Remembering the Dead in Late Medieval China (7th–10th c.)
Alexei Ditter, PhD
10 May, 2025     9:30 - 11 am 
Remembering—the articulation of past experience in language—often involves collaboration: sharing recollections, reminiscing together about people or experiences, or commemorating historical events within interpersonal, social, or cultural contexts. During these collaborations, significant details are added, altered, or removed, contexts and timelines redefined, and content adjusted to achieve a desired audience response. Join First Saturday PDX in this talk as Dr Alexei Ditter focuses on collaborative remembering that occurred during the production of the late medieval Chinese entombed epitaph (muzhiming 墓誌銘), an important form of funerary epigraphy.

Entombed epitaphs are square stone slabs that were inscribed, in prose and verse, with an account of the character and experiences of the deceased.  Professor Ditter will introduce the different actors—informants, authors, families, calligraphers, and craftsmen—that worked together across discrete stages—prewriting, writing, editing, calligraphing, and inscription— to produce the entombed epitaph.  Moreover, he will discuss the different objectives—personal, social, political, and commercial—that shaped the content of the epitaph text, sites of contention and negotiation in their recorded memories, and how understanding collaborative practices of memory making can shed new insight into medieval commemorative cultures within China and beyond.
About the speaker:  
Alexei Kamran DITTER (Ph.D., Princeton) is Professor of Chinese and Humanities at Reed College. His research explores interactions between social and textual practices in late medieval Chinese literature, focusing on questions of place, genre, and memory. His publications include articles and book chapters on twentieth-century literary histories of the Tang, civil examinations and cover letters in late-eighth-century China, conceptions of urban space in Duan Chengshi’s 9th c. Records of Monasteries and Stupas, and the commercialization of funerary writing in the mid- to late-Tang. A strong believer in collaborative and cross-disciplinary research, in recent years he has co-edited two volumes of translations: with Jessey J.C. Choo and Sarah M. Allen, Tales from Tang China: Selections from the Taiping guangji (Hackett, 2017) and with Xiao Rao, Laughter, Humor, and Comedy in Middle Period China, 600-1400 (Amsterdam UP, under review). He is currently working on a monograph studying collaborative remembering in late medieval China and finalizing, with Jessey J.C. Choo, an anthology of late medieval entombed epitaphs.​
​​​For those interested in continuing the conversation, there will be a no host lunch family style with the speaker at a Chinese restaurant afterwards.   Please let us know if you are joining when you register for the program so that we can make the proper arrangements.
Check-in begins promptly at 9:15am
​Please meet at the SOUTH SIDE entrance doors
(north side doors are to the Physics side of the building)

​**This is an on-site presentation. 
Reed College, Biology Building, B19 Auditorium (lower level)
3203 SE Woodstock Blvd, Portland, OR 97202

The large East Parking Lot (free) is conveniently located nearby to the Biology Building, adjacent to the neighboring ETC (Educational Technology Center), see campus map here

Public transportation is available, plan your TriMet trip HERE.  (The #19 bus stops right on SE Woodstock East Parking entrance to the campus.

​We recommend that attendees be vaccinated and boosted, and follow CDC guidelines regarding masking.
Our program series is supported by Reed College, Northwest China Council, Lan Su Chinese Garden,  Portland Chinatown Museum and Portland State University's Institute for Asian Studies.   ​
​All our programs are free and open to the public.   ​