Speaker: Benjamin Ridgway, Independent Scholar
Moderator: Beth Harper, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Date: Monday, June 8, 2026
Time: 4:00 pm Hong Kong Time
Venue: Faculty Lounge (Room 430), 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU
In Longing for Landscape Benjamin Ridgway explores a new song lyric style created by the famed poet Su Shi (1037–1101), which culminated during the poet’s political exile in the late eleventh century. Su Shi shifted the genre away from its origins in banquet entertainment and toward expressions of longing for place through two tropes of travel. The first was “leisurely strolling,” by which the poet expressed attachment to the present landscape; the second was “imagined travel,” by which the poet sought communion with admired figures in the past.
Employing theories of cultural memory and nostalgia, Ridgway argues that the next generation of song lyric writers—the so-called “crossing-south” poets, including Ye Mengde, Li Qingzhao, and Xiang Ziyin, who lived through the Jingkang disaster (1126–1127) and the subsequent collapse of the Northern Song and mass migration to the south—was inspired by Su’s new mode of memory poetics to develop a major strain of song lyrics focused on rootlessness and longing for a lost homeland in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. This talk brings the field of premodern Chinese poetry studies into conversation with comparative approaches in memory and migration studies and, by humanizing the writers of song lyrics, aims to offer a new perspective on the problem of longing for contested landscapes that will resonate with readers in our own time.
Benjamin Ridgway (白睿偉) received his PhD from the University of Michigan and he is an independent scholar. His research interests lie in classical Chinese poetry, travel literature, urban space in pre-14th century China, ecocritical approaches to premodern Chinese literature, and word and image relationships in Chinese poetry and painting. He has published articles in CLEAR, JCLC, JSYS, Frontiers in Chinese Literary Studies, Postmedieval, and in the volume, Senses of the City: Perceptions of Hangzhou & Southern Song China published by CUHK Press in 2017. His first book, Longing for Landscape: Displacement, Locality, and Cultural Memory in Song Dynasty Lyrics will be published by Harvard University Asia Center in Fall 2026.
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