Faculty Publications

Our ideas about Confucius come from the stories told about him. He often appears as the great sage of ancient China, handing down timeless moral precepts to his disciples and to posterity. Yet over the course of twenty-five centuries, Confucius has meant...

China’s early medieval period, from the fifth through the early seventh century, from the Northern and Southern Dynasties through the unified Sui, was a time of political fragmentation, military strife, and ethnic conflict. It also witnessed brilliant...

We possess two separate manuscripts for the Tadhkira of Sūt Bībī, about the life and deeds of Sūt Bībī, a prominent saint of Yarkand. One of these is from the Jarring collection (Prov. 6), the other from the Hartmann collection (Ms. or. oct. 1727). Both...

《源氏物语》是诞生于十一世纪的日本文学瑰宝，不仅具有极高的文学价值，而且对后世日本的艺术、文化和社会都产生了不可估量的影响。1510年《源氏物语画帖》是世界上已知现存最古老、最完整的源氏物语绘画和书法作品集，由大内氏家臣陶氏家族定制，三条西实隆与玄清协调组织，六位贵族书法家献笔，土佐光信及其领导的绘所绘制而成。这部书画集不仅反映了中世日本统治阶层（包括贵族和武士）对《源氏物语》文化内涵的阐释，也体现了以土佐光信为代表的中世绘画艺术家对传统宫廷艺术的继承与绘画技法的创新。 钻研日本美术文化

Japan’s oceans demand our attention. Violent, prolific, and changeful, they define life and death on the archipelago: pushing the shore under the rush of tsunami, charging typhoon circulation, feeding millions, and seeding conflicts over territory and...

Canvasing a range of materials that include early tales of exemplarity, medieval song lyrics, Ming-Qing poetry and plucked rhymes, twentieth century writings about revolutionaries, opera stars, missionaries, and contemporary fiction, this volume...

Interweaving a star-crossed romance with the decline and fall of the Ming dynasty in mid seventeenth-century China, The Peach Blossom Fan by Kong Shangren (1648-1718) is a masterpiece of world literature. This sweeping historical drama encompasses the...

Winner, 2025 Katherine Singer Kovács Book Award, Society for Cinema and Media Studies

Winner, 2024 Moving Image Book Award, Kraszna-Krausz Foundation

Winner, 2024 Choice Outstanding Academic Title

Honorable Mention, 2025 Joseph Levenson Prize (post-1900)...

Winner, 2024 Choice Outstanding Academic Title

Edo-period Japan was a golden age for commercial literature. A host of new narrative genres cast their gaze across the social landscape, probed the realms of history and the fantastic, and breathed new life...

Literary History in and beyond China: Reading Text and World explores the idea of literary history across the long span of the Chinese tradition. Although much scholarship on Chinese literature may be characterized as doing the work of literary history...

Why would an inkstone have a poem inscribed on it? Early modern Chinese writers did not limit themselves to working with brushes and ink, and their texts were not confined to woodblock-printed books or the boundaries of the paper page. Poets carved lines...

Playwriting in many forms flourished during the late Ming and early Qing dynasties. Shorter theatrical genres in particular offered playwrights opportunities for experimentation with both dramatic form and social critique. Despite their originality and...

Winner, 2023 Choice Outstanding Academic Title

Our relationship with things abounds with paradoxes. People assign value to objects in ways that are often deeply personal or idiosyncratic yet at the same time rooted in specific cultural and historical...

As the first intellectual history of Song, Yuan, and Ming China written from a local perspective, Localizing Learning shows how literati learning in Wuzhou came to encompass examination studies, Neo-Confucian moral philosophy, historical and Classical...

Yan Zhitui (531–590s) was a courtier and cultural luminary who lived a colourful life during one of the most chaotic periods, known as the Northern and Southern Dynasties, in Chinese history. Beginning his career in the southern Liang court, he was taken...

『유대칭가 고문서』는 하버드－옌칭도서관에 소장되어 있는 8점의 고문서를 탈초, 번역하고 연구한 논문을 엮은 것이다.

이 고문서들은 충청도 부여에 세거했던 유대칭을 선조로 하는 기계유씨 가문과 관련된 것들로 조선후기 이 가문의 사정을 알려주는 자료이다. 고문서가 담고 있는 정보는 단편적이지만 다른 사료와 함께 사용할 때 조선후기 한 가문의 역사를 이해하는데 중요한 자료이다. 또한 고문서를 활용한 사례연구가 집적될 때 조선후기 사회와 문화에 대한 이해는 더욱...

This is the first collection of essays in English, contributed by well-known experts of Chinese literature as well as scholars of a younger generation, dedicated to the poetry of Du Fu, commonly regarded as the greatest Chinese poet. These essays are...

In Utopian Ruins Jie Li traces the creation, preservation, and elision of memories about China's Mao era by envisioning a virtual museum that reckons with both its utopian yearnings and its cataclysmic reverberations. Li proposes a critical framework for...

As the political, economic, and cultural center of Chosŏn Korea, eighteenth-century Seoul epitomized a society in flux: It was a bustling, worldly metropolis into which things and people from all over the country flowed. In this book, Si Nae Park examines...

In Global Healing: Literature, Advocacy, Care, Karen Laura Thornber analyzes how narratives from diverse communities globally engage with a broad variety of diseases and other serious health conditions and advocate for empathic, compassionate, and...

he volume on Semantics and Pragmatics presents a collection of studies on linguistic meaning in Japanese, either as conventionally encoded in linguistic form (the field of semantics) or as generated by the interaction of form with context (the field of...

This book explores the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) military, its impact on local society, and its many legacies for Chinese society. It is based on extensive original research by scholars using the methodology of historical anthropology, an approach that has...

Written in the eleventh century by the Japanese noblewoman Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji is a masterpiece of prose and poetry that is widely considered the world’s first novel. Melissa McCormick provides a unique companion to Murasaki’s tale that...

The turn of the third century CE—known as the Jian’an era or Three Kingdoms period—holds double significance for the Chinese cultural tradition. Its writings laid the foundation of classical poetry and literary criticism. Its historical personages and...

"From the cry of a tiny insect, one can hear the sound of a vast world. . . ."

So begins Zhang Daye’s preface to The World of a Tiny Insect, his haunting memoir of war and its aftermath. In 1861, when China’s devastating Taiping rebellion began, Zhang was...

Winner of a 2006 Choice Magazine Outstanding Academic Title Award

As medieval Chinese manuscripts were copied and recopied through the centuries, both mistakes and deliberate editorial changes were introduced, thereby affecting readers' impressions of the...

This book explores the parallel and yet profoundly different ways of seeing the outside world and engaging with the foreign at two important moments of dislocation in Chinese history, namely, the early medieval period commonly known as the Northern and...

The Liang dynasty (502–557) is one of the most brilliant and creative periods in Chinese history and one of the most underestimated and misunderstood. Under the Liang, literary activities, such as writing, editing, anthologizing, and cataloguing, were...