Happy New Year! The Advanced Institute for Global Chinese Studies (AIGCS) and the Department of Chinese at Lingnan University are proud to announce the establishment of the Lingnan Forum on Chinese Digital Humanities. For details, go to the following link:

https://uofi.app.box.com/s/1j2p8obwye90n7pxcvkg0s99cj0541ty

Mission

The forum aims to promote the application of digital tools and concepts in literary and historical research, addressing the limitations of traditional methodologies. By conducting quantitative analyses of significant topics in literary studies, intellectual history, and related disciplines, it seeks to generate qualitative insights grounded in humanistic data. Additionally, the forum identifies research questions that challenge dominant theoretical frameworks in Chinese humanities, broadening the scope of academic inquiry.

Core Activities

Academic Symposia: Two international symposia will be held in the year of 2025.

Lecture Series: Delivered in a hybrid format, combining online and in-person sessions.

Research Focus

The forum focuses on major issues in literary studies and intellectual history, employing computational techniques to analyze Chinese literary corpora, including the usage and relationships of key terms. It also addresses topics beyond textual analysis, such as authors’ biographies literary networks, creative contexts, cultural environments, and the dissemination of ideas and artworks.

Posted by: Junzhe Wang <aigcs@ln.edu.hk>

Dear List Members,

We are delighted to announce that Professor Liang Luo has been elected as the new president of the Association of Chinese and Comparative Literature (ACCL). We extend our heartfelt gratitude to both distinguished candidates, Professor Liang Luo and Professor Ping Zhu, for their participation in this election. Special thanks go to our former presidents, Professor Nicolai Volland and Professor Carlos Rojas, for volunteering to oversee the vote counting process.

Professor Luo will assume her role as the new ACCL president in December. We warmly congratulate Professor Luo and express our sincere appreciation to Professor Zhu. As the outgoing president and program officer, we will complete the transition process by the end of December. Professor Liang Luo will lead ACCL forward for the next two years.

Finally, we thank you all again for your support of the 2024 ACCL Biennial Conference “Behold the Human” in Hong Kong!

Best regards,

Mingwei Song <msong2@wellesley.edu> and Jannis Jizhou Chen Continue reading ACCL 2024 election result →

Dear List Members,

The 2024 ACCL Biennial Conference was successfully held at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology on June 24-25, with six keynote speeches, sixty-five panels, and nearly 400 participants from Asia, Europe, Australia, and the United States. I am very grateful to the support of the HKUST faculty, students, and staff, particularly Professor Jianmei Liu and her students. My gratitude also goes to all conference participants and the audiences. The conference program can be found here.

As the current president of the ACCL, my last job is to announce that the election for the next president is now open. We have two excellent candidates. They are:

Luo Liang (University of Kentucky)
Zhu Ping (UCSD)

Their statements can be found here.

If you would like to cast your vote, please click this link, fill in the relevant information and make your choice.

​I am thankful to two former presidents, who will supervise the election and count the votes. Please cast your vote before November 10. Thank you very much!

Yours sincerely,

Mingwei Song msong2@wellesley.edu

Source: Focus Taiwan (10/22/24)
Author, int’l writing program founder Hualing Nieh Engle dies at 99
By Yeh Kuan-yin, Wang Pao-er and Matthew Mazzetta

Novelist Hualing Nieh Engle. Photo courtesy of the National Museum of Taiwan Literature

Taipei, Oct. 22 (CNA) Hualing Nieh Engle (聶華苓), a Chinese-language novelist and co-founder of the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program, has died at the age of 99.

Nieh’s death on Oct. 20 was confirmed to CNA by the poet Lin Chi-yang (林淇瀁), known by the pen name Xiang Yang (向陽), who received the news in a text message from Nieh’s daughter Lan-Lan Wang (王曉藍).

Hualing Nieh was born in 1925 in Wuhan, China. She came to Taiwan with her family in 1949, and later began publishing books while holding teaching positions at National Taiwan University and Tunghai University.

In 1964, Nieh moved to the United States after accepting a position as a visiting writer at the University of Iowa’s Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Three years later, Nieh, along with her future husband, the poet Paul Engle, co-founded the university’s International Writing Program.

In the nearly 40 years since then, the program has offered writing residencies for over 1,600 writers from 160 countries, including Pai Hsien-yung (白先勇) and Taiwanese poets Xiang Yang, Wu Sheng (吳晟) and Cheng Chou-yu (鄭愁予). Continue reading Nieh Hualing Engle dies at 99 →

It is with great sadness that I must share the news that Stefan Landsberger has unexpectedly passed away. Our Chinese Studies community here at Leiden University is still shell-shocked by this tragic loss. Stefan had not only a huge influence on the study of contemporary Chinese propaganda and media, but he was also a close and trusted friend.

Our institute has now published an obituary I wrote, along with several anecdotes and recollections that students, colleagues, and friends were so kind to share. These are, of course, only a small slice of the compassionate and heart-warming comments we’ve received this past week. I nevertheless hope these vignettes and thoughts will offer a small impression of how much Stefan meant to us.

Florian Schneider <f.a.schneider@hum.leidenuniv.nl>

In Memoriam: Stefan Landsberger (1955-2024)

Published on 17 October 2024

My colleagues and I have been devastated to learn that our good colleague and friend Stefan Landsberger (born 1955) passed away unexpectedly, on 26 September 2024. Stefan had been a fixture of China Studies in the Netherlands, where he had been Associate Professor of contemporary Chinese History and Society at Leiden University, and Emeritus Olfert Dapper Professor of Contemporary Chinese Culture at the University of Amsterdam.

Text by Florian Schneider

Stefan Landsberger (1955-2024).

I first encountered Stefan in 1999, though not in person. His beautiful book Chinese Propaganda Posters: From Revolution to Modernization (The Pepin Press, 1995) was a constant feature at the street book stalls outside Hamburg Uni where I studied, and it became one of the first books about China that made it onto my student shelf. My teachers would also mention him frequently, as an example of what good hermeneutic research about contemporary China looked like. Much of my own fascination with propaganda and political communication was shaped by these early impressions of Stefan’s work.

My second encounter with Stefan was twenty years later, when I found myself sitting across from him during my job interview in Leiden. I must admit I was awestruck, not to mention a bit intimidated, to be asked sharp questions by this famous scholar of Chinese iconography. And it was only much later that I learned how instrumental Stefan had been in hiring me that day: fortunately for me, the idiosyncratic ways in which my background combined traditional philology and contemporary interests spoke to Stefan, who was a staunch defender of the humanities and area studies ethos. For Stefan, scholarship deserved to be societally relevant, but it also needed to keep sight of the complex, deep cultural and linguistic contexts in which people do things with media and communication, in diverse places around the world. Continue reading In Memoriam: Stefan Landsberger →