Dear fellow researchers,
We are two graduate students from Freie Universität Berlin and McGill University. We are actively looking for participants and discussants to join our panel on "Metamorphic Animals in the Sinosphere." Our panel will explore shapeshifting of animals as a cultural phenomenon and/or cultural product in the Sinosphere. The topics of current papers include:
1) dogs and cats as liminal beings of reincarnation and karmic change in contemporary Chinese Buddhist pilgrimage (anthropology; religious studies);
2) the rewriting of the female fox spirit (hulijing), a folklore figure, into a cyborg hunter in contemporary Chinese American sci-fi or "silkpunk" (literary studies).
We are looking for 1-2 additional participants and discussants to join us. We welcome papers focusing on animals and metamorphosis as means, process, and/or result. Your specific topics may relate to identities, subjectivities, boundary-crossing, becoming, empowerment, etc., in China and broader contexts across Asia. We are open to different disciplines, (historical) periods, and regions of interest (including those beyond the Sinosphere, with some flexibility to fine-tune our panel's boundary).
If you are interested, please send your short bio and abstract to Haolun SUN (haolun.sun@fu-berlin.de) and/or Ziwei JIANG (ziwei.jiang@mail.mcgill.ca). Questions regarding the panel and or ideas on your potential contributions to our panel are also welcomed. Please feel free to share this post with other researchers and students who might be interested.
Many thanks for your consideration! We are looking forward to hearing from you.
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Haolun Sun
Freie Universität Berlin
haolun.sun@fu-berlin.de
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