March 13, 2026

Early China Seminar Lecture Series

Title: “Conceptualizing Crisis in Early China”
Speaker: Shirley Chan, Macquarie University
Time: March 13, 2026 (4:30-6:30 PM EST)
Venue: Faculty House
*Please check the announcement board in the first floor lobby for room information.
**Please use the ‘Request Pre-circulated Paper’ link to RSVP by March 9. All visitors without a CUID are required to receive pre-authorization to gain access to Morningside campus as per guidelines of Columbia Morningside campus access. Attendees must present a government-issued ID with their name matching exactly the name registered for the event, along with an one-time QR code (via email), for entry.

Crisis is often spoken of as if its meaning were self-evident, yet what counts as a crisis and what counts as a response has never been singular. In early China, transmitted texts and recovered manuscripts reveal a striking variety of vocabularies for disruption, vocabularies that resist neat translation into modern categories. From the mythic story of Great Yu’s flood control, remembered as the archetype of ecological calamity, to bamboo slips that imagined disorder through illness and culinary balance, and finally to the Lüshi Chunqiu’s vision of the body politic as an organic system, these sources display a diversity of perspectives that together trace a distinctive trajectory of crisis-thinking. They suggest that crisis was never a single rupture to be overcome, but a recurring condition demanding unceasing vigilance and sustained attention.