Craig Clunas

@forarthistory.org.uk

A memorial tablet to the Emperor Yongle (reigned 1402-1424) "who moved the urns of empire", photographed c.1923 by "Adam Warwick", the male pseudonym the Peking photographer Juliet Bredon used to get work in America....

We're hiring: Development Manager

We’re looking for a Development Manager to help grow support for the Association for Art History and advance our mission.

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A purple colour block banner with the words 'ERC Consolidator Grant webinar’ written on it.

We will be running an ERC Consolidator Grant webinar on 24 November for UK-based researchers in the humanities and social sciences interested in applying for the ERC Consolidator Grants. Find out more and register your interest: https://bit.ly/46RDnVV

Genre borrowing in Chinese digital culture: Narrative imagination and grassroots storytelling on social media - Guobin Yang, 2025 A notable feature in Chinese digital culture is its playful style. Memes, jokes, parodies, and coded language of all sorts abound on social media. While researc...

This is fascinating! Sima Qian is surely making a comeback! People wrote Shiji-style biographies of Li Wenliang during Wuhan lockdown - my piece on this is just out, open-access journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Did Chinese Kiss? It may seem like a silly question, but a new book by scholar Hu Wenhui tries to resolve the debate over whether kissing has always been a part of Chinese courtship.

Did Chinese kiss?

MLGB is back!! Delighted that Medieval Libraries of Great Britain @bodleian.ox.ac.uk is now back online. We are also working had on plans for the next phase of the resource, enhancing & adding data & functionality. HUGE thanks to my colleagues for their hard & clever work mlgb.bodleian.ox.ac.uk

Do Identical Twins Write Identically? Evidence from Authorship Attribution This study investigates the writing styles of identical twins to determine if their shared genetics result in identical writing. We used computational authorship analysis techniques on writing samp...

A study has just been published comparing writings by three pairs of twins to see whether they write differently, including me and my art historian brother Glenn. The upshot is that our styles are apparently very dissimilar.

www.tandfonline.com/eprint/YFIRR...

#linguistics #twinstudies #philsky

HES asking the public which properties they should dump next?

"...the strategy acknowledges that 'not all sites and collections are equally important' and that 'it may not be possible or necessary for us to be the custodians of a place forever'"

"Chinese Painting and its Audiences" down to $20.40 for shoppers in the Americas, Asia, Australia press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...

This is Nobel Week and, like clockwork, people are speculating about Can Xue 残雪 again -- so reposting this little thread in French about a very deserving contender who remains vastly undertranslated in the Francophone world

#BOTD: Matteo Ricci 利瑪竇 (1552–1610), #Jesuit missionary to #China #SocietasJesu #耶穌會 #SJ #ChineseChristianity #ChristianityinChina #Catholicism #天主教

publication day for my *Documents géographiques de Dunhuang*, a social and cultural history of geographical knowledge, and probably one of the only medieval history books published in France during the ephemeral Lecornu government, which you can freely download here: books.openedition.org/cdf/20307

Mid-Autumn, Tiger Hill, Late Ming "Everyone was perfectly silent, even the mosquitoes."

For the Mid-Autumn Festival, I translated the 17th century failson, epicure, and memoirist Zhang Dai's account of the annual Mid-Autumn singing competition on Tiger Hill in Suzhou. www.burninghou.se/p/mid-autumn...

Mid Autumn Festival 2025 The Tower of Reading 念樓中秋   The Fifteenth Day of the Eighth Month of the lunar calendar, a day that in 2025 falls on the 6th of October, marks the Mid Autumn Festival 中秋節. A major

chinaheritage.net/journal/mid-...

From pack animals to polo: donkeys from the ninth-century Tang tomb of an elite lady in Xi'an, China Donkeys facilitated trade and transport in much of the ancient world, but were seldom used in elite or leisure activities. While Tang Dynasty (AD 618–907) texts indicate that noble women played polo riding donkeys, this has never been documented archaeologically. Here, the authors present the first archaeological evidence of the significance of donkeys for elite Tang women through analyses of donkey remains recovered from the tomb of a Tang noblewoman in Xi'an, China. These findings broaden our understanding of the donkey's historic roles beyond simple load bearing.

Chang'an is well-known for its elite tombs and they can tell us a lot about life in this period, such as one noblewoman's tomb from AD 879. She likely enjoyed playing donkey polo and was buried with her favourite donkeys. 2/2

🔗 from 2020 (£) doi.org/10.15184/aqy...

We are getting the Renaissance Skin band back together in a few weeks time! Do join us to discuss everything skin from piercing dog's ears to skin under the 17th-century microscope. Thank you @hannahmurphynews.bsky.social for organising such a special event @kingscollegelondon.bsky.social

Any #earlymodern #skystorians with some knowledge of Vietnamese and its orthography?

I've come across an EIC jurebasso (translator/intermediary) whose name is given as Phuc Ngay, and wondering what the accurate rendering of it would be in a modern text.

Interested to learn that this great historian of medieval Europe knew and was gripped by 'Fanshen', both William Hinton's original book on land reform in China and David Hare's 1975 play derived from it

In his essay “Proust's Pinks”, Christopher Prendergast celebrates the author's use of the colour pink in À la recherche du temps perdu: https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/prousts-pinks

Can't say how pleased I am to read this. For 60 years, since many childhood holidays there, I've been baffled by 'the battle of Cruden Bay'. Now clarity descends, thankyou. #nosuchthing

Today’s Knowledge Common’s share explores enthusiasm for Vikings in Scotland from the 18th century and how that manifested in the folklore of Aberdeenshire #scotland #aberdeenshire #medievalsky #folklore #history #skystorians works.hcommons.org/records/b5j9... tse4.mm.bing.net/th/id/OIP.l8...

I just received the first copies of my book and I have to say it’s looking gorgeous! 😍 Thank you @reaktionbooks.bsky.social for making such a beautiful book #earlymodern

Nine little line drawings of flowers, vases, and other objects with the publisher's name, 錦書堂, incorporated into the design.

Slightly more elaborate ad design, as if written on a curling scroll of paper, reads: 貴客光顧請認省城學院前錦書堂為記.

This #WoodblockWednesday, musing over the creativity of this Guangzhou publisher's branding on nearly every page of its printed lists of successful provincial exam candidates. Making a dry subject just a little cute, page by page.

All from fasc reprint 清歷科廣東鄉試錄 search.worldcat.org/title/34561437

Tangut Winter School 2026 | Elling Eide Center Tangut Winter School 2026 Join the Tangut Winter School 2026 for five days of lectures and guided readings on Buddhist texts, history, law codes, and more.T ...

Call for applications: Tangut Winter School 2026 at the Elling Eide Center, January 5-9, 2026. Apply by November 1 for this 5-day (funded!) immersion in Buddhist texts, history, law codes, and more.

Just four recent acquisitions I'm moving off my desk. Some Latin Arabic type from Rome; Engraved bio of John of the Cross; Martini's history of China; and another of the only known copies of a unique San Francisco Chinese imprint from the 1880s (probably the most important yet).

We invite applications for British Academy/Leverhulme Senior Research Fellowships 2025. The scheme supports established and senior researchers in the humanities and social sciences wishing to complete research through a sustained period of leave for one year. Apply now: https://bit.ly/3VMeTZ9

CfP for a panel on the polemic of illusion and materiality in the transcultural context for the upcoming AAH annual conference at Cambridge. This panel will be convened by me and Sumi from Kyoto University: forarthistory.org.uk/questioning-...

Funded Research Fellowships Pursue your research with the Warburg Institute’s world-renowned collections.

Applications are open for our funded fellowships!

📚 Long- and short-term fellowships in cultural, intellectual & art history
🎨 New Frances A Yates Curatorial Fellowship
📚 Joint fellowship with Villa I Tatti

Find out more: warburg.sas.ac.uk/research-fel...

#ResearchFellowship #CulturalHistory

CfP for an exciting animal panel at the upcoming Association of Art History Conference (University of Cambridge, 8-10 April 2026). A great opportunity for Chinese animal / art scholars! 🎨🐝🐸