A Hyperlinked Edition of the huainanzi

As part of my first book project, I plan to publish a hyperlinked edition of the Huainanzi, a highly constructed and intertextual text from the 2nd century BCE that various reformist scholars have previously read as an encyclopedic collection of unoriginal, philosophical treatises. In this DH project, I reconstruct a hyperlinked edition of the Huainanzi that visualizes the textual parallels between Liu An’s text and various pre-Han sources.

Samurai - popular representations of a Mystified warrior

In this project, I interviewed five young American students on their encounter and interaction with ‘samurais.’ I aimed on showing the remarkable stability of the image of the samurai over the last three hundred years by comparing popular representations of the virtuous warriors in media such as movies, woodblock prints, and other visual cultural products with the young students’ perceptions. In so doing, I wanted to visualize that the myth of the samurai as the ‘epitome of Japanese culture’ is indeed re-affirmed and kept alive via the cultural crystallizations of and stories about the warrior caste. In this sense, visual cultural products such as Kabuki plays, prints, and movies and their re-workings of the myth of the samurai seem to play a crucial role in the creation and preservation of Japan’s national identity and mark her transition into a modern society.

Music-race-empire: A research circle

Music - Race - Empire was a research circle organized by Ronald Radano (School of Music) and Teju Olaniyan (English, African Languages and Literature), with funding provided by the International Institute and the Global Studies program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Between 2009 and 2012, the circle hosted a series of workshops, presented three invited speakers, and began a major research project to document the production and circulation of popular music between 1890 and 1940. In 2011, the circle organized an international symposium that focused on the transnational production of race through musical practices and form.

The Music-Race-Empire World Pop Project represents an attempt to document the global presence and circulation of jazz and popular music recordings prior to 1940. Together with Laura Wen, I was responsible for the China section.