Daily Archives: April 20, 2013

CFP: Inaugural English Edition of Heritage and Transition

[On behalf of Ben Hammer, Shandong University]

A Call for Drafts for the Inaugural English-language Edition of Heritage and Transition: Studies in Chinese Humanities

Shandong University’s Journal of Literature, History and Philosophy (《文史哲》Wen Shi Zhe) is one of mainland China’s most well-known and well-respected academic journals. It has appeared bi-monthly for more than half a decade and has gained the highest repute among Chinese scholars. The Journal focuses on presenting scholarly work on various aspects of China’s traditional culture and society.

Due to the rising demand and desire for international dialogue as well as the rising prominence of sinology in Western countries, the editorial board has decided to begin publishing an edition in English, entitled Heritage and Transition: Studies in Chinese Humanities. It is our goal to help foster such international dialogue and provide a platform for important academic exchange.

This notice is to officially extend an invitation to Western scholars to take part in Heritage and Transition’s inaugural English-language edition.  The theme of the inaugural edition is “The Forms and Formation of Chinese Society” (中国社会形态的问题). All entries must be original works somehow related to this theme.

There is no fee to submit. All submissions will be reviewed by the editorial board. All accepted submissions will receive payment. Furthermore, along with being published in the English edition, accepted works will also be translated into Chinese and published separately in the Chinese edition.

The deadline for the first edition is September 30, 2013. Submissions should be between 6,000 and 10,000 words in length. If you are interested in contributing or have questions, please contact Dr. Ben Hammer at   benkhammer@sdu.edu.cn

Benjamin Hammer
Assistant Editor, Heritage and Transition
Lecturer, Advanced Institute of Confucian Studies
Shandong University
Jinan, Shandong, China, 250100
+011-86-152-6411-3113

Munro Fund for Chinese Thought Established at ACLS

Munro_Donald_cropped

I am very excited to announce and to celebrate the generosity of Manyul’s and my teacher at the University of Michigan, Don Munro. We should all be grateful for his continuing efforts to cultivate the field of Chinese thought!

The American Council of Learned Societies is pleased to announce the establishment of the Munro Fund for Chinese Thought. Proceeds of the fund, which was created through Donald J. Munro’s generous gifts to ACLS, will help support ACLS Fellowships awarded for research projects on Chinese philosophical traditions and ethical systems that exhibit high quality in sinology and in critical analysis, as well as relevance to human problems.

The Munro Fund can help fund awards in any ACLS fellowship program, except those supporting pre-doctoral study. A list of ACLS fellowship programs with links to information about each can be found at  http://www.acls.org/programs/comps/.

Continue reading →

New Book: Cook, Bamboo Texts of Guodian

164 BambooVol1

Scott Cook’s extensive, two-volume study and complete translation of the Guodian excavated texts has been published and is available through University of Hawaii Press. For more information, check out these two sites (vol. 1; vol. 2), which are largely identical but have links for purchasing the two volumes at the bottom. Congratulations, Scott!

Here follows the blurb from the website:

The cache of bamboo texts recently unearthed (in 1993) from the village of Guodian, Hubei Province, is without doubt a rare and unique find in the history of Chinese philosophy and literature. As the only archaeologically excavated corpus of philosophical manuscripts to emerge from a Warring States–period tomb, the Guodian texts provide us with a wealth of reliable information for gaining new insights into the textual and intellectual history of pre-imperial China. In this respect, one may reasonably claim that they are the most exciting thing to happen to the study of early China since the third century ad, the last time a pre-imperial textual cache of similar import was unearthed. More than a few scholars have even gone so far as to suggest that their discovery necessitates that the entire history of early Chinese intellectual history will have to be rewritten. The importance of these texts is manifold. First, given the prominence of Confucian works in the corpus, they serve to fill out much of the intellectual historical picture for the doctrines of roughly three generations of Confucian disciples who fell between the times of Confucius 孔子 (551–479 BC) and Mencius孟子 (ca. 390–305 BC). Next, the discovery of three different texts that each parallel portions of the Daodejing 道德經 (aka. Laozi 老子), along with a possibly related cosmogonic work, the “Taiyi sheng shui”太一生水, is helping us better understand the formation and early transmission of the Laozi and the nature of its relationship to early Confucian thought and even popular beliefs. Moreover, the dating of the tomb serves to dispel serious doubts about the early temporal provenance of both the Laozi and many of the chapters from the Li ji 禮記 (Book of Ritual), as well as giving us a number of clues to help us reconstruct the history of the early Chinese canonical “classics” that are cited in some of the texts. And written as they are in the local Chu 楚 script, the manuscripts hold great significance for the study of early Chinese paleography and phonology, giving us tangible examples of “ancient script” forms hitherto seen mainly in early character dictionaries and a limited array of technical manuscripts previously excavated from the region.