Below is a list of our upcoming events in the Spring quarter. Celebrating Birthdays in Our Times：the Aesthetics of Association in Chinese Painting Albums Talk by Professor Lihong Liu, The Getty Research Institute Thursday, June 05, 2014 4:00 PM - 5:30 PM 10383 Bunche Hall In 1549, Wen Zhengming（1570–1559）, a Suzhou painting master and cultural leader, reached his eightieth birthday. Dozens of painters, calligraphers, and writers collectively created an album centered on a program of place names for celebrating this ostensibly grand occasion in the Wu region. Similar birthday-celebratory albums of varying complexity—in which Wen himself took part—were also carried out to celebrate senior men and women of the day. This lecture introduces this understudied genre. I will analyze the programmatic and task-specific participatory modes of practice used to create birthday-celebratory albums. My analysis considers answers to intriguing questions concerning the significance of place or non-place that grounds the differentiated representations of the formation of personalities in association with the building of community. Finally, in socio-historical and cultural terms, I will investigate the issue of what I refer to as the entanglement of time; I will show how communal birthday celebrations, as practiced in the open but serial album format, simultaneously bring into line the multi-temporal measures of life, age, and era.  Lihong Liu is presently a postdoctoral fellow at the J. Paul Getty Research Institute. She received her doctoral degree from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University in 2013. Liu is currently preparing a book manuscript, tentatively titled “The Real Scene：Painting and Place in China, 1450–1550.” In this work, she seeks to develop a new approach to the phenomena and notions of the “substantive” and “scenic” landscapes（shijing）in mid-Ming Chinese paintings. Liu is also researching a project on plate glass as material medium in the early modern art world; her focus is on how plate glass was used in the construction of windows, mirrors, and vitrines and as a painting support in Qing China since it was introduced from Europe toward the end of the seventeenth century.   The Late Tang Geography of Power     Lecture by Nicolas Tackett, UC Berkeley Thursday, May 15, 2014 4:00 PM - 5:30 PM Bunche Hall 10383 Los Angeles, CA How does one account for the long-term survival of the medieval Chinese aristocratic clans despite important institutional developments, including the expanded use of the civil service examinations and the creation of a new system of provincial bureaucracies? How does one then explain the dramatic disappearance of these families at the turn of the tenth century? By exploiting a large prosopographic database, this paper will explore how a better understanding of the geographic distribution of political power and of the Tang political elite's social networks can help resolve these questions. Nicolas Tackett received his PhD from Columbia University in 2006. After postdoctoral fellowships at the Getty Research Institute and Stanford University, he joined the U.C. Berkeley History Department in 2009. He has just completed a monograph on The Destruction of the Medieval Chinese Aristocracy. He is now working on a second monograph that will look at how unusual social, political, and geopolitical factors during the eleventh century spurred Chinese intellectuals into developing a new sense of their place in the world.   Introducing The Late Imperial Primer Literacy Sieve, A Digital Tool, with examples from Ming Steles for Shrines to Living Officials     Talk by Sarah Schneewind, UC San Diego Friday, May 16, 2014 12:00 PM - 2:00 PM Bunche Hall 10383 Many late Ming people had memorized a standard primer or two（such as the Three Character Classic）and could read – some.  Vernacular literature blossomed, and daily-use encyclopedias, legal documents, scriptures, announcements, shop signs, stone inscriptions, etc., made reading an integral part of life.  I will introduce a new digital tool, the Late Imperial Primer Literacy Sieve, intended to reveal roughly what a primer-literate reader could read of a given text.  To demonstrate, I will apply the Sieve to steles commemorating shrines to living officials. These inscriptions typically record or invent conversations among commoners, praising some officials and criticizing others.  These apparent legitimations of popular participation in politics stood, carved in stone, in public places.  Was their potentially dangerous rhetoric safely isolated in the domain of gentry cultural hegemony? Only the classically literate could appreciate a stele in all its allusive complexity, but could ordinary folk read parts of it?  If so, what messages might they have gleaned?  The Sieve offers a way to begin to address the knotty problem of audience.     Sarah Schneewind, a graduate of Columbia University, is presently Associate Professor of History at UC, San Diego.  After writing Community Schools and the State in Ming China, which challenged the centrality of the Ming founder, and the more readable A Tale of Two Melons：Emperor and Subject in Ming China, and after editing Long Live the Emperor! Uses of the Ming Founder across Six Centuries of East Asian History, she has finally turned her back on Ming Taizu to research the ubiquitous but under-studied phenomenon of shrines honoring living officials in Great Ming, with a comparison to  Chosŏn Korea.  She has been President of the Society for Ming Studies and manages the on-line Ming History English Translation Project.