New Book | Performing Enlightenment: Buddhism and Theater
From Harvard UP (Professor Wang will present on the book at Yale this Thursday at 4pm as part of the China Colloquium Lecture Series) . . .
Mengxiao Wang, Performing Enlightenment: Buddhism and Theater in Early Modern China (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2026), 348 pages, ISBN: 978-0674303423, $53.
In early modern China, a major revival of Buddhism coincided with a surging fascination with theater. Buddhist monastics and laypeople increasingly participated in viewing, discussing, and writing plays. Far from merely serving as a medium for conveying religious teachings and practices, drama became a source of deep concern for Buddhists due to the perceived tension between spiritual discipline and worldly entertainment.
In Performing Enlightenment, Mengxiao Wang examines how Buddhist clerics and laity engaged with and drove innovations in theater during the late Ming and early Qing dynasties. Drawing on an extensive range of sources—including clerical sermons, scriptural commentaries, temple gazetteers, morality books, literati prose, and dramatic texts and paratexts—Wang argues that Ming-Qing Buddhists resolved the conflict between religion and entertainment by transforming theater into a creative mode of devotional practice. Consequently, playwriting, stage performance, and theatergoing all emerged as legitimate pathways to spiritual enlightenment. This interdisciplinary work provides fresh insights into Chinese studies, Buddhist studies, and theater studies while offering a comparative perspective on the complex interplay between religion, literature, and performance across cultures.
Mengxiao Wang is Assistant Professor of Chinese Literature at the University of Southern California. She received her PhD from Yale University and was the Sheng Yen Postdoctoral Fellow in Chinese Buddhism at UC Berkeley.
c o n t e n t s
List of Figures and Tables
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Note to the Reader
Introduction
1 Forbidding Theater
2 Philosophizing Theater
3 Playwright as Buddha
4 Drama as Scripture
5 Staging as Ritual
Coda
Appendix 1 Translation of Zhuhong’s “Jiyue”
Appendix 2 Translation of Zhida’s “Xiju gongtong”
Appendix 3 Plot Synopsis for Tanhuaji
Appendix 4 Plot Synopsis for Guiyuanjing
Appendix 5 Extant Editions of Guiyuanjing
Bibliography
Lecture | Richard Goddard on Huguenot Craftsmen in London, 1713–1744
From Eventbrite:
Richard Goddard | Protestant But Still French: West End Craftsmen, 1713–1744
French Protestant Church, London, 22 October 2026, 5.30pm
Richard Goddard will speak on “Protestant But Still French: West End Craftsmen during the Long Peace of 1713–1744.” The talk will be followed by a 6.30 concert, as Bloomsbury Baroque presents a musical celebration of David Garrick and his Huguenot connections.
Richard Goddard has published on his Huguenot ancestors, the Basire family as printmakers (2017), and on the Grignions as clock and watchmakers (2022); both studies are available as free downloads here.
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From Bloomsbury Festival:
Bloomsbury Baroque | Huguenot Music and David Garrick
French Protestant Church, London, 22 October 2026, 6.30pm
An evening of music by Huguenot composers with period instruments and readings of letters by David Garrick.
Bloomsbury Baroque will play a selection of music from the main Huguenot composers since their initial appearance in England during the seventeenth century to their established role in English cultural life in the late eighteenth century. We will focus on David Garrick’s work with musicians and connections to France to illustrate the changing place of this community within British life, with extracts from his letters read during the performance. Composers featured will include Nicholas Lanier, Peter Prelleur, and members of the Barthelemon family.
Members of Bloomsbury Baroque are active in a wide range of musical ventures, reflecting the diversity of London’s current early music scene, mirroring its eighteenth-century counterpart. The ensemble’s activities regularly include sacred music, theatrical productions, solo and chamber concerts, large-scale choral works, and music in taverns.
Philippa Hyde, soprano
William Summers, Baroque flute, recorder
Diane Moore, Baroque violin
Ibrahim Aziz, viola da Gamba, Baroque Cello
Yeo Yat-Soon, harpsichord
Concert tickets are available here»
Talk | Riva Arnold on Jewish Ritual Art of Rosh Hashanah
Andrea Zambelli ‘L’Honnesta’, Torah Crown (keter), ca. 1740–50, silver, parcel gilt
(New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2013.443)
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This talk is already sold out, but I’m glad for any excuse to post exquisite eighteenth-century silver from Venice. And for readers celebrating, happy new year. –CH
Riva Arnold | Looking at the Jewish Ritual Art of Rosh Hashanah
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 15 September 2026, 3pm
Join Riva Arnold, David Berg Foundation Senior Research Associate, to discover The Met’s Judaica collection with a focus on Jewish ritual art used in the synagogue. Timed with the High Holidays, a season rich in tradition and symbolism, this talk will examine exceptional works including a rare set of Torah finials from the Rothschild collection and an Italian Torah crown manufactured by silversmith Andrea Zambelli for an 18th-century Jewish community. The next tour in this series will be on 8 December 2026 in celebration of Hanukkah.
Julia Carver on William Hogarth’s Altarpiece in Bristol
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From the Bristol Museum & Art Gallery:
Julia Carver | William Hogarth’s Bristol Altarpiece
St Nicholas Church, Bristol, 17 September and 19 November, 2pm each afternoon
William Hogarth’s largest known work resides inside St Nicholas Church in Bristol. Drop into St Nicholas Church to see the vast triptych that was painted for St Mary Redcliffe in 1755/56. On September 17 and November 19, Julia Carver, curator of art at Bristol Museum & Art Gallery, will give an introduction to the painting and its remarkable journey around Bristol.
Depicting Christ’s Ascension on a central canvas flanked by The Sealing of the Sepulchre and The Three Marys at the Tomb, the triptych was commissioned as a new altarpiece for Bristol’s St Mary Redcliffe church. It was Hogarth’s only commission from the Church of England. He was paid £525, and the receipt still exists.
During the Victorian era Hogarth’s work was no longer thought to be suitable for St Mary Redcliffe, and attempts were made to sell it. Eventually, it was given to the Bristol Fine Art Academy, which became the Royal West of England Academy, in 1859. The work continued to present challenges for public display, not least due to its size. It was eventually rolled up and stored in the basement. Bristol Museum & Art Gallery officially acquired the triptych in 1955 from the Art Collections Fund, and it has been on display at St Nicholas Church since the 1970s.
Open afternoons in 2026
Thursday, 17 September, 2–3pm
Thursday, 19 November, 2–3pm
Conference | New Republic, New Worlds
From Colonial Williamsburg:
New Republic, New Worlds
Fifth and final meeting of the ‘For 2026’ Project
Williamsburg, 23–24 October 2026
Hosted by The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, the Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture, and William & Mary
The American Revolution forged a new nation out of thirteen British colonies, triggering a host of predictable and unexpected consequences. This conference will explore the novel circumstances, challenges, and opportunities of the transitional era that followed victory in the War for American Independence. What were the fresh constitutional and political structures fueled by the Revolution, and what were the possibilities in play then and after? How were families, communities, boundaries, and environments changed in the new era? What were the ambitions of this new nation, and what do we now know about how diverse communities assessed its prospects? How did the various peoples within its borders and beyond respond to this new moment?
New Republic, New Worlds, the final meeting of the five-year For 2026 project, brings into conversation scholarly and public-facing research exploring the far-reaching effects of the American Revolution. It will take place October 23–24, 2026, at the William & Mary School of Education and at Colonial Williamsburg in Williamsburg, Virginia. Daytime programs will take place on the campus of William & Mary and throughout the Historic Area of Colonial Williamsburg, with two evening plenaries open to the public with no pre-registration required. Full conference registration information will be available by September.
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e v e n i n g p l e n a r i e s
The Friday and Saturday evening plenaries are free and open to the public. Seating will be available on a first-come, first-served basis, and the recorded programs will be available online on both William & Mary and Colonial Williamsburg supported pages following the event.
Ronald Johnson | Entangled Alliances: Racialized Freedom and
Atlantic Diplomacy during the American Revolution
Art Museums of Colonial Williamsburg, 23 October 2026, 5pm (doors open at 4:30)
Dr. Ronald Angelo Johnson is the 2026–2027 Mellon Distinguished Scholar in Residence at the American Antiquarian Society and the Ralph and Bessie Mae Lynn Professor of History at Baylor University. He is the author two books: Entangled Alliances: Racialized Freedom and Atlantic Diplomacy during the American Revolution (Cornell University Press, 2025) and Diplomacy in Black and White: John Adams, Toussaint Louverture, and Their Atlantic World Alliance (UGA Press, 2014). He co-edited the volume In Search of Liberty: African American Internationalism in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World (UGA Press, 2021). His current book manuscript We Are All Equal: Turmoil and Triumph in the Early United States and Revolutionary Haiti is under contract with Princeton University Press.
Kathleen DuVal | The American Revolution and the Survival of Native Nations
Muscarelle Museum of Art, Williamsburg, 24 October 2026, 5pm (doors open at 4:30)
The American Revolution brought unprecedented challenges to Indigenous lives, land, and sovereignty in North America. Yet we can also tell the past 250 years of Native history as the story of surviving the creation of the United States. Focusing on Native history can help us put the American Revolution in the longer context of North America’s long past, present, and future.
Dr. Kathleen DuVal is the Carl W. Ernst Distinguished Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is a Guggenheim Fellow and the author of Native Nations: A Millennium in North America, which won the Pulitzer Prize, the Bancroft Prize, the Mark Lynton History Prize, and the Cundill History Prize. Her other books include Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution, The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent, and the U.S. history textbook Give Me Liberty!, co-authored with Eric Foner and Lisa McGirr. DuVal has published in the William and Mary Quarterly, the Journal of the Early Republic, The Atlantic, Time Magazine, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. She also appeared in the recent Ken Burns film, The American Revolution.
Online Talk | Mei Mei Rado on Chinoiserie Textile Designs
From the Cooper Hewitt:
Mei Mei Rado | Chinoiserie Designs in Textiles
Online, 8 July 2026, 1pm (ET)
Curtain, 1774–1811, after Jean-Baptiste Pillement, printed by Bromley Hall, copperplate printed cotton plain weave (New York: Cooper Hewitt, American Textile History Museum Collection, 2016-35-101).
Join Cooper Hewitt for an illustrated talk exploring a selection of chinoiserie (Chinese-inspired) designs used in works on paper and textiles from Cooper Hewitt’s permanent collection.
During the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, innovative chinoiserie designs in European textiles vividly reflected the cross-cultural exchanges fostered by global networks of trade, Jesuit missions, diplomatic contacts, and colonial expansions. Print sources, including illustrated travel accounts and decorative vignettes by artists such as François Boucher and Jean Pillement, provided major inspirations for the chinoiserie motifs across various textiles mediums, ranging from tapestry and silk, to embroidery and printed cotton. Used for furnishings or fashionable dress, these textiles offered Europeans visual knowledge and imaginative engagements with a distant land and foreign culture. Meanwhile, European chinoiserie textiles also travelled back to China, where they sparked a very different set of perceptions and imagination of the West. This is the third and final program of our recent series exploring the connections between Chinese and Western art and design from the seventeenth through the nineteenth century.
Registration is available here»
Mei Mei Rado is Assistant Professor at Bard Graduate Center, New York. Her research focuses on the history of textiles, dress, and decorative arts in China and France from the eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries. Previously Dr Rado served as Associate Curator of Costume and Textiles at Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Her recent monograph The Empire’s New Cloth: Cross-Cultural Textiles at the Qing Court (Yale University Press, 2025) was the winner of the 2026 Louis Gottschalk book prize of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and a finalist for the 2026 Charles Rufus Morey book award of the College Art Association.
Jamie Kwan is the Assistant Curator of Drawings, Prints and Graphic Design at Cooper Hewitt. Before her time at Cooper Hewitt, Kwan served as the Associate Curator at the Wende Museum, an institution focused on the Cold War in Culver City, California. She has also held positions at the Morgan Library & Museum, J. Paul Getty Museum, Huntington Library, and Getty Research Institute.
Tasting and Discussion | The Worlds That Chocolate Made
From Eventbrite:
The Worlds That Chocolate Made: A Tasting and Discussion
Tara Zanardi and Daniel Corpuz, as Facilitated by Adrian de León
Espacio de Culturas, New York University, 10 April, 3–5pm
Let’s talk Chocolate! Join Espacio de Culturas for an afternoon of delicious chocolate tasting while learning about its origins and history. On select Fridays throughout the semester, we offer programs that are hands-on and interactive under the title of ‘Fridays on the Patio’. These programs are free and open to the public with registration.
This event is in collaboration with SULO: The Philippine Studies Initiative at NYU, and includes a guided chocolate tasting, where you will be able to try chocolate crafted by Daniel Corpuz, a Filipino chocolatier based in New York City. The event will also feature a conversation with Tara Zanardi, a professor at Hunter College, who will explore the history and geopolitics of chocolate as they relate to the Americas and Philippines. The conversation will be facilitated by Adrian de León. Join us to appreciate the flavors of chocolate while also gaining insight into the systems that shape its production and accessibility—discovering the worlds that chocolate created.
Daniel Corpuz is a pastry chef and chocolatier based in New York City who graduated from the Culinary Institute of America, achieving his Associates Degree in Baking and Pastry and his Bachelor’s Degree in Food Business Administration in 2019. After working in Michelin restaurants like The Modern, One White Street, and The Clocktower, Daniel shifted to work primarily with chocolate as a result of the pandemic. This yielded the opportunity to be on Netflix’s School of Chocolate with world renowned Pastry Chef Amaury Guichon. Utilizing his Filipino-American background, he launched Daniel Corpuz Chocolatier. This chocolate brand centers on his upbringing while amplifying his industry experience by incorporating Filipino and Asian ingredients and flavors into his chocolates.
Tara Zanardi is Associate Professor of Art History at Hunter College, CUNY. Zanardi’s forthcoming book, Material Seduction: Charles III, Empire, and the Porcelain Cabinet at Aranjuez, 1760-65 (The Getty Research Institute), examines the king’s porcelain cabinet as a highly political and performative space and problematizes its imagery of empire and chinoiserie. Her current research includes an upcoming exhibition on chocolate, co-curated with Lynda Klich, and a book on the Real Gabinete de Historia Natural (opened, 1776). As Madrid’s first public museum, its global collections showcased the fluidity of art, science, ethnology, and archeology.
Lecture | Anne Lafont on Africaneries
From The Institute of Fine Arts:
Anne Lafont | Africaneries, or, Stylistic Dismemberment
Online and in-person, The Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, 22 April 2026, 6pm
Scroll of a viola da gamba, late 18th century, Italy (Paris: Musée de la musique, D.AD.23470).
The European Enlightenment invented a new exoticism from within the Rococo tradition. Informed by the craftsmanship, lines, and colors of the Far East, European artisans appropriated motifs, imitated them, and revived them in contexts of refined metropolitan luxury. A geography of taste thus emerged—one might even speak of a qualitative hierarchy of stylistic skills operating at the peripheries of European empires, which served as major suppliers of materials and decorative schemes for the applied arts in eighteenth-century Delft, Meissen, London, and Paris. At the heart of this cultural economy of sophisticated objects, one motif stands out: miniaturized and, in most cases, objectified Black figures. These are what I propose to call Africaneries—artworks whose cultural roots and formal qualities dissolved in the wake of the transatlantic slave trade, which accelerated the social and cultural death of Africans. My central question is this: how was the thread severed that once connected so-called African fetishes to the material culture of Black people in the Americas and, ultimately, to the decorative objects known as au Nègre in imperial Europe? In this experimental study, I attempt to restore the connections between these various objects of the early modern Black Atlantic.
Part of the Conversations in Modern European Art series.
Anne Lafont is an art historian and professor at École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris (EHESS). She is interested in material culture and aesthetics of the Black Atlantic and researches notion of African art in historiography. In 2019, she published a book entitled L’art et la Race: L’Africain (tout) contre l’œil des Lumières (to be published in English by the Getty Institute in 2027: Art and Race: The African (up) against the Enlightenment’s Eye) and participated in the exhibition Le modèle noir de Géricault à Matisse (Musée d’Orsay). During the 2021–22 academic year, she was Clark Professor in Williamstown and was awarded the Iris Foundation Award by the Bard Graduate Center for outstanding mid-career scholar. With François-Xavier Fauvelle, she co-edited the book L’Afrique et le monde: Histoires renouées de la préhistoire au XXIe siècle (La découverte, 2022). Her latest book is a collection of articles published in Brazil: A Arte dos mundos negros: historia, teoria, critica (Bazar do Tempo, 2023). She is now researching circulations of African objects in early modern Europe at the time of slavery as their presence and reception gave grounding to the conceptualization of fetishism in Western humanities (to be published in 2027). Another book in the making addresses how the Black Lives Matter movement specifically impacted the politics of French Heritage.
Lecture | Ana Lucia Araujo on the Work of Black Artists in the Americas
From The Institute of Fine Arts:
Ana Lucia Araujo | The Power of Art: The World Black Artists Made in the Americas
Daniel H. Silberberg Lecture Series
Online and in-person, The Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, 30 March 2026, 6pm
Iron crown, 34 × 45 cm, Real Fábrica de Ferro São João do Ipanema (Museu Paulista, Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil).
Throughout human history, men and women have used artistic expression to overcome the most horrible atrocities. Africans and their descendants also embraced artistic creation to survive the horrors of the Atlantic slave trade and slavery in the Americas, and to soothe their physical and spiritual wounds. Drawing on written and visual primary sources, artifacts, and artworks housed in archives and museums in the United States, Brazil, the United Kingdom, France, and the Netherlands, my book The Power of Art: The World Black Artists Made in the Americas combines history, art history, and art to tell the story of enslaved artists and examine the works they created in the Americas during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I argue that Black creators drew on the long and powerful heritage of African arts and knowledge, which they combined with European and Native American artistic traditions, to design artworks and objects that asserted a defying world of their own.
Many enslaved and freed artists modeled clay objects, forged magnificent iron pieces, wove textiles, mats, and baskets, carved wood and stone sculptures. These artists embraced the knowledge transmitted to them by their African ancestors, while also introducing innovations learned from European and indigenous creators. Drawing on these rich economic and cultural exchanges, African artists and their descendants in the Americas adapted and developed new techniques and combinations of forms and colors. When creating new artworks, these artists also embraced new materials to which they assigned new uses and meanings. I contend that artistic creation offered bondspeople relief and hope, and sometimes also opened to them a path to emancipation. Ultimately, by shedding new light on the works of enslaved Africans and their descendants, which still remain largely invisible in most museum collections, The Power of Art illuminates their long-lasting contributions to the development of visual arts in the Americas.
Registration is available here»
Ana Lucia Araujo is a historian of slavery, the transatlantic slave trade and the global African diaspora. Trained as a historian and as an art historian, she has explored the legacies of slavery, including the history of calls for reparations, memory, heritage, material, and visual culture of slavery. Her recent books are Humans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of Slavery (University of Chicago Press, 2024), The Gift: How Objects of Prestige Shaped the Atlantic Slave Trade and Colonialism (Cambridge University Press, 2024), and Reparations for Slavery and the Slave Trade: A Transnational and Comparative History (Bloomsbury, 2017, 2023). A John Solomon Guggenheim Fellow (2025), her work has also been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Getty Research Institute, the Institute of Advanced Study (Princeton, NJ), the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies at Universität Bonn (Germany), the Clark Art Institute, and the American Philosophical Society.
Seminar | Douglas Fordham on Joseph Wright and Metaphysical Images
Joseph Wright of Derby, The Old Man and Death, 1773, oil on canvas
(Hartford: Wadsworth Atheneum)
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This Newberry seminar is hosted by Alicia Caticha, with Meredith Gamer providing a response:
Douglas Fordham | Joseph Wright of Derby and the Metaphysical Image
Eighteenth-Century Studies Seminar
The Newberry Library, Chicago, Friday, 20 February 2026, 3–5pm
In a recent monograph on Joseph Wright of Derby, Matthew Craske locates the artist in a genteel Midlands culture where he cultivated a melancholic temperament and a preference for seclusion. Craske describes Wright as a “painter of darkness” who sought to “stimulate sympathetic emotions” and produce a pleasurable discomfort in viewers through sublime contrasts of light and shade. Drawing on Craske’s insights, this talk raises metaphysical questions about Wright’s representation of life, death, and afterlife. Was it possible in Georgian England for painting to serve as “a catalyst of focused attention and a source of open-ended reflection”? That is how Thomas Pfau defines the metaphysical image, and we will consider just how fitting that phrase may be in relation to Wright. Were Wright’s paintings able, and were Georgian viewers willing, to grasp a radical alterity separate from oneself?
Douglas Fordham is a historian of British art and the chair of the Art Department at the University of Virginia. He co-edited Art and the British Empire (2007), which helped to place empire at the center of the study of British art. His first monograph, British Art and the Seven Years’ War: Allegiance and Autonomy (2010) examined the relationship between imperial politics and artistic organization in eighteenth-century London. His second monograph, Aquatint Worlds: Travel, Print, and Empire (2019) considered how the newly discovered medium of aquatint printmaking conditioned the representation of cultures beyond Europe. Douglas is currently working on a book about metaphysics and Georgian painting.
This event is free, but all participants must register in advance. Space is limited, so please do not request a paper unless you plan to attend. Register and request paper»
The Eighteenth-Century Seminar is designed to foster research and inquiry across the scholarly disciplines in eighteenth-century studies. It aims to provide a methodologically diverse forum for work that engages ongoing discussions and debates along this historical and critical terrain. Each year the seminar sponsors one public lecture followed by questions and discussion, and two works-in-progress sessions featuring pre-circulated papers.
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