Janus: Language and Text between East Asian and Greco-Roman Classics, University of Oxford, June 15–16, 2025

Over the past decade, a surge of interest in the global reception of Classics has generated a growing body of scholarship that engages with texts and cultures beyond Greece and Rome, especially in Mexico and South America, India, and Eastern Europe. The Janus Project was launched in January 2024 to direct this energy still further east towards another body of texts also known as Classics: the ancient East Asian philosophical and literary canon, and the commentary and pedagogical traditions that grew up around it. The inaugural Janus conference will bring together scholars working on any point of confluence between Greco-Roman and East Asian ‘Classics’. We invite proposals for papers engaging with any aspect of the textual and linguistic interaction between Greco-Roman and Classical Chinese traditions. The conference will showcase the breadth and depth of the field, explore the potential for cross-disciplinary collaboration, and build connections within and between specialties. Selected papers from the conference will be published as an edited volume or special journal issue.

Potential topics include:

• The effect of the introduction of Latin and Greek in Asia, not only on classical Chinese but on indigenous Asian languages. Conversely, the impact on Latin (and to a lesser extent Greek) of its encounter with and use by native speakers of Asian languages.
• The translations between Latin and Chinese texts, and the new texts which were produced in both languages as a result of the confluence of classical traditions.
• The influence of Greco-Roman classics on translations of Chinese texts for European audiences.
• How available readings of both canons changed as a result of this encounter – and the new ways of interpreting, teaching, and commenting on canonical texts generated by approaches of scholars trained in the other tradition (e.g. of scholars trained in the western liberal arts and humanities reading Confucius).
• How different traditions of commentaries merged in translations of classical texts.
• How conceptions of canon in both cultures (and of linguistic and literary canonicity) changed as a result of the confluence of these two text cultures.
• The ways in which both the western classical canon and the Asian canon were tools of cultural exchange in Europe and in Asia, and in turn were shaped by their encounters with readers in different culture.

We invite 20-minute paper proposals of no more than 500 words from scholars working in any area related to the intersection of Greco-Roman and East Asian classical language and texts. We would be particularly happy to see submissions of collaborative papers between two scholars working from different fields.

The conference, sponsored by the University of Oxford Faculty of Classics and Oxford University Press John Fell Fund, will be held 15-16 June 2024 at the Ioannou Centre.