Over the past decade, a surge of interest in the global reception of Classics has generated a growing body of scholarship that engages with texts and cultures beyond Greece and Rome, especially in Mexico and South America, India, and Eastern Europe. The Janus Project was launched in January 2024 to direct this energy still further east towards another body of texts also known as Classics: the ancient East Asian philosophical and literary canon, and the commentary and pedagogical traditions that grew up around it. The inaugural Janus conference will bring together scholars working on any point of confluence between Greco-Roman and East Asian ‘Classics’. The conference will showcase the breadth and depth of the field, explore the potential for cross-disciplinary collaboration, and build connections within and between specialties.
The conference is sponsored by the University of Oxford Faculty of Classics and Oxford University Press John Fell Fund.
Please direct any questions you may have to the conference organizers, Cynthia Liu and Charis Jo (mailto:admin@janus-project.org).
To register to attend in person, please email mailto:cynthia.liu@classics.ox.ac.uk by 3 June. The registration fee for in-person attendance, to include coffee/tea and lunch, is £10. If you have dietary requirements, please do let us know by 3 June.
To attend online, please email mailto:cynthia.liu@classics.ox.ac.uk by 14 June.
Programme
09:30-10:30 Session 4: Translation
Marco Gay (St. Anne’s College, Oxford) and Alberto Di Falco (Zhejiang International Studies University), Latin as obscene censorship in 20th-century translations of Jin Ping Mei
Beichen Xing (University of Bristol, Renmin University of China), Chinese Translation of Ancient Greek Drama: Three Stages
10:30-11:00 Coffee and Tea Break
11:00-12:00 Session 5: Online online
Xue Li (Beijing Foreign Studies University), Cross-cultural Communication between Stoic and Confucian Ethics – An analysis of Matteo Ricci’ Twenty-five Paragraphs
Tengda Ni (Beijing Normal University) Intellectual Liberty during the Han Dynasty: A Comparative Study of the Religious Criticism of Lucian and Wang Chong
12:00-13:30 Lunch
12:00-13:00 Practice-based talk
Wentao Zhai, Translating Latin Poetry into Chinese: Strategies and Examples from Virgil, Horace and Catullus
13:30-14:30 Session 6: Zottoli
Antonio de Caro (University of Zurich), Classics in a Time of Crisis: Fr. Angelo A. Zottoli as a Cultural Mediator between Confucianism and the classicità
Danchen Zhang (University of Warwick), Between classic and literature: Zottoli’s prefaces to the odes and his use of Zhu Xi’s interpretations
14:30-15:30 Session 7: Ancient Greek as Mediator
Kristina Chew (Rutgers University) online Ezra Pound’s Ideogrammic Use of Ancient Greek in his Poetry
Dimitra Amarantidou (University of Macau), Laozi’s Logos: Heraclitean echoes in modern Greek translations of the Daodejing
15:30-16:00 *Coffee and Tea Break
16:00-17:00 Session 8: Catholics and Classics
Maria Maciejewska (University of Innsbruck), China seen by an educated Jesuit – a classical example of Michael Boym
Akihiko Watanabe (Otsuma Women’s University) in seminario didicerunt litteras Latinas et Iaponicas: Catholicism and Classics in 16th~17th century Japan
17:00-17:30* Coffee and Tea Break
17:30-18:30 Keynote 2: Jinyu Liu (Emory University), From Epictetus’ Enchiridion to Ricci Matteo’s Twenty-five Sayings (二十五言)
