2026: The ‘Classics’ in East-West Exchange.

The focus of the Janus Project in 2025–6 is the rhetoric of antiquity and ‘Classics’ in intellectual and cultural exchange between East Asia and the West. Our seminar series this year will be held online on a monthly basis from October through May. Talks will explore how, why, and to what effect appeals to antiquity and notions of ‘Classics’ were used to communicate between East Asia and the West.

Programme of speakers TBA. If you would like to give a paper, please contact Cynthia Liu (cynthia.liu@classics.ox.ac.uk).

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2025: No Seminar

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2024: “Greco-Roman and Classical Chinese Translation: Theory and Practice”

This seminar series is intended to look more broadly at Latin translations of Chinese texts, Chinese translations of Greco-Roman texts, and translation as theory and practice within and between both traditions.

The seminar will take place in Trinity Term (27 Apr–15 June) 2024. The seminar will be held Fridays 2:00-3:30pm GMT in the Ioannou Centre weeks 1-7.

Week 1: Benjamin Sharkey (Oxford) on “Christian scriptural and classical translation and transmission in Asia before the Jesuits.”

Week 2: Ross Moncrieff (Oxford) on “The Jesuits and Neo-Confucianism: A Comparative Philosophical Approach to Confucius Sinarum Philosophus.”

Week 3: Lea Cantor (Cambridge) on “Plato’s and Zhuangzi’s shared argument against the view that only one thing exists.”

Week 4: Kai Chen (Oxford) on “Greece as Mirror: Reassessing China’s Cultural Identity through Classical Scholarship in the Early 20th Century.”

Week 5: Simone Mollea and Elisa della Calce (Università di Torino) on “The Latin Confucius. The Translation techniques of the Confucius Sinarum Philosophus (1687).”

Week 6: Justine Potts (Oxford) on “Daring translation and mistranslation: Stephen Weston and the Qianlong emperor’s poetry on chicken cups (with a note on Keats’s reception of Eastern and Western Classics).”

Week 7: Cynthia Liu (Oxford) and Xiaojing Miao (Oxford) on “Latinizing Chinese and Sinicizing Latin: a joint examination of Angelo Zottoli’s translations of Tang poetry.