The 13th Annual Meeting of the Chinese Medieval Studies Workshop was held at Rutgers University on May 4, 2019. This workshop, started by Professor Wendy Swartz and funded by the Chiang Ching-kuo (CCK) Foundation, is a major academic forum for the exchange of ideas and the advancement of scholarship. Distinguished scholars from across the United States working on medieval Chinese literature, history, religion, and visual culture, have been meeting annually in this forum since 2003 to discuss their current research and ways to expand the field. Ground-breaking research and methodology first presented at these workshops have found their way into notable and award-winning books and journal articles.

​This workshop has also served as a lively forum that encourages scholars to collaborate and exchange ideas. Two publications have resulted from this Workshop. The first of its kind, Early Medieval China: A Sourcebook (Columbia University Press, 2014) presents a broadly-based selection of important texts of the period in the disciplines of literature, historiography, art history, and religion. It offers new ways of conceptualizing the early medieval period by focusing less on modern disciplinary boundaries and more on the issues and discursive spheres that animated the era. The second collaborative book, Memory in Medieval China: Text, Ritual, and Community, was published by Brill Press in 2018. This volume, edited by Wendy Swartz and Robert Campany, is the first English language book that treats the subject of memory from various perspectives: from the role of literary genre in memory construction to commemorative writings, cultural memory, nostalgia, and mnemonic practices.

This Workshop has also contributed greatly to expanding the field by providing a venue for younger, up-and-coming scholars to participate in major scholarly discussions. Over the years, graduate students from Columbia, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, The University of Pennsylvania, and Rutgers have attended the meetings. This workshop hopes to build on the momentum it has gathered over the past sixteen years and continue to be a major forum for scholarly exchange. 

​On April 29, 2019, Professor Chen Pingyuan, the Boya Lecturing Professor in the Department of Chinese Literature at Peking University, delivered a lecture at Harvard University’s Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations on the topic of “The Front, Back and Side of the New Culture Movement: The Gentlemen of Peking University.” The lecture was attending by nearly 30 people, including David Wang (Harvard U.) and Xia Xiaohong (Peking U.), as well as other visiting scholars and graduate students. Taking four modern men of China as his examples—Lin Shu, Gu Hongming, Liu Shipei, and Zhang Jingsheng—Chen returns to the discursive scene of the New Culture Movement and turns it inside out, revealing the breadth of academic discourses concealed by the complexities of history. The various positions of the debates were certainly not diametrically opposed, and there often existed various shades of arguments within the same camp. The question of how to most appropriately treat and discuss the abundance and complexity of the May Fourth and New Culture movements, as well as bring to light the obscured details of those moments, are precisely the questions Professor Chen attempts to answer. Following the talk, there was a lively discussion among faculty and students regarding how to situate their own research regarding the May Fourth movement with respect to Professor Chen’s remarks, as well as what kinds of methods are best to achieve these results.