In her talk, Anna Shields, associate professor of Chinese at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, explores the impact of elite male friendship on the literary culture of the mid-Tang period (780s–820s), an era of great social and cultural change and the beginning of the epochal Tang-Song transition. Drawing from her book “One Who Knows Me: Friendship and Literary Culture in Mid- Tang China," Shields focuses on images of the “body” of the friend in mid-Tang poems, letters, and funerary texts. Thursday, April 24, 5 p.m., Humanities 180.