Dear Colleagues, Happy October everyone! I am writing with a quick update from the Society for Song, Yuan, and Conquest Dynasty Studies. Many of you received the announcement today that the Preliminary Program for the 2019 AAS Annual Conference in Denver is now available on the AAS website (https://www.eventscribe.com/2019/AAS/index.asp?launcher=1). We are happy to announce that both of our sponsored panels were accepted by AAS. Time and date information as well as panel abstracts appear below. Please be sure to mark them on your calendars—we would love to see you there. Individual paper abstracts will soon appear on our website. We will also have our annual meeting in conjunction at the conference, time and date still TBD. With best wishes for a productive fall semester, Tracy Miller President, Society for Song, Yuan, and Conquest Dynasty Studies PS—This email was sent to both the SSYCDS membership and the listserv, which are not precisely the same. My apologies for duplicate emails. AAS 2019 Denver SSYCDS Sponsored Panels: Title: The Impact of Visual and Material Cultural Networks in the Mongol Empire and Beyond Time and Date: Friday, March 22, 2019, 9:00 am – 10:45 am Panelists and Papers: · Susan HUANG (Associate Professor, Rice, Chair): Elite Uighurs as Cultural Middlemen of Buddhist Books and Woodcuts in the Mongol Empire · Eiren SHEA (Assistant Professor, Grinnell) Tartar Cloths and the Italian Renaissance · Yong CHO (PhD Candidate, Yale; Organizer) Carving Cloth on the Stones: Juyongguan from Trans-regional Perspective · Yusen YU (PhD Candidate, Heidelberg) Picture Remounted: Mongol Legacy and the Material Adaptation of Chinese Painting in the Persianate Context Panel Abstract The recent “global turn” in the academy has made the Mongol Empire, which spanned a large landmass across the Eurasian continent, a particularly dynamic time period for art historical research. This panel gathers four art historians whose papers contribute to this growing body of literature. Each presenter focuses on less-studied artistic forms as primary sources, such as illustrated woodcut print (Huang), silk cloth (Shea), stone carving (Cho), and paper (Yu). In doing so, the panel charts out previously unnoticed links of trans-regional contacts across Eurasia, from Italy to Iran, Central Asia, the Himalayan Plateau, North and South China, and Southeast Asia. The panel conceptualizes the cultural sphere of the Mongol Empire as forming a trans-regional network, transcending the borders of political entities such as Yuan China and Ilkhanate Persia. In doing so, the panel seeks to expand our understanding of interconnectedness among various artistic traditions — for it was this expanded network, which generated the immense creative energy in the visual and material worlds across Eurasia in the 13th to 14th century and beyond. Title: The Impact of Trade on Daily Life in East Asia, 960-1600 Time and Date: Saturday, March 23, 2019, 11:15 am-1:00 pm Panelists and Papers: · Valerie HANSEN (Professor, Yale) Chinese and Japanese Consumption of Incense Circa 1000 · Yiwen LI (Assistant Professor, City University of Hong Kong; Organizer) Wind from Foreign Lands: Japanese Folding Fans in China, 1000-1410 · Peter SHAPINSKY (Associate Professor, U. Illinois, Springfield) Dressing like a Pirate: Clothing as Symbolic Marker in the East Asian Maritime World c. 1350-1600 · Richard VON GLAHN (Professor, UCLA; Discussant) · Ezra VOGEL (Professor, Harvard; Chair) Panel Abstract The last decade of research has completely up-ended our understanding of trade between China and Japan. Officially the two countries had suspended their formal relations after the last Japanese embassy in 838. But in reality the economies of the two countries became increasingly intertwined, so much so that by the late 11 00s the Japanese were using coins minted in China as their primary currency. How did living in an interconnected world affect daily life? In both China and Japan, people at all social levels consumed large quantities of aromatics from the Islamic world and Southeast Asia (Valerie Hansen). Chinese consumers had a love-hate relationship with Japanese folding fans (Yiwen Li). Between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. Japanese pirates developed practices of adopting the dress of other lands and their actions inspired rebellious denizens of other lands to dress as Japanese pirates (Peter D. Shapinsky). The exposure to objects and practices from other cultures provided many opportunities: people enjoyed consuming foreign luxuries, delivered their political agendas via commenting on imported objects, and learned from the foreigners they came across. By investigating miscellaneous notes, poems, literature works, paintings, and transmitted and excavated objects, this panel examines how the objects and people that crossed borders played a role in people's daily lives in pre-modern East Asia and shaped their understandings of each other. -------------------------------------------- Tracy Miller, Ph.D. Associate Professor, History of Art and Asian Studies Vanderbilt University