The CU Boulder Asian Studies Graduate Association (CUBASGA) online meeting 2022 was held successfully on February 19th and 20th. Apart from the graduate student panels, we also invited two distinguished scholars as keynote speakers. This year, we had Prof. Lucas Bender from Yale University giving his talk: “Why the Mid-Tang Poet-Monks (Shiseng 詩僧) Chose Shi 詩-Poetry” on 19th, and prof. Fabio Rambelli at UC Santa Barbara discussing: “Music, the Sacred, and Healing: The Gagaku Piece Sokō and a Different Look at the Intellectual Systems of Premodern Japan” on 20th.
Prof. Bender’s talk focused on Chinese poet-monks in the Mid-Tang period, exploring poet-monks’ literary writing from a genre’s perspective. This represents a significant contribution to the field of poet-monk studies in medieval China. Prof. Rambelli’s talk examined Japanese music “Gagaku” and discussed its relationship with the intellectual world of premodern Japan. This is an inspiring approach for people to learn more about premodern Japanese culture. Both talks were followed by lively discussions with questions asked by senior scholars and graduate students, from which the audience acquired better and deeper understandings of the talks. After the conference, we even received several notes from the participants expressing their gratitude and how much they had enjoyed and learned from the talks.
CUBASGA conference is a well-established event of the Department of Asian Languages & Civilizations at CU Boulder. For the past two years, despite the influence of the pandemic, we managed to hold the conferences online and continued the strong tradition. The keynote addresses, as always, were the peak of the event. The excellent scholars we invited not only encouraged applications before the conference, but also attracted more audience during the conference. Their comments and questions to all the presenters greatly helped graduates students with their academic journeys, not to mention their informative keynote speeches also broadened our understanding of the fields. During the past few years, we have kept our graduate conference at a high level, and have invited scholars from universities such as Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, UCLA, UBC et cetera, together with this year’s two professors, we are building a fine reputation for our conference, even for our university. We believe in the future, we will keep inviting top scholars for our keynote addresses, and keep the high quality of CUBASGA conference.
CUBASGA is supported by the Center for Asian Studies.