Dear Colleagues, I am writing with an update on the Society for Song, Yuan, and Conquest Dynasties Studies and an invitation to attend our events at this year’s AAS meeting in Washington, DC. Our annual meeting will be held on Saturday, March 24, from 1:00-2:30 pm in Harding on the Mezzanine Level of the Marriot, Wardman Park (the conference hotel). We will have refreshments to facilitate our discussion of the business of the Society and new membership. Please put us on your schedule. Last year was quite productive. The Society was very happy to be able to support a reception at the Second Conference on Middle Period Chinese Humanities held in Leiden from September 14-17, 2017. We have also reorganized the editorial board for the Journal of Song-Yuan Studies, and in the works is an updated Society website, which we hope to have up and running by the end of this calendar year. Additionally, in keeping with our current effort to fund new initiatives supporting Song, Yuan, and Conquest Dynasties studies, last summer we announced a program to help support SSYCDS-sponsored panels at AAS. Members of sponsored panels receive $100 each from the Society to help offset travel costs and/or registration fees. I am happy to announce that both of the panels we sponsored were accepted: (115) Medicine, Material Culture, and Daily Life in Middle Period China 3/23/2018 12:45 PM - 2:45 PM Location: Roosevelt Room 3, Exhibit Level Organized by: Hsiao-wen Cheng; panelists and discussant: Margaret Ng, Hsiao-wen Cheng, TJ Hinrichs, Kai-hsiang Hsu, and Brigid Vance (391) The Meanings of Things: Material Culture in Middle Period China 3/25/2018 8:30 AM - 10:30 AM Location: Washington Room 2, Exhibit Level Organized by Huijun Mai; panelists and discussant: Yunshuang Zhang, Ya (Leah) Zuo, Jeffery Moser, and Dorothy Ko [More information can be found on the AAS Website, and at the end of this email] Congratulations to Hsiao-wen Cheng and Huijun Mai for organizing successful panels! We plan to continue this program—look for an announcement regarding this year’s deadlines in your inbox, and on the SSYCDS website: https://www.songyuan.org. If you have other ideas for awards or sponsored programs, please bring them with you to the meeting or feel free to email me directly. We welcome your suggestions. Finally, Volume 46 of the Journal of Song-Yuan Studies will be published in late March. It features five articles, including a mini-symposium on the Ten Kingdoms, one research report, and seven book reviews. The table of contents appears below. Membership/order forms will be available at the meeting, and will also soon be distributed over the listserv. New memberships and membership renewals can now be processed online, and paid for with PayPal, at http://songyuan.org/JSYS/subscr.htm<https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fsongyuan.org%2FJSYS%2Fsubscr.htm&data=02%7C01%7Ctracy.g.miller%40Vanderbilt.Edu%7C34273dd55c414545dc1e08d58354debe%7Cba5a7f39e3be4ab3b45067fa80faecad%7C0%7C1%7C636559323299396930&sdata=jYvaNprFYWJCvpzj2aleP9woBzfAJOfeTlk4HD3DiK8%3D&reserved=0>. Many thanks to Ari Levine for his hard work ensuring the timely publication of the journal. I look forward to seeing everyone on March 24th at 1:00 pm! Best wishes, Tracy Miller President, Society for Song, Yuan, and Conquest Dynasty Studies 2018 SSYCDS Sponsored Panels at AAS, Washington, DC (115) Medicine, Material Culture, and Daily Life in Middle Period China 3/23/2018 12:45 PM - 2:45 PM Location: Roosevelt Room 3, Exhibit Level Our roundtable examines the intersection of medicine, market, and material culture in Middle Period China. Rapid developments in Song era markets deeply impacted cultures of health, most obviously in the price, circulation, and knowledge of drug materials. Drug prices played a role in the popular perceptions of efficacy. New forms of medical knowledge influenced the Song state’s attempt to monopolize the import of medicinals, such as luxury aromatics from the Indian Ocean. Local drug markets merged with temple fairs, and the marketplace became an integral part of local healing practice. Meanwhile, physicians and literati variously embraced and pointedly rejected the norms of the marketplace, seeking health in the materiality of everyday life, rustic foods, and easy-to-get drug materials. <<and>> (391) The Meanings of Things: Material Culture in Middle Period China 3/25/2018 8:30 AM - 10:30 AM Location: Washington Room 2, Exhibit Level Drawing on a variety of textual, visual, and historical materials, this interdisciplinary panel explores the ways in which the unprecedented interest in material things shaped the structure of knowing and learning in the Song Dynasty (960–1279). The four papers that compose the panel collectively advance two propositions: that the wider cultural changes associated with the Song cannot be understood in insolation from the physical objects that conditioned these changes; and that the history of material culture would be incomplete without consideration of its intellectual, social and aesthetic underpinnings. We progress from literary engagements with things (Huijun Mai and Yunshuang Zhang), through discussions of the material dimensions of textual production (Ya Zuo), to analyses of material processes that occurred independently of writing (Jeffrey Moser). From the biographies of scallops to the mold-marks of bronzes, we move from the wordiest effusions of materiality in the documentary record to the silent things unvoiced in texts. In so doing, we explore the ways in which things, as both subjects and objects, shaped the Song experience. -------------------------------------------- Tracy Miller, Ph.D. Associate Professor, History of Art and Asian Studies Vanderbilt University President, Society for Song, Yuan, and Conquest Dynasty Studies https://my.vanderbilt.edu/tracymiller/