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 INTERESTS

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

PUBLICATIONS

“Classics.” In The Oxford Handbook of Classical Chinese Literature, edited by Wai-yee Li, Xiaofei Tian, and Wiebke Denecke. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.

“Speaking of Documents: Shu Citations in Warring States Texts.” In Origins of Chinese Political Thought: Studies in the Classic of Documents. Leiden: Brill, 2017.

Zuo Tradition / Zuozhuan: Commentary on the “Spring and Autumn Annals.” Translated by Stephen Durrant, Wai-yee Li, and David Schaberg. Classics of Chinese Thought. 3 volumes. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016.

“The Ruling Mind: Persuasion and the Origins of Chinese Psychology.” In The Rhetoric of Hiddenness in Traditional Chinese Culture, edited by Paula Varsano. SUNY Series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture. Albany: SUNY Press, 2016.

“On the Range and Performance of Laozi-style Tetrasyllables.” In Literary Forms of Argument in Pre-modern China, edited by Joachim Gentz and Dirk Meyer. Leiden: Brill, 2015.

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).

"Playing at Critique: Indirect Remonstrance and the Formation of Shi 士 Identity." In Text and Ritual in Early China, ed. Martin Kern  (2005).

"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 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).