Talk by Prof. Scott Pearce, Western Washington University.

Thursday, October 16, 2025
2:00 PM - 3:15 PM (Pacific Time)
Young Hall CS76

This talk is part of Chinese 50 - Chinese Civilization.

Placing a 524 Maitreya altarpiece, now held by New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, in the social, political and religious context of the last years of the Northern Wei Dynasty (386-534).

Scott Pearce took his PhD at Princeton, under the direction of Denis Twitchett, and now teaches at Western Washington University, in the state of Washington, USA. His research focuses on the political, military and social history of the Northern Dynasties, including Northern Wei and its sixth-century successor states. In addition to a Cambridge History of China chapter, he has published a book on Northern Wei (386-534): a new form of empire in East Asia, which came out from Oxford in 2023. This was an effort to produce a full history of that dynasty, stretching back into its Inner Asian origins. He is now at work on a successor volume on the later Northern Dynasties, in part through time recently spent as a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and at NYU’s Institute for Study of the Ancient World, in New York City.

Sponsor(s): Center for Chinese Studies, Center for Buddhist Studies