I am pleased to announce the very first DCC seminar in China, to be held in Shanghai, June 12–14, 2015. The event will be hosted by Shanghai Normal University and is being organized by Marc Mastrangelo, Professor of Classical Studies at Dickinson, and Jinyu Liu, Associate Professor of Classical Studies and Chair of the Classical Studies Department at DePauw University. Prof. Liu also holds the title of Shanghai “1000 plan” Expert/Distinguished Guest Professor at Shanghai Normal University.

The event will bring together Chinese scholars of the western classics around a project to create Chinese version of the Dickinson College Commentaries websites. The plan is to begin by producing a Mandarin version of our core vocabularies for Latin and Greek, with the hope of stimulating more wide-ranging collaborations in the future. In addition to Professors Mastrangelo, Liu, and myself, participating scholars will include Liu Chun (Peking University), Chen Wei (Zhejiang University), Bai Chunxiao (Zhejiang University), Huang Yang  (Fudan University), Zhang Wei (Fudan University), Wang Shaohui (Northeast Normal University, Institute for the History of Ancient Civilizations), and Xiong Ying (Nanjing University).

The inspiration for the project was a fascinating panel at the APA (2014), “Classics and Reaction: Modern China Confronts the Ancient West,” in which scholars from both North America and China (including Prof. Liu) describe the current flowering of the western classics in China, while also explaining the limitations of available resources.

We hope that a Chinese DCC will provide resources, for free and in Chinese, but also create a space for collaboration between Chinese and Western classical scholars. A Chinese DCC could provide free access to high quality scholarly resources for Chinese speakers who want to engage with western classical texts directly, both through translations and in the original, with Greek-Chinese and Latin-Chinese vocabularies, and interpretive notes on individual passages.

Generous support for the seminar is being provided by Dickinson College, The Roberts Fund for Classical Studies, Shanghai Normal University, and DePauw University.