Speaker: Zhou Boqun 周博群
Time: 4 pm CET 7, 14 October
One could devise a history of China through the recoveries of ancient manuscripts. A most famous is the discovery of ancient texts in the walls of what was believed to have been the house of Confucius described in the Records of the Historians 史記, but several others occurred through time: during the Song 宋 dynasty several bronzes bearing inscriptions were discovered, giving rise to important catalogues such as the Kaogutu 考古圖, whose terminology is still in use today.
In these lectures, PhD Zhou Boqun 周博群 introduces the most recent recoveries of unearthed documents (chutu wenxian 出土文獻), a collective name to refer to anything that comes from underground. In particular, he will focus on the bamboo and silk manuscripts published in the last 50 years.
Zhou Boqun is a postdoctoral fellow in the Tsinghua-Michigan Society of Fellow. He earned his doctorate at the University of Chicago, in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations. His research interests range across ancient Chinese Intellectual History, History of Science and Technology, and Excavated Bamboo Manuscripts. In particular, he researches how classical thinkers utilize technological metaphors in their ethical and political theories. He is currently working on his book The Mechanical Mind: Metaphor, Body, and Technology in Early China, as well as an annotated English translation of six manuscripts from the Tsinghua University Manuscript Corpus.