Photo by Gisella Klein
This workshop offers unique opportunities for scholars from the China, Japan, and Korea fields to exchange, compare, and explore different modes of research surrounding “memory and text.” Organized into a three-day program with ten seminars, two roundtables and two keynote speeches, it promises to bring intense and exciting discussion of the interaction between memory and text, may it concern the individual or the group, the spatial or the temporal, or “product” or “process.” Insights from this workshop will provide a foundation from which to draw coherent concepts, theories, and methods for the research of memory and text in premodern East Asian studies. The first of its kind, it is posed to inspire broad and bold rethinking of the study of the past as a subfield across Chinese, Japanese, and Korean studies.
The two roundtables are designed for general discussion about the current state and future directions of memory and textual studies in the three fields; the ten seminars, by contrast, will each focus on a specific topic, including autobiographical memory, generational memory, trauma and memory, public memory and ancestral memory, ritual and memory, orality and memorization, historical memory, social memory, cultural memory through time, and cultural memory through space. Each seminar will be presided over by a lead discussant, who will assign a primary text and a secondary reading for her/his seminar ahead of time; a few of the seminars will be followed by a discussion from a responder, who will respond to the seminar and/or questions from the floor based on her/his research.
The workshop is opened—within the limit of space—to anyone who is interested. Interested parties should contact Meow Hui Goh (goh.25@osu.edu), the organizer, about attending the workshop and read the assigned materials available on this website before the workshop.