Weibke Denecke, associate professor of Chinese, Japanese, and comparative literature, became the first BU recipient of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s prestigious New Directions Fellowship. The fellowship will allow Denecke to travel with her family to China, Korea, and Japan throughout next year to research all-but-forgotten poetry from the 7th through 12th centuries C.E.
Once the “Latin” of East Asia, Classical Chinese was the shared language of government, Buddhism, scholarship, and high literature for almost two millennia. In the early twentieth century, the Japanese, Koreans, and Vietnamese abandoned Classical Chinese, promoting their vernacular tongues as their nations’ official languages. One result of this was that the region lost a common literary heritage. She believes these ancient documents may hold an important key to harmony in East Asia, promoting what she calls a “positive transnational identity.” Rediscovering Classical Chinese, Denecke argues, might help East Asia heal the war wounds of the recent past. Read more