A cultural, historical, and practical guidebook to Kagawa Prefecture on the island of Shikoku across the narrow Seto Inland Sea from the main island of Japan. Formerly the province of Sanuki, a compact area with convenient train lines, it has great potential for tourism. An active region culturally for more than 2,000 years, it was the birthplace…[Read more]

A cultural, historical, and practical guidebook to Kagawa Prefecture on the island of Shikoku across the narrow Seto Inland Sea from the main island of Japan. Formerly the province of Sanuki, a compact area with convenient train lines, it has great potential for tourism. An active region culturally for more than 2,000 years, it was the birthplace…[Read more]

This is a summary of 12 contributions made by me for the blog “The Genealogical World of Phylogenetic Networks” in 2017. The contributions are shared in form of a PDF document with a table of contents that allows for a quick search of the contributions and offers also the direct links to the blog.

This is a summary of 12 contributions made by me for the blog “The Genealogical World of Phylogenetic Networks” in 2016. The contributions are shared in form of a PDF document with a table of contents that allows for a quick search of the contributions and offers also the direct links to the blog.

Repair has visibly come to the fore in recent academic and policy debates, to the point that ‘repair studies’ is now emerging as a novel focus of research. Through the lens of repair, scholars with diverse backgrounds are coming together to rethink our relationships with the human-made matters, tools and objects that are the material mesh in whi…[Read more]

The presentation suggests how faculty members in the East Asian context can contribute to the local community as well as to their university through online video production. One experiment with the technology of videoblogging, while abroad with students in New Zealand, back to a campus blog in Japan through the Internet, which the presenter termed…[Read more]

This is an outline of how the Leys d’amors, a fourteenth-century troubadour treatise of huge influence on post-troubadour poetry, catalogued rhymes according to merit. It is used in my classes of 35399 Medieval Catalan Literature II, degree in Catalan Philology, at the Universitat de València (http://go.uv.es/ozQkp3H).

Despite a period of almost two decades in which quantitative approaches in historical linguistics have been increasingly used, gaining constantly more popularity even among predominantly qualitatively oriented linguists, we find many problems in the field of computational historical linguistics, which have only sporadically been addressed. In the…[Read more]

Short audio to download, introduces Keisei Awa no Naruto, a Bunraku puppet play, followed by discussion questions for educational use. This 18th Century Chikamatsu play plumbs the depths of pathos with Sophoclean fatalism, leaving the listener wondering, among other things, why such a drama of ‘mono no aware’ is still performed as a puppet play.…[Read more]

By comparing the languages of the world, we gain invaluable insights into human prehistory, predating the appearance of written records by thousands of years. The traditional methods for language comparison are based on manual data inspection. With more and more data available, they reach their practical limits. Computer applications, however,…[Read more]

A report published by the Sutton Trust and Social Mobility Commission this week, ‘Elitist Britain’, found that two fifths (39%) of Britain’s ‘leading people’ were educated privately, more than five times as many as in the population as a whole, with almost one quarter (24%) graduating from Oxbridge. I therefore thought it would be timely to publis…[Read more]

The author contrasts Japan’s unsurpassed cultural preservation with the destruction of irreplaceable treasures of humanity in Afghanistan and Central Asia, showing the limitations of UNESCO and what factors lead to designation or not of World Heritage Sites. This short podcast concludes by theorizing how discrimination against women originated,…[Read more]

A literary and historical introduction to the printed and manuscript materials composing the Great Peace (Taiping 太平) textual corpus, with a critical assessment of several modern Chinese editions thereof, followed by a revised review of THE SCRIPTURE ON GREAT PEACE: THE TAIPING JING AND THE BEGINNINGS OF DAOISM, translated by Barbara Hen…[Read more]

Review of “L’itinéraire de Marco Polo dans sa traversée de la Chine”, by Philippe Ménard (MEDIOEVO ROMANZO, vol. 26 [3rd Series, vol. 7], fasc. 3 [2002]: 321–360).

Based on a cluster of Great Peace (taiping 太平) and Weft (wei 緯) materials dealing with stages in human reproduction (impregnation, gestation, intrauterine infancy, birth) and the logic governing annual cycles, this study shows how ontological and cosmological representations were translated into religious discourse and practice in early medie…[Read more]

Historiography, morphological analysis, textual study and full translation into French of Chinese manuscript Stein no. 4226 from Dunhuang in the British Library (Or.8210/S.4226/R.1).

A state-of-the-art study of popular movements and religiosity in Late Antiquity China (1st–2nd cent. CE), focused on issues of theology, practice, sources and terminology, and including a critical assessment of received scholarship.

Review of MAKING TRANSCENDENTS: ASCETICS AND SOCIAL MEMORY IN EARLY MEDIEVAL CHINA. By Robert Ford Campany. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2009. Pp. xviii + 300.

Review of THE CHENWEI RIDDLE: TIME, STARS, AND HEROES IN THE APOCRYPHA. By Licia Di Giacinto. (Deutsche Ostasienstudien, vol. 13). Gossenberg: Ostasien Verlag, 2013. Pp. xi + 332. 25 Figures, 40 Tables, 4 Appendices, List of Illustrations, Bibliography.