The Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures was well represented by its faculty and graduate students at the annual CHINOPERL conference, held on Thursday, March 12, in Vancouver, Canada.

CHINOPERL—an organization “devoted to the research, analysis, and interpretation of oral and performing traditions of China”—has brought together scholars of Chinese studies for more than 50 years. This year’s conference, held in conjunction with the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) annual meeting, had its largest number of participants in years, energized in part by a strong showing from Ohio State’s Buckeye community.

Professors Margie Chan and Mark Bender played active roles in organizing the conference and made significant contributions to its success. Prof. Bender led a panel discussion focused on “Ballads and Love Songs,” while Prof. Chan moderated a panel on “Narrative in Theatre and Quyi.” Professor Bender also delivered remarks in remembrance of Susan Blader, the pioneering Chinese language and culture scholar from Dartmouth who passed away last year. Prof. Chan followed her moderating duties with her own presentation, “Zhao Ziyong’s 招子庸 Diao Qiuxi 弔秋喜: A Yue Ou 粵謳 Song and Two Centuries of Its Legacy.”

DEALL’s graduate students continued their strong tradition of presenting compelling research at CHINOPERL, offering the following talks:

• Zeng Xiao – “Estranged Tongues, Staged Spaces: Intentional Linguistic Hybridity in Yuan Zaju”
• Li Zhao – “Hearing Together: Sound, Taste, and a Shared Theater in Late Qing China”
• Jiahang Wu – “Performing Verbal Inflation: Online Xiangsheng and the Contemporary Transformation of Quyi”
• Kaiyu Zhang – “Echoes in Hanfu: Performing Women’s History in China’s Digital Spaces”
• Huiyi Zhang - "Performative Naming: Wei Changsheng and the Establishment of qinqiang Nomenclature”

Another graduate student, Yuyang Han, prepared a talk for the conference but was unable to present due to travel delays that affected many attendees. Her planned presentation, “Cross-Media Multimodal Analysis of ‘Riding a White Horse Through Three Passes’: Peking Opera, Gezai Opera, and Pop Song,” will instead be delivered at the upcoming CHINOPERL online conference.

East Asian Studies Center MA student, Zhe Cheng, also presented her research, “Kun Opera Performance in the Museum: Reconstructing the History Kun Opera, Or Blazing a New Trail in the Digital Era?” and DEALL alum Eric Shepherd presented, "Making Women Blush and Cover Their Ears with Dirty Water Margin Tunes: What Republican Era Newspapers Say about the Telling about Wu the Second Tradition"