Professor David Leopold Holm
Professor of Chinese Room 213 Tel: + 61 3 8344 5990 |
Background
David Holm completed a doctoral thesis at Oxford University on the genesis of the Chinese Communist Party's cultural policies during the War of Resistance against the Japanese (1937-1945), and went on to write a book on the transformation of the folk arts and the village drama movement in the Party's wartime base areas. During the 1980's he conducted fieldwork on the processions and traditional forms of theatre and music of the Chinese New Year in Northwest China. In the 1990's he was part of an international research group coordinating a large-scale survey of ritual theatre traditions in thirteen Chinese provinces, a project that led to the publication of 80 volumes in the series Studies in Ritual, Theatre and Folklore under the general editorship of Professor Wang Ch'iu-kuei. He also began work on the textual traditions and performance culture of the Zhuang, a Tai-speaking people and China's largest minority group.
Research Interests
Holm's work on the Zhuang has led to the publication of two recent books, /Killing a Buffalo for the Ancestors/ (2003) and /Recalling Lost Souls /(2004), and the establishment of a research team to edit Zhuang traditional texts and survey regional varieties of the old Zhuang character script. The Zhuang Texts Project has attracted international interest and international collaboration. Current publication projects include the songs of Zhuang female shamans, traditional Zhuang funeral songs, texts of puppet plays, and the ritual texts of Zhuang vernacular priests (boumo). Holm's scholarly interests cover many aspects of traditional Chinese culture, including regional theatre (mainly north China), art-song, traditional shawm and percussion music, woodblock prints (NewYear pictures), dialectology, minority languages, cultural geography, traditional material culture, ethnobotany, and the study of indigenous and primordial religions.