Human Kinds and Animal Species in Early Modern China

This talk explores the specific pathways through which a burgeoning literature on the earth and its inhabitants was made accessible to readers of diverse social strata in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century China, and how this epistemological process was shaped by a set of linguistic and pictorial strategies popularized by commercial woodblock printing, which aimed not only to inform, but also to amuse and astonish.

 

Yuming He received her B.A. and M.A from Peking University and her Ph.D. from UC Berkeley. Her research interests include dramatic performance and texts, textual and visual culture, as well as social and intellectual history, particularly history of the book, in late-imperial China. She is the author of Home and the World: Editing the "Glorious Ming" in Woodblock-printed Books of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2013).

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