Month: September 2022

Games and Culture | Reading Games as Cultural Texts

Presented by DKU’s Arts & Humanities Division

Date: Sep 29, 8-9:30pm BJT
Zoom Meeting ID: 982 3938 0827
Passcode: 528585

We all play games. All the time. But how well do you “read” the games you play? What roles do culture, race, gender, class or ideology “play” in our games? Our guest speakers will discuss how games engage broader cultural and political themes, how prevailing cultures and values affect design, popularity, and even user experience, and the relation between games and questions of identity, ethics, group behavior, and politics. In short we will ask: Do we play the game, or does the game play us?

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Humanities Research Center’s Mysticism Colloquium led by Professors Ben Van Overmeire, Bryce Beemer, and Yitzhak Lewis.

“We are organizing an HRC-funded colloquium around the theme “mysticism,” defined broadly. We invite papers that discuss both the general usage of the term mysticism (“what does it mean?”) and specific case studies of mysticism as it manifests in religious practice, literature, behavior, ritual, and otherwise.”

Please submit a proposal of no more than 150 words. Applications are due by Sept 30, to ben.van.overmeire@duke.edu.
Selected proposals will be presenting online or in-person.

The colloquium will be held on the Duke Kunshan University campus and virtually Dec. 2–3, 2022

Event overview:

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The Humanities Research Center is proud to sponsor Assistant Professor of Chinese Language at Duke Kunshan University, Wenting Ji’s “Destiny of Rebirth and Late Imperial Chinese Culture.”

This academic event introduces an 18^th century Chinese tanci 彈詞 fiction Zaishengyuan 再生緣 (Destiny of Rebirth) written by Chen Duansheng 陳端生 (1751–1796). Set in the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368) while reflecting the social norms in the high Qing era (1683–1799), this fiction takes a detour from a typical cross-dressing female protagonist’s adventure and fleshes it out with distinguished depictions of character development and nuanced emotional changes. Written by a female author for the gentry women’s community, Destiny of Rebirth demonstrates the creativity of late imperial Chinese women and provides a glimpse into their rarely showcased inner world and real concerns. Besides, tanci fiction is written in rhymed language and is considered a predecessor of today’s Suzhou pingtan 評彈 (storytelling and ballad singing in Suzhou dialect), and the story of Destiny of Rebirth also inspires popular pingtan performance titles like Meng Lijun 孟麗君, making it a significant cultural symbol for the Jiangnan region, even until today.

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