ICS Event: Launching the “Chinese Theater Collaborative”/華語戲聚

The Institute for Chinese Studies and Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures (The Ohio State University), in collaboration with the Advanced Institute for Global Chinese Studies (Lingnan University), present:

Launching the “Chinese Theater Collaborative”/華語戲聚

with moderators

Patricia Sieber
Professor in Chinese, Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures, The Ohio State University

and

Julia Keblinska
Post-doctoral scholar, East Asian Studies Center, The Ohio State University

In a ZOOM conversation with participants from around the globe, we will introduce the “Chinese Theater Collaborative,” a digital resource center for traditional Chinese plays and their modern afterlives. 

Patricia Sieber’s primary research interests center on traditional Chinese performance genres and their afterlives in the Chinese-speaking world and in transnational contexts. She is the author of Theaters of Desire: Authors, Readers, and the Reproduction of Early Chinese Song-Drama, 1300-2000 (Palgrave MacMillan, 2003), a cross-cultural history of the construction and reception of "Yuan zaju song-dramas” (Chinese translation to appear from Guangxi Normal University Press, 2024). She is the lead editor of How To Read Chinese Drama: A Guided Anthology (Columbia University Press, 2022) (with Regina Llamas, Chinese translation to be published by Sanlian Publishing), co-editor of How To Read Chinese Drama in Chinese: A Language Companion  (Columbia University Press, 2023) (with Guo Yingde, Wenbo Chang, and Xiaohui Zhang) and co-editor of Ecologies of Translation in East and South East Asia, 1600-1900 (Amsterdam University Press, 2022) (with Li Guo and Peter Kornicki) . She also guest-edited a special issue of the Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture entitled "The Protean World of Sanqu Songs" (2021) with some essays appearing in Chinese translation in Lingnan xuebao (fall 2023). In 2023, she won the OSU College of Arts and Sciences’ Ronald and Deborah Ratner Award for Distinguished Teaching.

Julia Keblinska is a postdoctoral scholar at the East Asian Studies Center at the Ohio State University. She has previously been an “Archival Imaginations” fellow of the OSU Global Arts and Humanities Society of Fellows and a postdoc focused on crisis in East Asian and Eastern European postsocialist transitions at OSU’s Center for Historical Research. She holds a PhD in Chinese (with a Designated Emphasis in Film & Media) from the University of California, Berkeley. Julia writes primarily on modern Chinese media history but is broadly interested in late socialist media ecologies in Eastern Europe and East Asian popular culture. Her first book project, “New Era, New Media: Reverse Engineering the Future in 1980s China,” is a popular media archaeology of China’s era of market reforms. Her article, “Mediated Nostalgia: Touching the Past in Reply 1994” (Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinemas), turns to South Korean TV drama to investigate the complex temporality of television as both a new and outdated medium. Two forthcoming chapters in edited volumes, “Reading Pulp Futures in New Era China” and “Compacted Copies and Street Circuits: The Forms, Formats, and Infrastructures of VCD Piracy,” theorize the affordances of cheap media during moments of technological transition in the early 1980s and late 1990s, respectively.