Elena Valussi, Loyola University

The Fairbank Center For Chinese Studies at Harvard University presents Elena Valussi from Loyola University, Chicago as a part of the China Humanities Seminar.

Covering the whole span of Chinese experience predating the modern era, the China Humanities Seminar addresses all aspects of Chinese civilization—literature, history, philosophy, religion, art history, and the performing arts. Organizer: James Robson

Speaker
Elena Valussi has a doctoral degree from the University of London, School of Oriental and African Studies, on the intersection of religion and gender in China. She teaches East Asian History and Gender in East Asian History at Loyola University Chicago and Chinese Religions at the Graham School of the University of Chicago. She has published on the subject of bodily images in a religious context in “Blood, tigers, dragons. The physiology of transcendence for women”, in IASTAM Journal of Asian Medicine, Leiden, Brill, 4.1, (2008), on the importance of paratext in “Female alchemy and paratext: how to read nüdan in a historical context”, in Asia Major, 21, number 2 (2008), and on the role of religious women in nineteenth century China in “Men and women in He Longxiang’s Nüdan hebian (Collection of female alchemy”, Nannü, Men, Women and Gender in Early and Imperial China, Brill, Leiden, Vol.10.2, (2008). She has been invited to speak on these subjects at Universities like Harvard, Cambridge, Oxford, and London, as well as in Germany, China, Japan, Taiwan and Bhutan. More recently, she has been interested in Chinese Contemporary art, leading Columbia College students to Shanghai with the course “Shanghai, History, Culture and Art”, which has a special focus on Contemporary Art. She organized a symposium on gender in contemporary art at Columbia College for the fall of 2009 which brought together her gender focus and her new interest in contemporary art. In June of 2011 Valussi plans to travel to Macau to present on the contemporary mediation techniques for Women in China at the conference on Women and Religion in China.During her fellowship Valussi will continue working on the adaptation of Chinese self-healing techniques for women to the contemporary American market. Self-healing techniques have a long history in China and have been imported in the United States in the last 20 years. There is a growing market for women, and these techniques are offered to enhance one’s emotional, physical and sexual well-being. I am interested in how these techniques are modified in the transition from their original milieu to an American market, how they are used, and what different audiences they are targeted towards

During her fellowship Valussi will continue working on the adaptation of Chinese self-healing techniques for women to the contemporary American market. Self-healing techniques have a long history in China and have been imported in the United States in the last 20 years. There is a growing market for women, and these techniques are offered to enhance one’s emotional, physical and sexual well-being. She is interested in how these techniques are modified in the transition from their original milieu to an American market, how they are used, and what different audiences they are targeted towards.

Valussi was recently published in the Journal of Daoist Studies, Volume 3 for her article entitled “Women’s Qigong in America-Tradition, Adaptation and New Trends. She also contributed to the publication Religion in Chinese Societies: Communities, Practices and Public Life. Her book review of Beata Grant’s Eminent Nuns: Women Chan Masters of Seventeenth Century China was also published in the Bulletin of the School of African and Asian Studies.