The Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation International Sinological Center in Prague invites you to
A group of scholars from Europe and Taiwan will present a series of talks, readings, and discussions about poetry written in Chinese language by a variety of authors from China and Taiwan. Even though the focus is on modern poetry, classical language poetry will be touched upon as well. The summer school offers a unique opportunity to look at poetry from various angles and discuss methodologies, poetics, interpretations, and translations. At the core of this, there will be the pleasure of close reading of selected poems provided in advance.
The summer school is open to all interested students and scholars upon submission of an online application including a short letter of motivation and a brief CV (up to 1 page). Tuition is free for all participants. Participants from Central and Eastern European institutions are eligible for a limited number of CCK-F travel and accommodation grants; to apply, specify the estimated ticket price in the online application.
The application deadline is May 31, 2026, note of acceptation in the first week of June.
please find the link to the online registration here.
9:30–10:00 Registration (Faculty of Arts, nám. Jana Palacha 2, 1st floor, room 104)
10:00–10:15 Welcome and Technical information
10:15–12:45 Yang Zhiyi: Introduction to clasical poetic language and forms (limited reading materials)
12:45–14:15 Lunch
14:15–16:30 Olga Lomová: Introduction to the May Fourth poetry and main challenges for the new poets in terms of language and form: Hu Shi, Xu Zhimo, Wen Yiduo (limited reading materials)
19:00 Dinner reception (TBC)
9:30–11.00 Zhiyi Yang: Vernacular and Classicist Chinese Translations of the Rubáiyát
11:00–11:30 Coffee break
11:30–13:00 Zhiyi Yang: Vernacular and Classicist Chinese Translations of the Rubáiyát – reading session
13:00–14:30 Lunch
14:30–16:00 Joanna Krenz: Translating Modern Chinese Poetry in Central Europe
16:00–16:30 Coffee break
16:30–18:00 Joanna Krenz: Translating Modern Chinese Poetry in Central Europe – reading session
9:30–11:00 Frederico Picerini : Poetry as a sociocultural practice: social intervention and cultural politics in and beyond the poetic text
11:00–11:30 Coffee break
11:30–13:00 Frederico Picerini : Poetry as a sociocultural practice: social intervention and cultural politics in and beyond the poetic text – reading session
13:00–14:30 Lunch
14:30–16:00 Cultural programme (TBC)
9:30–11:00 Liao Hsien-hao: Taiwan Modernist Poetry
11:00–11:30 Coffee break
11:30–13:00 Liao Hsien-hao: Taiwan Modernist Poetry – reading session
13:00–14:30 Lunch
14:30–16:00 Andrea Riemenschnitter: Worlds Behind the Screen: Poetry, Technology, and Rewired Spirituality in Taiwan
16:00-16:30 Coffee break
16:30–18:00 Andrea Riemenschnitter: Worlds Behind the Screen: Poetry, Technology, and Rewired Spirituality in Taiwan – reading session
9:30–11:00 Šárka Masárková: Contemporary Unofficial Performance Poetry in the PRC: Verse and the Live Event
11:00–11:30 Coffee break
11:30–13:00 Šárka Masárková: Contemporary Unofficial Performance Poetry in the PRC: Verse and the Live Event – reading session
Yang Zhiyi: Vernacular and Classicist Chinese Translations of the Rubáiyát
Edward FitzGerald’s (1809-1883) creative adaptation of Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (hereafter Rubáiyát) in English verse is one of the most fascinating episodes in the history of world literature, and it is in turn translated into every literary language around the world. In Chinese alone, there have been two dozen published translations of Rubáiyát. I argue that it is precisely FitzGerald’s example that has given translators the creative license to continue Rubáiyát’s fantastical journey into lyric transculturality. Furthermore, the poetic form proves highly accommodating, allowing conflicting cultures and beliefs to be articulated in the voice of Omar Khayyám, whose poetic persona takes new shape with every translation. While May Fourth translators like Hu Shi and Guo Moruo saw in Rubáiyát inspirations for their revolutionary romanticism, more recent translators like Kerson Huang, Sui Qian, and Zhong Jin have chosen to translate Rubáiyát into classical Chinese jueju quatrains, hereby signaling a return to classicism. Their choice is also inspired by the Persian genre’s similarity (if not historical connection) to the Chinese jueju, hereby closing a transcultural and transnational circuit of Rubáiyát’s journey across times, civilizations, beliefs, and styles. In this session, we will read a few vernacular and classicist translations of the Rubáiyát from Republican to contemporary China and discuss their respective strategies of alienation and domestication.
Joanna Krenz: Translating Modern Chinese Poetry in Central Europe
[to be confirmed]
Frederico Picerini : Poetry as a sociocultural practice: social intervention and cultural politics in and beyond the poetic text
Approaching contemporary poetry as a sociocultural practice can have numerous implications and mobilise different approaches. Overall, it means addressing poetry as an activity based on the interaction between the poetic text and the social context, which we will discuss along the following possible trajectories: a) the investigation or critique of social matters by the poetic text; b) the “turning social” of poetry, by becoming an instrument handled by authors who come from groups normally excluded from cultural activity; c) a praxis generated by the act of writing the text, creating networks and connections, building communities amongst poets or in a broader sense, or directly impacting the surrounding material space. Through specific case studies, we will especially focus on how texts are essential to understand socially-inflected poetic practices.
Liao Hsien-hao: Taiwan Modernist Poetry
[to be confirmed]
Andrea Riemenschnitter: Worlds Behind the Screen: Poetry, Technology, and Rewired Spirituality in Taiwan
This session explores how selected contemporary Taiwanese poems engage spiritual traditions amid a broader global crisis of political, technological, and spiritual world-making. Drawing on theoretical perspectives (among them N. Katherine Hayles and Donna Haraway), we will discuss emergent ways of reimagining relations and forms of kinship between humans, technology, and nonhuman presences. Particular attention will be paid to the poems’ reflections on the spectral persistence of local spiritual traditions and on the practice of “making kin” across species, bodies, and forms.
The lecture engages with Taiwan’s post-1996 democratic reforms and its policies of cultural pluralism, approached through the lens of Puyuma poet Ma Yi-hang’s bilingual long poem The Eye/s of Landscape and Work, which illuminates the predicament of threatened Indigenous languages and forms of knowledge. The reading session will turn to Xiao Ling’s poetry book Behind the Screen There Is Bodhisattva Maitreya, where Buddhist doctrine and digitally mediated everyday life collide and collude in subtle reflections on aesthetics, embodied spirits, and technological modernity.
Together, these two poets compellingly evoke Taiwan’s contemporary cultural moment: the formation of a pluralistic identity shaped by multiple colonialisms; the erosion of Indigenous values and worldviews through past coercive or inadvertent processes of Hanification, alongside presently undertaken official and grassroots efforts at their revival; the lifestyle-oriented transformation of Buddhist traditions; and the pervasive influence of technological infrastructure.
Šárka Masárková: Contemporary Unofficial Performance Poetry in the PRC: Verse and the Live Event
This lecture and subsequent reading session examine unofficial performance poetry from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) through the theoretical lens of Julia Lajta-Novak’s monograph, Live Poetry: An Integrated Approach to Poetry in Performance. Rather than treating oral delivery as a secondary iteration of a printed text, Lajta-Novak’s framework approaches live poetry as an autonomous, integrated medium where the physical event constitutes the primary object of analysis. By focusing on the dynamics of bodily presence, vocalisation, and the situational framing of the live setting, her methodology provides a systematic analytical toolkit for evaluating how poetry operates beyond the page. This study applies this framework to the highly creative, authentic, and experimental unofficial poetry scene in the PRC. The accompanying reading and viewing session centres on selected poetry performances by Yan Jun (颜峻), Feng (风), and Ya Gongzi (雅公子). As multidisciplinary figures whose broader creative output spans painting, music, and performance art, they use their live poetry as a crucial site of artistic convergence. By applying Lajta-Novak’s multi-layered model to these specific video recordings, the session demonstrates how her analytical categories accommodate the complex acoustic and kinetic features of contemporary Chinese performance poetry. Ultimately, the presentation illustrates how these artists utilise the unique parameters of the live event to cultivate independent cultural spaces and redefine poetic expression through physical, communal engagement.
Yang Zhiyi (JWG Universität Frankurt am Main)
Zhiyi Yang is professor of Sinology at Goethe University Frankfurt. Her research investigates how Chinese classical lyric traditions intersect with aesthetics, history, intellectual history, cultural memory, as well as media and culture. She is the author of Dialectics of Spontaneity: The Aesthetics and Ethics of Su Shi (1037-1101) in Poetry ((Brill, 2015; Chinese editions: Sanlian, 2018, 2025) and Poetry, History, Memory: Wang Jingwei and China in Dark Times (University of Michigan Press, 2023; Chinese editions: Linking, 2024; Yomimichi, 2025). She is currently completing a monograph on avant-garde classicist poetry in the Sinophone cyberspace. She also collaborates with scholars on an interdisciplinary project of global Sinophone classicisms and on aesthetics of democracy.
Joanna Krenz (Uniwersytet Adama Mickiewicza, Poznań)
Joanna Krenz is assistant professor of Chinese Language and Literature with the Adam Mickiewicz University. She recieved her BA and MA from the same university and obtained her PhD in Chinese Literature at Leiden University. She has also spent periods of language training at Yunnan Normal University and Central China Normal University. Her reaserch concerns modern chinese literature as well as translation of modern literature. She is the author of In Search of Singularity: Polish and Chinese Poetry Since 1989.
Federico Picerni (Università di Bologna):
Federico Picerni is assistant professor of Chinese literature with the University of Bologna. He received his BA and MA from the same university, and then obtained his PhD in Asian Studies from Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, in a double degree programme with Heidelberg University. He has also spent periods of fieldwork and language training at Xi’an Jiaotong University and Peking University. His research concerns the relation between cultural production and society. Specifically, he focuses on Chinese workers writers and poets, literary amateurism, (trans)cultural studies. His monography, Chinese Worker Writers: The Social and Textual Practice of Picun Literature Group, is forthcoming with Routledge.
Liao Hsien-hao 廖咸浩 (National Taiwan University)
Dr. Sebastian Hsien-hao Liao is Emeritus Professor at National Taiwan University (NTU). He is also President of the Taipei Chinese Center of International PEN. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford University and was post-doctoral fellow at Harvard University. He served at various important positions such as: Dean of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and the Social Sciences at NTU and Distinguished Professor of English and comparative literature at NTU, President of the Comparative Literature Association of ROC (Taiwan), and Commissioner of Culture at Taipei Municipal Government. His research interests include: contemporary literary and cultural theories (with an emphasis on Psychoanalytical theories and Posthumanist theories), comparative poetics, Modern Taiwan literature, modern Anglo-American literature, techno-humanities, Red-ology, the Chinese diaspora, Taoist aesthetics, creativity studies, cultural policy, etc. The books he has published include among others Love and Deconstruction, Brave New Century: Pre-modern, Modern, and Postmodern, Sorrows of Mending Heaven: Dream of the Red Chamber as National Allegory, Who Is Afraid of Meaninglessness: from the Avant-garde to Postmodernism. Two more books are forthcoming: Illusions of Identity: Taiwan Cinema since the New Wave, and Deleuze and Taoism. He has also edited volumes such as Beyond Apocalypse: The Plague, Globalization and the Anthropocene, The Fantasy of Bilingual Nation, The Multiplicities of China: Post-Western Perspectives on Traditional Chinese Culture, Stranger than Paradise: Reconceptualizing Globalization, Foreign Language Policy in the Age of AI, In the Shadow of Death: Cultural Reflections on War and Peace, AI and Humanity: A Cross-cultural Dialogue, and Coping with Post-Globalization: De-Composing or Re-Composing. He also writes modern and classical poetry. A collection of his recent poems, entitled “流沙墜簡” (Letters from Quick Sands), is forthcoming this year.
Andrea Riemenschnitter (Universität Zürich)
Andrea Riemenschnitter is Deputy Director of the Institute of Asian and Oriental Studies and Chair Professor of Modern Chinese Language and Literature, Institute of Asian and Oriental Studies, University of Zurich. Previously she taught at the University of Heidelberg. She is Honorary Fellow at Lingnan University, Hong Kong, and has held visiting professor positions and visiting research fellowships at Beijing Normal University, the University of California, Berkeley and Tsinghua University, Beijing. Her books include The Visible and the Invisible: Poems Leung Ping-kwan (ed., 2012); Carnival of the Gods. Mythology, Modernity and the Nation in China’s 20th Century (in German, 2011); Jia Pingwa – Stories from Taibai Mountain (ed., in German, 2009); Diasporic Histories. Archives of Chinese Transnationalism (ed. with D. Madsen, 2009); A Friend to the Text. Explorations of Chinese Antiquity (ed. with R. Altenburger and M. Lehnert, in German, 2009); Gao Xingjian – Sleepwalking. Reflections on Theatre (tr. with M. Gieselmann and others, in German, 2000); China Between Heaven and Earth. Literary Cosmography and National Crisis in the 17th Century (in German, 1998). In her research, she focuses on modern and contemporary Chinese literature and cultural history (late Ming to present), theories and methodology of cultural analysis, cultural flows and translation, environmental humanities, Hong Kong and sinophone studies, mythologies of/in modernity, theater and performance studies.
Šárka Masárová (Universita Karlova, Praha):
Šárka Masárová graduated in Chinese language and literature and English language and literature at the Faculty of Arts, Palacky University in Olomouc (1998 – 2005, Master’s dissertation topic (written in Czech) – “The Analysis of Sea Imagery in Shu Ting’s Poems”). She completed her PhD in modern and contemporary Chinese literature at the Department of Chinese Language and Literature, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, East China Normal University in Shanghai, China (2010 – 2014, full scholarship of China Scholarship Council; Doctoral dissertation topic – “The Contrast of Light and Darkness in the Poetry of Zhai Yongming”, written in Chinese, the dissertation title in Chinese -《翟永明诗歌之光与暗的对照》). In 2014 – 2016 she worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at Fudan University, Department of Chinese language and literature, her postdoctoral research was focused on the analysis of Haizi’s poetry. Her main research interest focuses on contemporary Chinese poetry, especially from Mainland China and comparative literature.
For more information on previous summer schools, see:
Prague Summer School of Chinese Poetry 2024: Modern Transformations
