Silk Road Symposium, 6-7 November 2023

Readers in Cambridge may be interested in this hybrid symposium “Beyond the Spice Route: Knowledge Transmission and Material Culture in Premodern Maritime Asia (700-1400 CE)” on 6th and 7th November 2023 at King’s College Cambridge, and also online. More details can be found here.

Organizers: Francesco Bianchini and Andrea Acri

Program:

Monday, November 6th (Afternoon Session)

In Person (Audit Room) and Online

15:00 – 15:05 Welcome address by members of King’s “Silk Roads Programme”

15:05 – 15:30 Andrea Acri (EPHE/EFEO) “Keynote Address”

15:30 – 16:00 Francesco Bianchini (King’s College Cambridge) “Bathing, Health and Knowledge Exchange: Perspective from Monsoon Asia”

Coffee Break

16:15 – 17:00 Anne Blackburn (Cornell University) “The ‘Pali Arena’ as Heuristic: Linking Intellectual and Material Histories in Early Second-Millennium Southern Asia” (Online)

17:00 – 17:45 Jinah Kim (Harvard University) “An Ambitious Itinerary: Journey across the Medieval Buddhist World in a Book”

Tuesday, November 7th (Morning Session)

In Person (Audit Room) and Online

9:00 – 9:45 Tansen Sen (NYU Shanghai) “When did Maritime Asia End? Zheng He and the Issue of Periodization” (online)

9:45 – 10:30  Iwan Pranoto (Institut Teknologi Bandung) “Tracing the Transmission of Decimal Number Knowledge in Monsoon Asia” (online)

Coffee Break

10:45 – 11:30 Louis Copplestone (Harvard University) “Building on the Go: Mechanisms of Exchange and Buddhist Architectural Networks in Medieval Southern Asia”

11:30 – 12:15 Gregory Sattler (UCLA) “Rethinking Tenth-Century Diplomacy in East Asia: New Perspectives on Relations between Japan, the Korean Peninsula, and a Politically Fragmented China”

Tuesday, November 7th (Afternoon Session)

In Person (Audit Room) and Online

14:00 14:45 Anwesha Das (Emory University) “Weaving Pieces Together: Material Culture in the Medieval Indian Ocean (12th-15th CE)” (online)

14:45 15:30 Bill Mak (ISF Academy), Kunthea Chhom (Apsara National Authority) “Maritime Transmission of Indian Astral Science in Southeast Asia: Notes on Indian Calendrics and Time Reckoning in Khmer and Javanese Inscriptions”

Coffee Break

15:45 – 16:30 Tom Hoogervorst (KITLV, Leiden) “Culinary Contact in the Pre-Modern Indian Ocean”

16:30 – 17:15 Alex West (Independent Researcher) “The Hemispheric Middle Ages and Maritime Asia”

17.15 – 17.45 Final discussion

Online attendance and further information:

For Zoom links, abstracts, and the latest updates please visit the “Events” webpage of King’s College Silk Roads Programme: