Pre-Modern China Lecture with Patricia Sieber

Patricia Sieber from Ohio State University will lecture on pre-modern China at Columbia University

Patricia Sieber is interested in the canon formation surrounding Chinese vernacular genres from the Yuan period onward. She is the author of Theaters of Desire: Authors, Readers, and the Reproduction of Early Chinese Song-Drama, 1300-2000, a cross-cultural history of the construction and reception of "Yuan zaju." She works on two book length studies. Her first project, The Power of Imprints: Qing-Period Publishing and the Formation of European Sinology, 1720-1860, examines the role that books acquisitions by Europeans in China played in the formation of the literary canon of Chinese belles-lettres in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. Her second project explores the socio-literary processes surrounding the song genre of sanqu in Yuan and Ming sources and their impact on modern conceptions of the Yuan period more generally. Other publications include an edited collection of short stories entitled Red Is Not the Only Color: Contemporary Chinese Fiction on Love and Sex Between Women and articles on canon formation, visuality, and performativity in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, CHINOPERL, Monumenta Serica, Journal of Chinese Religions and Contemporary Buddhism among others. She teaches courses on different facets of traditional Chinese literature, including courses on traditional Chinese novels & drama, the intersection of traditional & modern Chinese literature, and comparative literary relations. She has been a fellow at the Center for Chinese Studies, National Central Library (Taipei), at the Institute for Collaborative Research and Public Humanities (OSU), and at the Library of Congress (Washington, D.C.). Her research has been awarded funding from the NEH, ACLS, DAAD and the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation among others. As a two time recipient of OSU's East Asian Studies Center FY National Resource Center (NRC) and Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) grants from the U.S. Department of Education, she currently serves as the director of OSU's East Asian Studies Center.