Education

  • Harvard University 1989-1996 PhD, Comparative Literature (Chinese, Greek, and Latin literatures, with emphasis on early narrative and the development of historiography). Dissertation: “Foundations of Chinese Historiography: Literary Representation in Zuo zhuan and Guoyu.”
  • National Taiwan University 1986-1988 Elective Student, Department of Chinese Literature
  • Stanford University 1982-1986 A.B., Humanities Special Programs: Comparative Literature: English, Chinese and German.

Research

  • Pre-Qin Chinese historiography and thought; Chinese poetry; Chinese, Greek, and Latin comparative literature.

Field of Interest

Classical Chinese Poetry and Thought

Publications

  • A Patterned Past: Form and Thought in Early Chinese Historiography (Harvard East Asian Monographs, 2005). Winner of the Joesph Levenson Prize of the Association of Asian Studies, 2003 (pre-1900 category).
  • “Authoritative Rhetorics: Prose.” Contribution to A Supplement to the Cambridge History of China, Volume I: Qin and Han (forthcoming).
  • “Playing at Critique: Indirect Remonstrance and the Formation of Shi m Identity.” In Text and Ritual in Early China, ed. Martin Kern  (2005).
  • “The Anecdotal Hero in the Shiji.” In Studies on the Shiji: A Volume of Collected Essays, ed. Michael Puett (forthcoming).
  • “Platitude and Persona: Junzi comments in Zuozhuan and Beyond.” In Historical Truth, Historical Criticism, and Ideology: Chinese Historiography and Historical Culture from a New Comparative Perspective, ed. Helwig Schmidt-Glintzer et al. (2005).
  • “Command and the Content of Tradition.” In The Magnitude of Ming, ed. Christopher Lupke (2004).
  • “Truth and Ritual Judgment: On Narrative Sense in China’s Earliest Historiography.” Historically Speaking: Newsletter of the Historical Society (March 2004).
  • Review of Moss Roberts, trans., Laozi: Dao De Jing: The Book of the Way. Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (forthcoming).
  • Review of Yuri Pines, Foundations of Confucian Thought: Intellectual Life in the Chunqiu Period (722-453 B.C.E.); Journal of Asian Studies 63 (2004).
  • “The Logic of Signs in Early Chinese Rhetoric.” In Thinking Through Comparison: Ancient China and Greece, ed. Stephen Durrant and Steven Shankman (2002).
  • “Song and Commemoration in Early China.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 59 (Dec. 1999).
  • “Travel, Geography, and the Imperial Imagination in Fifth-Century Athens and Han China,” Comparative Literature 51 (Spring 1999).
  • “Remonstrance in Eastern Zhou Historiography.” Early China 22 (Spring 1998).