China Humanities: The Individual in Chinese Culture

Born in China in 1971, Xiaofei Tian graduated from Peking University in 1989 and obtained her PhD in Comparative Literature at Harvard in 1998. She is Professor of Chinese Literature and chair of Regional Studies East Asia program. Her translation of a nineteenth-century memoir, The World of a Tiny Insect: A Memoir of the Taiping Rebellion and Its Aftermath, was awarded the inaugural Patrick D. Hanan Prize by Association for Asian Studies in 2016. She was a Walter Channing Cabot Fellow in 2012. She has also published many Chinese-language books on Chinese and Western literatures, ranging from the 16th-century Chinese novel Jinpingmei to Sappho and the poetry of Moorish Spain.

Eugene Wang (Ph.D Harvard, 1997) began teaching at the University of Chicago in 1996 before joining the faculty at Harvard University in 1997. He was appointed the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Professor of Asian Art at Harvard in 2005. A Guggenheim Fellow (2005) and recipient of ACLS and Getty grants, he served as the art history associate editor of the Encyclopedia of Buddhism (Macmillan, 2004). His extensive publications cover the entire range of Chinese art history from ancient funerary art to modern and contemporary Chinese art and cinema. He serves on the advisory board of the Center for Advanced Studies, National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. and the editorial board of The Art Bulletin.

Michael Puett is the Walter C. Klein Professor of Chinese History and Chair of the Committee on the Study of Religion. He holds a joint appointment in the EALC and Anthropology departments. He is also a non-resident long-term fellow for programs in anthropological and historical sciences and the languages and civilizations of East Asia at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, Uppsala. Puett joined the Harvard faculty in 1994 after earning his M.A. (1987) and Ph.D. (1994) from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago.

Stephen Owen earned a B.A. (1968) and a Ph.D. (1972) in Chinese Language from Yale University. He taught there from 1972 to 1982, before coming to Harvard. In acknowledgment of his groundbreaking work that crosses the boundaries of multiple disciplines, Owen was awarded the James Bryant Conant University Professorship in 1997. He has been a Fulbright Scholar, held a Guggenheim Fellowship, and received a Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award (2006) among many other awards and honors. He specializes in premodern literature, lyric poetry, and comparative poetics.

Wai-yee Li has been Professor of Chinese Literature at Harvard since 2000. Li earned her B.A. from the University of Hong Kong and her Ph.D. from Princeton University (1987), where she was associate professor from 1996 to 2000. She also taught at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Li’s research spans topics ranging from early Chinese thought and narrative to late imperial Chinese literature and culture.

Peter K. Bol’s research is centered on the history of China’s cultural elites at the national and local levels from the 7th to the 17th century. He led Harvard’s university-wide effort to establish support for geospatial analysis in teaching and research; in 2005 he was named the first director of the Center for Geographic Analysis. As Vice Provost (2013/09–2018/10) he was responsible for HarvardX, the Harvard Initiative in Learning and Teaching, and research that connects online and residential learning. He also directs the China Historical Geographic Information Systems project, a collaboration between Harvard and Fudan University in Shanghai to create a GIS for 2000 years of Chinese history. In a collaboration between Harvard, Academia Sinica, and Peking University, he directs the China Biographical Database project, an online relational database currently of 420,000 historical figures that is being expanded to include all biographical data in China’s historical record over the last 2000 years.