Dear Colleagues, Please join me in welcoming Prof. Yang Shao-yun of Denison College (yangs@denison.edu<mailto:yangs@denison.edu>) to the listserv community. I stole the following account from his webpage at Denison: Dr. Yang has published in the journal Tang Studies and contributed essays to two edited volumes: Chang'an 26 BCE: An Augustan Age in China? (University of Washington Press, 2015) and Political Strategies of Identity-Building in Non-Han Empires in China (Harrasowitz Verlag, 2014). His first book project, provisionally titled The Way of the Barbarians: Reinterpreting Chineseness and Barbarism in Tang and Song China, 800-1200, explores the various ways in which the medieval Chinese interpreted and utilized the so-called "Chinese-barbarian dichotomy" - a longstanding belief that the peoples of the world were fundamentally divided between superior Chinese and inferior barbarians. The book demonstrates that during a period stretching from the ninth century to the thirteenth century, understandings of this dichotomy became less centered on ethnic or cultural differences and more interested in interpreting barbarism as a universal moral problem that the Chinese were also susceptible to. Yours truly, Michael