Talk by Ya Zuo, Associate Professor and Vice Chair of Department of History, University of California, Santa Barbara
Thursday, April 24, 2025
2:00 PM - 3:30 PM
Bunche Hall 10383
As a scholar of emotions in premodern Chinese thought, I often find myself sounding unintentionally postmodern. From antiquity through the middle period, Chinese thinkers—whether engaging with Confucian moral philosophy, Daoist internal alchemy, or medical theory—often expressed ideas that would sit comfortably within the post-structuralist discourse of the long twentieth century. For example, is an emotion something you have, or something that happens to you? Is this feeling inside you, out in the world, or—more radically— does it even require a “you” to contain it? Is an emotion a thing, a process, or a process with a thing-effect? Chinese theories of emotion provide somewhat unintuitive answers that would position them as productive interlocutors for affect theorists. In this talk, I highlight these parallels to introduce some critical phenomenological claims about emotions in the Chinese tradition.
Ya Zuo is an associate professor of History at University of California, Santa Barbara. She is a cultural historian of middle and late imperial China, and the author of
Shen Gua’s Empiricism (Harvard Asia Center, 2018), with the Chinese translation published by Zhonghua Book Company in 2024. Driven by interdisciplinary interests, she has written a range of articles on topics such as theory of knowledge, sensory history, medical history, book history, and the history of emotions. She is currently working on a book on crying and tears in middle-period China.
Sponsor(s): Center for Chinese Studies