Dear Colleagues, Please join me in welcoming Lance Pursey LSP559@student.bham.ac.uk<mailto:LSP559@student.bham.ac.uk> to the listserv community. I include his self-introduction below. Yours truly, Michael I'm a first year PhD student in Medieval History at the University of Birmingham under the supervision of Professor Naomi Standen. My focus is on urban centres in 10th - 11th century Northeast China/Asia; my research will incorporate historical and archaeological methods. Beyond this, my research interests can be rather broad. My MA was in Religious Studies - Daoism at Sichuan University, my dissertation examined the Mid-Tang text Xuanzhenzi, and compared its content to other Tang texts from Daoist Canon in an attempt to resolve whether or not the Xuanzhenzi was a text that upheld the idea of transcendence or 'xianhood'. I'm interested in Chinese history, both intellectual and general, as well as classical Chinese, however as you can see my current project starts to take me out of the central plains to look at the Northern Asian frontier and the boundaries of identities at such borders. I'm also branching out into material culture from what was originally a wholly text-based approach to research.