Sponsored by the Center for European Studies.
This lecture is part of the keynote address of the Graduate Early Modern Student Society Symposium (GEMSS), “Early Modern Land/scapes”
Yue Zhuang is Senior Lecturer in Chinese, Art History and Visual Culture at the University of Exeter. Trained as an architect, Yue Zhuang studied for her first PhD in Chinese architectural history and theory at Tianjin University in China. Her second PhD at the University of Edinburgh broadened her research interests to include the history and theory of 18th-century British landscape art. She then spent two years as an EU Marie Curie postdoctoral fellow at the University of Zurich (‘Asia and Europe’ Programme) before joining the University of Exeter in 2013.
Yue specializes in the landscape art history of China and Britain as well as the cross-cultural contacts between China and Europe in the early modern period. From 2011–2013, she was a principal investigator for Matteo Ripa’s “Views of Jehol”, an Intra-European Fellowship funded by EU Marie Curie Actions. Through an international symposium held in the Rietberg Museum in Zurich in 2013 and a volume of collected essays Entangled Landscapes co-edited by Yue, the project concludes with ‘entangled landscapes’ as a new paradigm for research innovation. From 2014–2018, Yue further developed this new paradigm in her second project ‘Nature Entangled,’ also funded by EU Marie Curie Actions. A sub-theme of this project, with a focus on Sir William Temple and his reception of China, was awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship (2016–2017). A recent publication ‘Gardens of happiness: Sir William Temple, temperance and China’ for this project may be viewed here.
Her current projects include completing a monograph for Routledge: Imperial Arcadia: Architecture, Landscape and the Funereal Imagination in 18th century Britain as well as essays exploring further the cultural entanglement surrounding the idea of gardens of happiness linking China and Europe in the late seventeenth and eighteenth century.
Moderator: Denise Castillo (Spanish and Portuguese, University of Wisconsin-Madison).