 14, Plaza Building

  • Einor K. Cervone, American Museum of Natural History, “The Chameleon Master Adds Snake Legs: The Art and Reception of Qiu Ying”
  • Wan Kong, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, “A Wu School Master Unlike Any Other: Examining Song Influences in Qiu Ying’s Paintings”
  • Yeewan Koon, University of Hong Kong, “Qiu Ying, Inter-Pictoriality, and Pictorial Wit in Ming China”
  • Wen-mei Hsu, National Palace Museum, Taipei, “A Study of Qiu Ying’s Spring Dawn in the Han Palace and Its Relationship to Palace Poetry”
  • Discussant: Stephen Little, Los Angeles County Museum of Art

11:15 AM – 1:00 PM

Panel 228

The Impact of Trade on Daily Life in East Asia, 960-1600 Sponsored by The Society for Song, Yuan, and Conquest Dynasty Studies

Director’s Row H, Plaza Building

  • Yiwen Li, City University of Hong Kong, “Wind from Foreign Lands: Japanese Folding Fans in China, 1000-1410”
  • Peter D. Shapinsky, University of Illinois, Springfield, “Dressing like a Pirate: Clothing as Symbolic Marker in the East Asian Maritime World c. 1350-1600”

3:00 PM – 4:45 PM    

Panek 256

Blood and Being across Chinese and Indian Medicines

Plaza Court 8, Plaza Building

  • Yi-Li Wu, University of Michigan, “Outside Blood, Inside Blood: Bleeding, Bloodletting, and the Body in Ming-Qing Trauma Medicine”
  • Natalie Köhle, Australian National University, “On the Relationship between Blood and Phlegm in Chinese Medicine”

Panel 257

Circulating “Current Affairs” in and about 257 Seventeenth-Century China: Cross-Border Perspectives

Grand Ballroom 2, Tower Building

  • Yuval Givon, Tel Aviv University, “From Hearsay to Bestsellers: The Making of Jesuit Ming-Qing Transition Reports”
  • Ilsoo D. Cho, Harvard University, “Staying Out of the Ming-Qing Transition: Korean Perspectives of the Continental Conflict, 1592-1644”
  • Kenneth M. Swope, University of Southern Mississippi, “Horror Stories and Exaggerated Possibilities: Magalhaens & Buglio at the Court of Zhang Xianzhong”
  • Ye Yuan, Columbia University, “Recording Our Time: A Late-Ming Early-Qing Publishing House and its Historical Concern”
  • Discussant: Evelyn S. Rawski, University of Pittsburgh

Panel 262

Moves On and Off the Board: (Early) Modern Cultures of Play in East Asia and Beyond PWindows, Tower Building

  • Paize Keulemans, Princeton University, “The Acoustic Fog of War: Signal and Noise in “The Three Kingdoms” as Ming-Dynasty Novel, Hong Kong Film, and Contemporary Video Game”
  • Tina Lu, Yale University, “Betwixt Text and Tricks: The Literary Cultures of Madiao in the Late Ming”

Panel 284

Crossing Ethnic, Religious, and Geographical Boundaries during the Mongol and Manchu Rule of China

Tower Court A, Tower Building

  • Wonhee Cho, Academy of Korean Studies, “Defining Religion in Yuan China: The Case of Muslims, Jews, Confucians, and the White Cloud Sect”
  • Minsu Park, Ewha Womans University, “ ‘Manchu Marches West’: The Qing Occupation of Shanhai Pass and Beijing in 1644”

 

4:00-5:30 PM

Database building (4:30 PM)

  • Peter K. Bol, Harvard University, “China Biographical Database”

5:15 PM – 7:00 PM

Panel 299

SOCIAL SCIENCES Thriving between a Rock and a Hard Place: Identity and Agency in Liminal Spaces in Imperial China

Plaza Court 8, Plaza Building

  • Xiaobai Hu, University of Pennsylvania, “The Art of Living in the Borderland: Religious Ritual, Resource War and Literati Network in 17th-Century Southwest China”

Panel 313

Conceptualizing the “Other” in Premodern China: Center-Periphery Dynamics Reconfigured

Governor’s Square 12, Plaza Building

  • Xiuyuan Mi, University of Pennsylvania, “Reviving a Genre: Rhetorical Innovation and Cultural Authority in Late Yuan China”

Panel 314

Divine Communication: Revelation, Mediumism, and Spirit-Writing in Imperial China

Director’s Row J, Plaza Building

  • Daniel J. Burton-Rose, Northern Arizona University, “Spirit Altar Prophecy in the Manchu-Han Reconciliation of the 1670s: Peng Dingqiu’s Circle and the Boxue hongci Special Examination”

Panel 315

Limited Engagements: Projections of Mongol Power on and beyond China’s Southern Frontier Director’s Row H, Plaza Building

  • James A. Anderson, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, “The Outer Limits of Steppe Power: Mongol Military Excursions in Maritime Southeast Asia”
  • Michael Brose, Indiana University Bloomington, “Managing Yunnan for the Mongols”
  • Francesca Fiaschetti, University of Vienna, “The Troubled Frontier: Sino-Burmese Interactions in the 14th Century”

SUNDAY MARCH 24, 2019

9:00 AM – 10:45 AM  

Panel 326

Spaces of Imagination: Place, Performance, and Production in East Asia

Director’s Row J, Plaza Building

  • Allison Bernard, Columbia University, “From Staging the Drama to Staging the Dramatist: Tang Xianzu and the Linchuan School Legacy in and After The Peach Blossom Fan”

Panel 348

History as Narrative: Perspective to Approach Avengers, Khitans, and Pirates (400 BC-1620) PPlaza Court 7, Plaza Building

  • Yuanfei Wang, University of Georgia, “Narratives of Pirates in Late Ming Unofficial Histories and Vernacular Fiction (1558-1644)”

Panel 353

Spatial Imagination in Late Imperial and Modern Chinese Literary Culture

PGovernor’s Square 11, Plaza Building

  • Jing Zhang, New College of Florida, “A Prop, a Dream, and a Miniature Stage: The Staged Life of a Porcelain Pillow in Tang Xianzu’s Handan Dream”

 

Panel 354

State Capacity and the Management of Mobility in Early Modern China

Director’s Row E, Plaza Building

  • Meng Zhang, Loyola Marymount University, “Obtaining Timber for the Court: Tribute, Market, and Frontier”
  • Chelsea Wang, Claremont McKenna College, “Ming vs. Qing: Which State Communicated Faster, and Why?”

 11:15 AM – 1:00 PM

Panel 364

Toward a Transregional History of East Asian Literature: New Perspectives on Canon, Reception, and Authorship

Terrace, Tower Building

  • Barbara Wall, University of Copenhagen, “Why Dynamic Classics Do Not Fit into the Frame of National Literatures: A Case Study on Journey to the West”

Panel 381

Bears and Wives, Monkeys and Lovers: Animal Narratives in Late Imperial Chinese Literature PGovernor’s Square 12, Plaza Building

  • Hsien Wu, City College of New York, “The Taming of the Tigress: The Making of Lady White Bone”
  • Yun Bai, Yale University, “Babies and Dogs: Contesting Humanity in Late Imperial Chinese Biji Stories”
  • Paola Zamperini, Northwestern University, “Monkeying Around: Animals and Lovers in Late Imperial Chinese Fiction”

More News

a place of mind, The University of British Columbia

Society for Ming Studies
1871 West Mall,
Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z2, Canada

Emergency Procedures | Accessibility | Contact UBC  | © Copyright The University of British Columbia