Dear Colleagues, I am happy to introduce Elizabeth Smith Rosser (elizabeth.smithrosser@orinst.ox.ac.uk<mailto:elizabeth.smithrosser@orinst.ox.ac.uk> ), a graduate student at Oxford, to our listserv community. I have taken her account of her work from her webpage at Oxford: My research has always revolved around the uses of the past in subsequent periods of Chinese history, specifically the idea and memory of earlier historical figures in the Song, Yuan and Ming periods (960-1644). My current DPhil project aims to employ premodern Chinese jokebooks as an alternative source to question and challenge prevalent historical conclusions drawn from official sources like histories and others which aim to conform to an orthodoxy. The thesis also hopes to fit within the Humour Studies field as a whole by testing out methodologies and strategies which utilise the specific structures of a joke as a text to the advantage of historical research. Please join me in welcoming Elizabeth to the listserv. Michael