SINOLOGY
Eroticism in Chinese literature
University of Zurich, 2020
The course concentrates on the history of sex in China and the ways it was reflected in literature throughout the centuries. We will talk about historical, cultural and religious aspects that influenced traditional Chinese views on such concepts as ‘love’, ‘sexual appeal’, and ‘eroticism’. We will briefly discuss the history of homosexuality and intercourses with supernatural beings. A large part of the course will be dedicated to exploration of how eroticism in literature has developed and evolved throughout history and across genres, from the earliest sources such as Shijing to the 20th-century literature, from classical poetry to pornographic novels. We will read and discuss translations of excerpts from selected texts.
Writing, reading and distributing texts in medieval China
University of Zurich, 2019
This course gives an introduction to the practices of working with texts in medieval China. We will be examining, how different types of texts were created, collected, distributed and then read. Apart from discussing the material and linguistic aspects of writing, we will look into the philosophical and cultural notions that shaped the literary collections extant to our day and influenced the reading practices in premodern China.
Readings in Tang poetry
University of Zurich, 2018
This course gives a general introduction to the poetry of the Tang dynasty, the most celebrated period of poetic creation in Chinese history. For each section, we will be focusing on one of the most renowned poets and a number of their selected writings to analyze their individual styles of poetic composition and their places in the establishment and development of “Tang poetry” as a cultural phenomenon. More importantly, we will investigate the general aspects like pervasive themes, basic poetic forms, prosodic rules and social functions of Tang poems. The aim is to give the students a basic understanding of Tang poetry and provide them with the necessary techniques that facilitate its reading and analysis.
DIGITAL HUMANITIES
Digital humanities approaches to sinology: texts, tools and theories
University of Zurich, 2017
This course introduces main topics of Digital Humanities and their application to sinology. We will study basic methods and tools, which include retrieving information from online databases, working with corpora, problematics of word segmentation in Chinese, advanced text search with regular expressions and network analysis. We will also briefly explore two programming languages, widely used in the humanities – Python and R, in order to see, which possibilities they bring and how some of the typical research questions can be reformulated to become more “computer-friendly”. The overall objective of this course is to get the students acquainted with the current state of the field and to introduce the diverse possibilities brought by Digital Humanities, as well as the problematics of the field, both general and specific to sinology.
Data culture and digital humanities (recurring)
Higher School of Economics, St. Petersburg, 2018–2020
This course introduces students to the process of acquiring, understanding and evaluating different sources of information. We will talk about qualitative and quantitative approaches in humanities as different modes of understanding texts. We will discuss how ways we handle information shape not only research, but also everyday life. This course focuses on practical skills, such as application of basic statistics, evaluating the plausibility of data, search and text mining techniques useful to students, as well as information on handling texts in non-Latin scripts.