Co-hosted by Yale Club of Beijing and Yale Center Beijing

Event Time

Saturday, December 20, 2025

Registration & Light Dinner

18:00 - 18:30

Presentation and Q&A

18:30 - 20:00

Location

Yale Center Beijing 
36th Floor Tower B of IFC Building 8 Jianguomenwai Avenue Chaoyang District, Beijing (Yong'anli Subway Station, Exit C) 

Registration and Fees

Registration
Please click “HERE” to register. 

Ticket: RMB 30 for students and Yale alumni; RMB 60 for regular admission (The ticket covers a light meal).

*The registration fee for the event is non-refundable. Unless due to a force majeure reason, Yale Center Beijing will not refund any part of the registration fee if a participant fails to attend the event.

Walk-ins will not be accepted.

The event will be English, with AI-enabled captions translated into Chinese in real time.

Note: Seats are available on a first-come-first-served basis.

The Event

Why do literature and music from the medieval era continue to fascinate us? On December 20, Ardis Butterfield, Marie Borroff Professor of English and Professor of French and Music at Yale University, will give a lecture based on her new edition, Medieval Lyrics in Britain. She will explore how language and lyric help us interpret the past, uncover the ideas and cultural dynamics embedded within them, and share how these themes have resonated in Yale’s classrooms.

The Speaker

Ardis Butterfield
Marie Borroff Professor of English, and (by courtesy) Professor of French and Music, Yale University

Ardis Butterfield specialises in the literatures and music of France and England from the 13th to 15th centuries. Her teaching and scholarship are grounded on continental and insular vernacular manuscripts and the social, material, and theoretical ways in which they record how writers and composers worked and thought. Her books include Poetry and Music in Medieval France (2002), and The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language and the Nation in the Hundred Years War (2009) which won the 2010 Society for French Studies R.H. Gapper Prize, was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title (2010), and was presented to the Académie Française. Born in Pakistan, and educated in South India and England, she completed her BA and PhD degrees at Trinity College, Cambridge. Before joining Yale in 2012, she was a Research Fellow at Downing College, and later Professor at University College London.