Event

Please join us for the next lecture in the EALC Speakers' Colloquium. 

Since COVID-19, anxiety has received increasing attention from both scholarly communities and societies by and large. In our contemporary context, the emotion is dealt with through strategies ranging from psychedelic treatment to self-care. People in medieval China dealt with similar anxieties, or more precisely, worry. Will I get that promotion? Will my marriage work out? In the medieval Chinese context, they also adopted diverse approaches to conceptualize and interact with this worry. This lecture will explore one particular approach: divination. Focusing on divination manuals from 10th century Dunhuang, it will explore on the one hand how worry drove individuals to divinatory practices, and on the other hand how the divination manuals used worry and other emotive words as part of their technical language to measure uncertainty. We will see that emotive language was in fact an effective way to convey and communicate different levels of uncertainty and future preferences that were otherwise difficult to convey.  

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Zhao Lu 趙璐 is Assistant Professor of Global China Studies, New York University Shanghai; Global Network Assistant Professor, New York University. He earned his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied the intellectual history of early China. He is the author of Weird Confucius: Unorthodox Representations of Confucius in History (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024) and In Pursuit of the Great Peace: Han Dynasty Classicism and the Making of Early Medieval Literati Culture (SUNY, 2019), and the co-author of Miscellany of the South Seas: A Chinese Scholar’s Chronicle of Shipwreck and Travel through 1830s Vietnam (University of Washington Press, 2023) with Kathlene Baldanza.