Dear T’ang Studies Society Member, This year we’re going to try something different. Below you will find the text of the annual State of the Society Letter and Board of Directors election materials. You will also receive a copy of these materials in the mail shortly. We hope that you will take advantage of the various electronic means available to vote and pay your 2012 T’ang Studies membership dues. To vote electronically, please send the names of your choices to vote@tangstudies.org with VOTE in the subject line. Don’t worry if you just hit REPLY to this email, we’ll sort it out. To pay your dues online via paypal, just go to http://tangstudies.org/Membership.html and select Regular or Student membership. Of course, we’ll still happily accept your ballot and dues by mail. Be sure to read the following letter. Lots of changes to take note of, including new mailing address for correspondence to the Society office. Best, mf *** STATE OF THE SOCIETY ANNUAL LETTER *** 14 December 2011 Dear T’ang Studies Society Members, It is my pleasure to once again write to you in our annual “state of the Society” letter. 2011 has brought a number of significant changes to the Society, and we are very excited about the future. At our March 2011 meeting, there were several changes in the ranks of the Society’s officers. Michael Drompp, after serving as President for six years, stepped down from that position, and Anna Shields was selected by the Board to serve as the Society’s President. Ding Xiang Warner, editor of T’ang Studies since 2005 also resigned her post, and Christopher Nugent was appointed by the Board to edit the journal. Finally, having also been in office since 2005, I announced a gradual resignation from the position of Secretary-Treasurer. The Board appointed Anthony DeBlasi to succeed me in this office, and Tony and I have been sharing secretarial and financial duties since March. Our new officers and editor come to us with long histories of involvement with the Society, energy, and great ideas for moving the Society forward in the coming years. The Board and Officers of the T’ang Studies Society are very grateful to the service offered by Professors Drompp, Warner, and Farmer. The Society and journal are much more vibrant and healthy due to their efforts. In March 2011, Stephen Bokenkamp, Suzanne Cahill, and Victor Xiong were elected to serve three-year terms on Board of Directors. We also wish to thank Board members Anthony DeBlasi, David Knechtges, and Amy McNair, whose terms expire in 2012, for their service on the Board over the past three years, and in the case of Prof. Knechtges, the past twenty years! The ballot for the 2012 Board election is enclosed, along with a pre-addressed envelope. Please mark your ballots and return them to Tony DeBlasi no later than 15 February 2012. You may also submit your vote via email to: vote@tangstudies.org. Volume 29 of T’ang Studies is currently in production and will be mailed to current members of the Society shortly. We are grateful to our editors, Ding Xiang Warner and Christopher Nugent, as well as our guest editor for this volume Jack Chen, for their efforts in bringing this issue to fruition. Again, we ask members of the Society to please keep T’ang Studies in mind as a potential venue for the publication of your own scholarly research on the Tang. Submission guidelines and procedures are located on the Society’s website (tangstudies.org), and submissions should be sent to Christopher Nugent at <cnugent@williams.edu>. Additionally, if your college or university library does not currently subscribe to T’ang Studies, please encourage them to do so. For information on institutional subscriptions, contact Helen Jakeman at <subscriptions@maney.co.uk>, or see the T’ang Studies page at Maney Publishing: www.maney.co.uk/journals/tng Last year we implemented a system allowing access to the back issues of T’ang Studies by current members. With the new year will come a new login code. Members whose 2012 dues are current will receive that updated access code. We ask that you please respect the copyright interests of the Society and our publishing partners and not share your username and password. Please take a few minutes to renew your Society membership for 2012. Regular membership is $35 per year; student membership is $20 per year. If your contact information has changed, please notify us of the changes. Checks drawn on U.S. banks can be sent to us directly. Additionally, we have established a PayPal online payment account allowing us to accept payment via credit card. All members are welcome to use this payment system, but we especially encourage our international (non-U.S.) members to pay in this manner. Changes in U.S. banking laws make it impossible for us to accept checks or money orders drawn on non-U.S. banks. For more information on membership and payment, see: http://www.tangstudies.org/Membership.html Please note, all correspondence by mail, including (especially!) dues and ballots, should now be sent to Tony DeBlasi at the following address: Anthony DeBlasi Humanities 244 Department of East Asian Studies University at Albany 1400 Washington Avenue Albany, NY 12222 You can reach us via email at admin@tangstudies.org Our next formal meeting will take place in conjunction with the upcoming annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies in Toronto from 15–18 March 2012. Our general meeting and reception will be held on Saturday, 17 March 2012 from 9:00-11:00 PM. The location will be in the AAS Program, and we will send an email reminder as we get closer to the date. We hope to see you there! Sincerely, J. Michael Farmer Secretary-Treasurer *** BOARD OF DIRECTORS ELECTION MATERIALS *** T’ang Studies Society 2012 Board of Directors Election Ballot Please choose THREE (3) of the following candidates for election to the TSS Board of Directors. Candidate biographies are provided on the accompanying sheet. Note candidates are listed here alphabetically. _____ Jack W. Chen _____ Linda Rui Feng _____ Richard D. McBride II _____ Amy McNair _____ James Robson _____ Ding Xiang Warner Write-in ________________________ Write-in ________________________ T’ang Studies Society 2012 Annual Election Candidate Biographies Jack W. Chen is Associate Professor of Chinese Poetry and Thought at UCLA. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University, his M.A. from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (both in Comparative Literature), and his B.A. in Literature from Yale. He is the author of The Poetics of Sovereignty: On Emperor Taizong of the Tang Dynasty (Harvard University Asia Center, 2010), and has written articles on gossip and historiography, the practice of reading, the history of imperial poetry, and most recently, the significance of the donkey's bray. He is also the guest editor of a special volume of T'ang Studies that focuses on Tang cities and literature, to which he has also contributed a paper on the anecdotal history of Anyi Ward in Chang'an. Jack's current work involves the visualization of networks for the Shishuo xinyu, which has caused him to spend much more time with datasets, geographical coordinates, and computational analysis than is natural for a literary scholar. Linda Rui Feng received her Ph.D. from Columbia University, and her B.A. from Harvard University. Her major research fields are premodern Chinese literature and cultural history, and to this end she works with materials ranging from informal prose anecdotes, narrative tales and poetry to vernacular novels and urban geographies. Her current book project, “Youthful Displacement: City, Travel and Narrative Formation in Tang Tales,” investigates the relationship between the literati elite’s formative experiences and their sojourns and encounters in Chang’an. She is especially interested in the interplay among urban space, social networks, courtesanship and narrative formation. Her major publications include "Unmasking Fengliu in Urban Chang’an: Rereading Beili zhi (Anecdotes from the Northern Ward)," Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 32 (2010): 1-21 and "Chang’an and Narratives of Experience in Tang Tales," Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 71, no. 1 (2011): 35-68. Richard D. McBride II is an Assistant Professor of History at Brigham Young University-Hawai'i. He earned a Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Cultures at UCLA in 2001, specializing in Buddhist Studies. He was a Mellon post-doctoral fellow at Washington University in St. Louis, 2004-2007, and Fulbright Senior Researcher in Korea, 2007-2008. He is the author of Domesticating the Dharma: Buddhist Cults and the Hwaom Synthesis in Silla Korea (University of Hawai'i Press, 2008), the editor of State and Society in Middle and Late Silla (Early Korea Project, Korea Institute, Harvard University, 2010), and numerous articles on medieval Chinese and Korean Buddhism. Amy McNair is Professor of Chinese Art History at the University of Kansas and the author of Donors of Longmen: Faith, Politics, and Patronage in Medieval Chinese Buddhist Sculpture (Hawai’i, 2007). Her research interests focus on Tang-dynasty material culture and its historical and religious contexts. James Robson is an Associate Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. He received his Ph.D. in Buddhist Studies from Stanford University in 2002. He specializes in the history of Medieval Chinese Buddhism and Daoism and is particularly interested in issues of sacred geography, local religious history, talismans, Chan/Zen Buddhism, and he has been engaged in a long-term collaborative research project with the École Française d’Extrême-Orient studying local religious statuary from Hunan province. He is the author of Power of Place: The Religious Landscape of the Southern Sacred Peak [Nanyue 南嶽] in Medieval China (Harvard Asia Center, 2009), which was awarded the Stanislas Julien Prize for 2010 by the French Academy of Inscriptions and Belles-Lettres [Prix Stanislas Julien by the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres (Institut de France)] and the 2010 Toshihide Numata Book Prize in Buddhism. He is the author of "Signs of Power: Talismanic Writings in Chinese Buddhism" (History of Religions 48:2), "Faith in Museums: On the Confluence of Museums and Religious Sites in Asia" (PMLA, 2010), and "A Tang Dynasty Chan Mummy [roushen] and a Modern Case of Furta Sacra? Investigating the Contested Bones of Shitou Xiqian." He is currently the President of the Society for the Study of Chinese Religions (SSCR). Ding Xiang Warner is an Associate Professor of Chinese Literature in the Department of Asian Studies. Her research interests are in the literature and culture of the Han through Tang dynasties and the history of text production and text culture in medieval China. In addition to a number of journal articles, she is the author of A Wild Deer amid Soaring Phoenixes: The Opposition Poetics of Wang Ji (University of Hawaii Press, 2003). In 2004–05, she was an NEH fellow at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina.Warner has served on the Western Branch of the American Oriental Society (2004–2007), the Board of Directors of the T’ang Studies Society (2003–2006), the Executive Committees of the MLA’s Division on East Asian Languages and Literatures to 1900 (2006-2010), and presently she is chair of the selection committee for the AAS Levenson Prize for Books on China before 1900. She is also a co-editor of the Brill Monograph Series for Studies in the History of Chinese Texts, and in 2011 she is the immediate past editor of T’ang Studies. -- T'ang Studies Society J. Michael Farmer Secretary-Treasurer