简介

My research spans the fields of literature, history, and textual criticism, and focuses on the canonical texts of early China, together with their later reception. I am particularly interested in exploring the gap between early meanings and functions of texts, and ways in which those texts were re-interpreted, adapted, and deployed in response to the lives and beliefs of later generations. My forthcoming book, The Commentarial Transformation of the Spring and Autumn, addresses a question that has puzzled scholars for centuries: how did the apparently factual and objective Spring and Autumn records come to be understood as conveying the judgments of Confucius? My book explores a group of early commentarial remarks on the Spring and Autumn that are embedded in the Zuǒ zhuàn, and that provide the missing link between ancient historiographical practices and later “Confucian” interpretations. I am also working on a second project that focuses on the Spring and Autumn itself, and examines the connection between its records and the religious and ritual practices of pre-Confucian China. I have a secondary interest in Chinese linguistics, particularly historical linguistics, and together with Richard VanNess Simmons (Rutgers) I co-edited a volume of essays, Studies in Chinese and Sino-Tibetan Linguistics: Dialect, Phonology, Transcription and Text (Academia Sinica Institute of Linguistics, 2014).