Thursday April 27

5pm     Annual Tang Lecture in Silk Road Studies

            Heyns Room, The Faculty Club

The Book and the Silk Roads

Amanda Goodman (University of Toronto)

Followed by reception

Friday April 28

Maude Fife Room, 315 Wheeler Hall

9am Welcome Address

            Sanjyot Mehendale, Chair of the Tang Center for Silk Road Studies

9:30 Astronomy

  Chair: Brian Baumann (UC Berkeley)

Yoichi Isahaya (Hokkaido University)

Converting a Science into Another: Mongols’ Imperial Attitude toward Sciences

Robert Morrison (Bowdoin College)

Merchants of Knowledge in the Eastern Mediterranean

Bill M. Mak (Chinese Research Center, ISF Academy, Hong Kong)

From Zero to Infinity — China’s Encounter with Indian Mathematics

11:45 Lunch break

1:30 Geography and Cartography

  Chair: Franck Billé (UC Berkeley)

Hyunhee Park (CUNY)

Mapping India in Medieval Eurasia via the Silk Roads

Kaveh Hemmat (Benedictine University)

The Role of Geographical Knowledge in Islamicate Social and Political Theory

Kenzheakhmet Nurlan (Harvard University)

European-Chinese Imperial Maps Related to Kazakh Khanate in the 16-19 Centuries

3:45 Cultivation and Textiles

Chair: Sanjyot Mehendale (UC Berkeley)

Chiara Gasparini (University of Oregon)

Chinese baohua Weavings in the Making of 8th Century Buddhist and Islamic Societies

Carol Bier (Graduate Theological Union)

Pattern-Making and Textile Technologies across Asia

Angela Sheng (McMaster)

Some Memory Devices of Early Chinese Textile Technologies and Their Diffusion (or Not)

Robert Spengler (Max Planck)

The Cotton Road: Tracing the Ancient Spread of a Commodity through Inner Asia 

Saturday April 29

Maude Fife Room, 315 Wheeler Hall

9:30 Pharmacopeia and Materia Medica

        Chair: Stacey van Vleet (UC Berkeley)

Yan Liu (SUNY)

Scented Protection: A Transcultural History of Aromatic Medicines in Medieval China

Miranda Brown (University of Michigan)

Milk in Chinese Medicine: A Silk Road Innovation?

Sean Bradley (University of Washington)

Traveling Formulas: Foreign Drugs in Chinese Medicine

11:45 Lunch break



1:30 Medicine and Epidemiology

Chair: Dominic Steavu (UC Santa Barbara)

Christos Lynteris (St. Andrews University, Scotland)

Plague and Human-Animal Relations on the Silk Roads (1871-1911)

Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim (Goldsmiths, University of London)

What Moves and What Does Not Move

Stacey van Vleet (UC Berkeley)

Potency and Purity: Debating Buddhism, Medicine and Governance in Qing Inner Asia

3:45 Manuscriptology and Codicology

Chair/Discussant: Amanda Goodman (University of Toronto)

Brandon Dotson (Georgetown University)

Adaptation, Networks, and Dice Divination from India to Central Asia to Africa

Shih-shan Susan Huang (Rice University)

Buddhist Book Roads: From Turfan to Beijing to Hangzhou in the 13th and 14th Centuries