Third Annual Trans-Asia Graduate Student Conference
at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
March 13-15, 2015
EXTENDED SUBMISSION DEADLINE: FEBRUARY 15, 2015
The TAGS-C Organizing Committee is pleased to announce the third annual Trans-Asia Graduate Student Conference, encompassing Asia-related research across a wide range of fields. The aim of this conference is to facilitate greater communication among disciplines, approaching Asia from multiple viewpoints in literature, linguistics, art history, geography, anthropology, political science, religious studies, sociology, history, folklore, gender and women’s studies, performance studies, visual culture studies, and other related fields. Participants will have a valuable opportunity to share work and receive feedback from peers and professors in the UW system, as well as to gain insight into recent developments in Asia-related research across various disciplines. This year’s conference examines topics that address the state of Asian humanities and potential futures in or beyond Asian area studies. Our own University is at a crossroads: the economic and cultural climate demands that area studies programs evolve, yet what path we should take remains undecided and highly debated. We must leave behind the corpse of disciplinary knowledge structures, and ask what knowledge looks like in the afterlives of Asian area studies. This year, we are pleased to announce that in addition to individual paper submissions and panel submissions, we have reserved the evening of the 13th to showcase audio-visual projects and performances.
Read MoreFunded by the Tang Junyi Lecture Fund and administered by the Department of Asian Languages & Cultures (ALC) and the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies (LRCCS) at the University of Michigan, the Tang Junyi Postdoctoral Fellowship is open to scholars conducting well-designed research and writing projects on Chinese philosophy. One (1) fellow will be selected.
Eligibility:
- Research topics can cover any aspect of Chinese philosophy and philosophical thought.
- Candidates must be able to provide evidence of successful completion of their PhD degree by June of the year of appointment and may not be more than seven (7) years beyond receipt of the PhD.
- Applicants who do not have native command of English must include the date and score of the most recent TOEFL examination or other evidence of proficiency in English (such as a degree from a US university or a letter from an academic advisor).
“Making the Dead Modern”
by Erik Mueggler
Winter 2015
This series of four public lectures describes a book project in progress, titled Songs for Dead Parents. The lectures examine the history of death ritual in a small minority community in mountainous Southwest China, where people are heir to an extraordinary range of resources for working on the dead: techniques to create material bodies for dead beings, exchanges to give substance to relations among the living and with the dead, and abundant poetic language to communicate with the dead. Work on the dead takes the form of making them material and immaterial. Corpses replace bodies; effigies replace corpses; tombstones replace texts; texts replace tombstones. Social personhood, involving relations among living and dead, is mutual entanglement through shared substance; dead persons are subjected to a long labor of disentanglement with the final goal of severing them from the shared world of matter and memory. It is through work on the dead that people envision the cosmological underpinnings of the social world and assess the social relations at the foundations of community. In this context, the long history of official interventions meant to reform death ritual has been deeply consequential, transforming both social relations and the positions of living and dead in relation to the state, as the central historical actor.
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