Union Pacific and McNally Fellows Presentations 3/6

About the Event

Chun Chen, "Hairpining Ceremony (jili 笄禮) and Girls’ Adolescence Period in Song Dynasty China (960-1276)"

As a parallel to the male capping ceremony (guanli冠禮), the female rite of passage, the hairpinning ceremony (jili笄禮), is also clearly documented in some Confucian classics. This study traces the development of the hairpinning ceremony in premodern China. It proposes that the Song dynasty is an essential period in which this ritual was transformed from an ideal in ancient classics into a real-life practice. Based on a close reading of the ritual manuals compiled by the Song emperor and literati, I argue that the Song female hairpinning ceremony was not limited to betrothed girls, but also applied to girls who had reached the marriageable age.

(Image: Su Hanchen, Children at Play in an Autumn Garden, National Palace Museum, Taipei)

Clare Harmon, "Grief People: Translation for Liveable Futures"

Through creative nonfiction forms and a poetic citational practice, my dissertation proposes translation as a grief ritual. I argue that structuring loss through translation is crucial to not only transform a translator and their readers, but to radically cleave from present, destructive ways of being human (e.g. racial colonial capitalism and the subjects that maintain these networks). Grounded in postcolonial translation theory, creative practice, and outcomes of archival research in Dante studies, my dissertation unfolds across autotheoretical interludes in Spain, Egypt, Italy, France and the US which describe myself as a grieving subject and chronicling my relationship as a translator with the incunabula catalogued at the Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli as XVI*L10, Cristoforo Landino’s Comento sopra la Comedia di Danthe (1481).

Lu Johnston, "Controlling Beggars’ Bodies: Disability & The Regulation of Begging in Post-Black-Death England"

In the decades following the Black Death, England grew interested in exerting legal control over beggars and their bodies. This presentation will look at a case study of a beggar prosecuted in late 14th-century London in order to explore the regulation of begging in England between 1349 and c. 1500 through the lens of critical disability studies. I examine how the bodies of “genuine” and “false” beggars were conceptualized and discussed.

About the Speakers

Chun Chen is a PhD Candidate from the Department of History at the University of Minnesota under the mentorship of Professor Ann Waltner and Professor Mary Jo Maynes. She is currently working on her dissertation, “Where the Girls Belong: Girls and Girlhood in Song China (960-1279).” Chun also serves as the student representative for the Society for Song, Yuan, and Conquest Dynasties Studies.

Lu Johnston is a History PhD Student. Their research focuses on social conceptions of and reactions to physical and sensory disabilities in western and central Europe during the late Middle Ages. Their current work explores the relationship between the body, begging, and (manual) labor in post-Black-Death labor legislation and its enforcement.

Clare Harmon is an interdisciplinary artist and experimental literary translator based in Montpellier, France. Clare's translations of canti from Dante Alighieri's Commedia have appeared recently in Poetry, Waxwing, and FENCE. In 2023, Clare was awarded a Fulbright fellowship to conduct archival research at the Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli.