On October 8-10, 2015, the Department of Asian Languages and Civilizations hosted the Annual Meeting of the American Oriental Society, Western Branch to great success. They hosted about 80 domestic and international participants, 52 of which presented papers. The feedback received from participants as well as the audience—mostly colleagues and graduate students in Chinese Studies—was overwhelmingly positive. This event undoubtedly helped to strengthen the excellent reputation and visibility of the Chinese program at Boulder, both within the US and abroad.
The success of the meeting is not the least owed to the visit of the keynote speaker, Professor Xiaofei Tian of Harvard University. Owing to her outstanding reputation in our field, Professor Tian’s presence may well have been one of the reasons that the number of participants was higher than we had expected so that there had to even be concurrent panels for part of the time. Apart from the keynote speech itself, which introduced a fascinating facet of medieval Chinese literary history, the M.A. graduate students, some of whom are considering to continue to PhD studies at Harvard, had the opportunity to make Professor Tian’s personal acquaintance.