China Humanities: The Individual in Chinese Culture

Peter K. Bol

Charles H. Carswell Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations

Harvard University

Peter K. Bol is the Charles H. Carswell Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, and the founding director of the Harvard Center for Geographic Analysis. He holds degrees from the University of Leiden and Princeton University. He began teaching at Harvard in 1985 and was named a Harvard College Professor for excellence in teaching. Bol and William Kirby have been teaching the history of China together since 1992.

Michael Puett

Walter C. Klein Professor of Chinese History and Anthropology

Harvard University

Michael Puett is the Walter C. Klein Professor of Chinese History and Anthropology at Harvard University. He is the recipient of a Harvard College Professorship for excellence in undergraduate teaching. He is the author of The Ambivalence of Creation: Debates Concerning Innovation and Artifice in Early China and To Become a God: Cosmology, Sacrifice, and Self-Divinization in Early China. He is also the co-author, with Adam Seligman, Robert Weller, and Bennett Simon, of Ritual and its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity , as well as the co-author, with Christine Gross-Loh, of The Path: What Chinese Philosophy Can Teach Us About the Good Life.

Eugene Wang

Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Professor of Asian Art

Harvard University

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.

Xiaofei Tian

Professor of Chinese Literature in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations

Harvard University

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.

Stephen Owen

James Bryant Conant University Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations

Harvard University

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

Professor of Chinese Literature in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations

Harvard University

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.