Category: UCLA Events

The symposium will focus on Korea and Eurasia from the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries and highlight thematic approaches that resonate with other places and periods. The symposium features scholars interested in integrating early modern Korea into regional and global narratives. Their projects weave together Mongolian, Ming, Koryŏ, and Chosŏn histories or provide interdisciplinary perspectives on comparative issues related to statecraft, diplomacy, and culture.

The morning session is a roundtable featuring the authors of three new books Korea’s interactions with the Eurasian continent. The afternoon sessions feature presentations on current research by scholars based in the Los Angeles area.

This event is an effort to build a field and a community around histories of early modern Korea that are engaging and exciting to more than fellow specialists. It will be an opportunity to exchange ideas, explore new perspectives, and foster collaborative research efforts. We invite all interested scholars and researchers to participate in this event and contribute to the growth of the field of early modern Korean history.

On-line Public Lectures UCLA Events

Reading Feminine Subjectivities: Poetic Responses by Women to Paintings of Women in Ming and Qing China

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Dr. Grace S. Fong

Professor, Department of East Asian Studies, McGill University

Friday, May 21st, 2021

2:00 PM-3:30 PM PST

Significant work by art historians of China have engaged with issues of gender and women, particularly the representation of women in the genres of “paintings of cultivated ladies” (仕女畫) and “paintings of beauties” (美人畫), from the Tang and Song to the Ming and Qing. Produced at court in early times, the intended audience was male, and the figures represented male conceptions of desired feminine subjectivities. During the Ming and Qing, these genres of painting circulated in a broader social context than in the Tang and Song. This paper explores changes to the production and reception of these painting genres in relation to the rise of women’s literary and artistic culture from the late Ming on. By drawing on the repertory of poetry written by women on viewing paintings and as inscriptions on paintings, I will explore questions about the new female audience and their responses to paintings of beauties and ladies. What were the contexts of viewing? How did women position themselves to the feminine subjectivities implied in paintings meant to appeal to male viewers? Were such paintings produced for a female audience? For women who painted, what visual self-representations did they create and how did they signify their gendered subjectivity?

About the Speaker

Grace Fong is Professor of Chinese Literature and Chair of the Department of East Asian Studies, McGill University. Author of Herself an Author: Gender, Agency, and Writing in Late Imperial China, she has published widely on classical Chinese poetry and poetics, autobiographical writing, and women writers of late imperial China.

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UCLA Events

A Book Talk with Laura Moretti

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April 16, 11:00 AM (PST)

Hosted by the Yanai Initiative and the Asian Languages and Cultures Early Modern Asian Studies Speaker Series

Laura Moretti, author of Pleasure in Profit: Popular Prose in Seventeenth-Century Japan (2021). She is senior lecturer in premodern Japanese studies at the University of Cambridge and a fellow at Emmanuel College. She is also the author of Recasting the Past: An Early Modern “Tales of Ise” for Children (2016).