April 13: “The Dynamic Spread of Buddhist Print Culture: Mapping Book Roads under Mongol Rule” with Professor Susan Huang, Rice University

The Art History Department will host Professor Susan Huang, a leading scholar in Daoist and Buddhist studies in China and the silk road, for this year’s Gombar/Duychak Lecture. Dr. Huang will lecture on “The Dynamic Spread of Buddhist Print Culture: Mapping Book Roads under Mongol Rule” on Thursday, April 13th as well as lead a workshop for graduate students on Friday, April 14th. See below for full event details. *Please note the updated event dates*

Gombar/Duychak Lecture 2022–23: “The Dynamic Spread of Buddhist Print Culture: Mapping Book Roads under Mongol Rule” by Shih-shan Susan Huang, Associate Professor, Rice University, Dept. of Transnational Asian Studies
Time: Thursday, April 13th, 2023 | 7:00–8:30pm CT
Place: Conrad A. Elvehjem Bldg, Rm. L140 | 800 University Ave. Madison, WI

Abstract: Elite Uighurs active in China under Mongol rule in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries played a major role as middlemen spreading Buddhist print culture. This talk examines selected individuals as sponsors, users, and transmitters of Buddhist books over long distances. It draws on Buddhist printed fragments excavated in Turfan, Xinjiang and an epigraphic source found in Quanzhou in southeast China. Taken together with the Mongol postal relay system, visualized in an online map using ArcGIS, the elite Uighurs’ vast network extending from China to the Uighur homeland in Central Asia can shed light on the dynamic spread of Buddhist print culture under Mongol rule.

Biography: Susan Huang (Ph.D., History of Art, Yale) is an Associate Professor at Rice University’s newly-founded Department of Transnational Asian Studies. Her book, Picturing the True Form: Daoist Visual Culture in Traditional China (Harvard Asian Center, 2012), translated into Chinese by Dr. Zhu Yiwen, was published by the Zhejiang University Press in 2022. She co-edited Visual and Material Cultures of the Middle Period China with Patricia Ebrey (Brill, 2017). Her recent articles explore Song-to-Ming book art of the Lotus Sutra and Diamond Sutra, Buddhist printing under Tangut Xi Xia rule, and painting and printing connections. Huang is completing a monograph, The Dynamic Spread of Buddhist Print Culture: Mapping Buddhist Book Roads in China and its Neighbors, which examines printed images and texts as objects “on the move,” as they were transmitted along networks and book roads in a transnational context. For more information, visit https://shihshansusanhuang.com/

Professor Huang will lead a graduate student workshop on April 14 (Friday 11:00-12:30, Hagen) and discuss the subjects related to workshop practice, art, and ritual.  These issues are prevalent in worldwide religious arts. Professor Huang has provided four articles. Participants can choose to read any of the four articles that she provided. The workshop will not discuss these articles one by one, but rather use them as sources of conversation to discuss the “workshop practice” and “art and ritual.”

You can find articles through the link of the box folder below.