Read the workshop report
Strasbourg (France), January 5-8, 2023
“Outliers and oddities: Identifying, contextualizing and questioning religious texts’ identity”
This four-day workshop is organized by the CRTA (Chinese Religious Texts Authority) project, supported by FROGBEAR and ITI HiSAAR. CRTA is an open-access, international collaborative database project aiming at describing Chinese religious texts. The workshop will introduce CRTA to participants and produce descriptions of chosen texts at the same time as it will train participants in readings late imperial religious texts of different genres. The workshop took place, France.
We open this call to 15 graduate students and early-career scholars of all nationalities and disciplines; we require a good reading command of classical Chinese and capacity of taking active part in discussions in English. We will also ask each participant to prepare in advance a 10-minute round-table presentation on an outlier late imperial, early Republican religious text of their choosing that they will contribute to the CRTA database. Each participant will choose a text that is an outlier in some way – an odd reprint, a strange volume, or anything that doesn’t fit the norm of religious texts. We hope that participants will maintain participation in the project after the workshop.
Candidates should send a CV, plus the title and abstract of a presentation for round-table discussion to frogbear.project@ubc.ca. Deadline is now extended to September 15, 2022.
Instructors
- Katherine Alexander (U. of Colorado): nineteenth-century Pangong baojuan 潘公寶卷
- Marcus Bingenheimer (Temple U.): Wang Rixiu’s 王日休 Essay on the Pure Land from Longshu 龍舒淨土文
- Daniela Campo (U. of Strasbourg): Buddhist religious instructions (kaishi 開示)
- Philip Clart (U. of Leipzig): morality books 善書
- Vincent Goossaert (EPHE, PSL): late Qing newly revealed litanies (chan 懺)
- Gregory Scott (U. of Manchester): the Qisha Canon 磧砂藏
Language of instruction
English
Schedule
Thursday 5 Jan
Arrival of participants
pm: presentation of the CRTA project
Friday 6 Jan
am: three training sessions of 50 minutes each on outlier texts by instructors
pm: one 1-hour training session on wiki editing, six to seven round-table presentations of outlier texts by early career scholars, group discussion
Saturday 7 Jan
am: three training sessions of 50 minutes each on outlier texts by instructors
pm: one 1-hour training session on wiki editing, six to seven round-table presentations of outlier texts by early career scholars, group discussion
Sunday 8 Jan
am: validation of the CRTA entries for all texts discussed
pm: departure of participants
Costs
CRTA covers train transportation from Paris or Frankfurt to Strasbourg, and single-room accommodation and full board in Strasbourg. CRTA will also offer a travel grant to partially cover air/train fare to Paris or Frankfurt (400 euros for participants coming from Asia or North America, and 100 euros for those coming from Europe, outside France).
