Skip to Content

Search: {{$root.lsaSearchQuery.q}}, Page {{$root.page}}

Writing Roman History in China in the First Half of the Twentieth Century

Jinyu Liu
Tuesday, March 27, 2018
4:00-6:00 PM
2175 - Classics Library Angell Hall Map
In the first half of the twentieth-century, the writing of Roman History in a semi-independent China was dominated by the Chinese agenda of national revival and modernization rather than a scholarly desire to investigate Roman history for its own sake. This, however, did not detract from the complexity with which the Chinese reformists, thinkers, and writers engaged with Rome. It is precisely this complexity that this paper will try to unfold. In particular, Ancient Rome, as a negative exemplum, loomed large in the Chinese discourses on a range of key issues including the role of religion in nation building, the (re)formation of "national character", and the relationship between unification/centralization and local autonomy. To a great extent, Ancient Rome functioned as a site where evaluation of China’s past, concern over China’s fate, search for historical lessons, and a close attention to contemporary European affairs and their historical precedents were intricately coalesced.

Jinyu Liu is Associate Professor of Classical Studies at DePauw University, and also Distinguished Guest Professor at Shanghai Normal University (2014-2020). Her research interests include social relations in Roman cities, the non-elite in the Roman Empire, Latin epigraphy, the reception of Graeco-Roman classics in China, as well as translating classical texts in a global context. As the Principal Investigator of “Translating the Complete Corpus of Ovid’s Poetry into Chinese with Commentaries", a multi-year project sponsored by a Chinese National Social Science Foundation Major Grant (2015-2020), she is collaborating with more than a dozen scholars from four countries to translate the complete works of Ovid (43 BCE-17 CE), arguably the most popular poet of ancient Rome, into Chinese for the first time.
Building: Angell Hall
Event Type: Lecture / Discussion
Tags: Chinese Studies, Classical Studies, Literature, Writing
Source: Happening @ Michigan from Confucius Institute at the University of Michigan, Contexts for Classics