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The Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies is pleased to announce the first two installments of the 2021 - 2022 SIMS Online Lecture Series:

* Between Central and East Asia: Chinese Manuscripts from Tenth-Century Dunhuang

Imre Galambos, University of Cambridge

Friday, September 17, 2021, 12:00 -1:30pm EDT (via Zoom)

Geographically, the oasis city of Dunhuang occupied a strategic position on the northwestern edge of the Chinese cultural sphere, connecting the Chinese states with Central Asia, known at the time as the Western Regions. During the tenth century, Dunhuang was inhabited by a multilingual population that produced a vast quantity of manuscripts written in Chinese, Tibetan and over a dozen of other languages. At the turn of the twentieth century, tens of thousands of these manuscripts were discovered in a sealed-off Buddhist cave, leading to the development of entirely new fields of scholarly research and the decipherment of several long-forgotten languages. The manuscripts provide an unprecedented amount of information on the linguistic, economic, social and religious dimensions of contemporary life. Even though they were found together in the same cave, and had been produced by the same group of people, they are typically studied by specialists of respective languages and disciplines. In an attempt to bridge the linguistic barrier, this talk proposes to look at Chinese manuscripts in a wider context, connecting them with non-Chinese scribal cultures of Central Asia. One of my aims is to draw attention to the degree of interaction and mutual influence between these traditions, attesting to the mixed nature of local population. Click here for more information and the link to registrationhttps://www.library.upenn.edu/about/exhibits-events/between-central-and-east-asia-chinese-manuscripts-tenth-century-dunhuang.

* Growing a Research Network: Approaches to Global Book History

Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Institute for Advanced Study, and Alexandra Gillespie, University of Toronto

Friday, October 15, 2021, 12:00 - 1:30 pm EDT (via Zoom)

The Book and the Silk Roads approaches the "book" in a capacious way: it is a writing surface, taken from the natural world, hand-crafted to bear textual records. Books can be rolls, leaves, screenfolds, codices, tablets, and even standing stones. To reveal their meanings, to read their diverse texts and scripts alongside their materials, physical structures, and layers of accretions, we need to marshal innovative, interdisciplinary approaches and a collaborative methodology, embedded within a global perspective. Over the past year and a half, we have worked to transform our understanding of the human past and its nonhuman contexts by establishing a wide range of research partnerships, laying the groundwork for a global history of the book. In this talk, we will offer an overview of The Book and the Silk Roads that 1) summarizes the lessons learned during the pandemic, as our project has pivoted in a nimble way to accommodate increased use of online environments and limitations on research travel; 2) outlines some of our research findings, from birchbark Kashmiri manuscripts to palimpsests from Sinai; and 3) describes our increasingly substantial public humanities focus, including our upcoming exhibition at the Aga Khan Museum, Hidden Stories: Books Along the Silk Roads. Click here for more information and the link to registrationhttps://www.library.upenn.edu/about/exhibits-events/growing-research-network-approaches-global-book-history.

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