Sarah M. Allen
Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, Williams College

Lucas Rambo Bender
Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures, Yale University

Robert Ford Campany
Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in the Humanities Professor of Asian Studies, Vanderbilt University

Jack W. Chen
Professor of Chinese Literature, University of Virginia

Hsiao-wen Cheng
Associate Professor of East Asian Religions, University of Pennsylvania

Manling Luo
Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Indiana University

Alexis Lycas
Maître de conférences, École pratique des hautes études (EPHE, PSL) Centre de recherche sur les civilisations de l’Asie orientale (CRCAO, UMR 8155)

Jonathan Pettit
Associate Professor of Chinese Religions, University of Hawaii

Xiaofei Tian 田曉菲
Professor of Chinese Literature, Harvard University

Don J. Wyatt
John M. McCardell, Jr. Distinguished Professor, Middlebury Colleg

Shao-yun Yang
Associate Professor of East Asian Studies, Denison University

Zekun Zhang
Ph.D. Candidate, Yale University 

What constitutes being human? What are the boundaries or fuzzy edges of humanity? What can we learn from exploring the margins of humanity? These questions lie at the heart of this symposium, which will bring together twelve scholars across a variety of fields to consider how concepts analogous to our contemporary idea of “the human” were defined and debated in Medieval China.

We hope that the papers assembled for the symposium will open new, interdisciplinary vistas on the ways in which ethnocultural others, sociological underclasses, striking and different individuals, animals and gods, and ex- and future-humans were conceptualized and written about in the medieval period, and on the ways in which these marginal beings expressed and challenged the self-understandings of the authors of the materials that survive to us.

The symposium will be held via Zoom from 10am to 1pm, EST, on June 1st through June 3rd, 2022. Registration is free and open to the public.

A special thanks to the Council on East Asian Studies at Yale University for the assistance with the symposium organization and to Gustavo Espada of EALC, Harvard University, for building the symposium website. Questions and comments can be directed to the symposium's graduate coordinator, Baiqian Bian, at baiqian.bian@yale.edu, or to the organizers, Luke Bender and Xiaofei Tian.