Friday, February 24, 3:00 – 5:00 p.m. in CEAS 319 (1155 E. 60th St.)
Aliz Horvath, “Confucianism as Method: From the History of Rituals to Digital Philology”
Please join us this Friday as we host Aliz Horvath (PhD Candidate, EALC). Aliz will present an overview of her dissertation project with particular attention to source material and method. She describes her project as follows:
This talk will consist of multiple components: I will first introduce the broader context of my dissertation project which showcases the combination of “traditional” and digital methods in a transnational framework by exploring the role of Confucianism in early modern Japan based on the study of the controversial and underresearched history writing project of the Mito school, entitled the Dai Nihon shi (The History of Great Japan), and the architect of the project, Tokugawa Mitsukuni (1628-1700), the second daimyo of Mito domain who became a celebrated part of contemporary Japanese popular culture. Subsequently, I am going to present a snapshot of the analysis of my main primary source (as part of the larger project) by analyzing how the scholars of Mito understood the concept of history and Japaneseness in Tokugawa Japan. Finally, using the abovementioned as a starting point, I will invite the participants of the workshop to an open discussion on intellectual history and the strengths, merits, and potential limitations of digital methods as opposed to more “traditional” approaches.
The paper is available at this link. If you have not received the password for the post, or if you have concerns about accessibility, please feel free to contact Alex Murphy at murphya1@uchicago.edu.
