Mark Csikszentmihalyi
Mark Csikszentmihalyi is Professor and Eliaser Chair of International Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He has an AB in East Asian Languages and Civilizations (Harvard) and a Ph.D in Asian Languages (Stanford). He uses both excavated and transmitted texts to reconstruct the religions, philosophies, and cultures of early China. Recent books include Material Virtue: Ethics and the Body in Early China (2004) and Readings in Han Chinese Thought (2006). He is currently translating a set of Song dynasty essays on the Zhuangzi. He is Editor of the Journal of Chinese Religions.
Tobias benedikt zürn
Tobias Benedikt Zürn is an assistant professor of premodern Chinese literature at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He is a scholar of early and medieval Chinese literature, religions, and material culture who examines how academic disciplines project and perpetuate modern and Eurocentric concepts onto the past and non-Western societies, a process he calls “theoretical imperialism.” He earned a PhD and MA in Chinese studies from the University of Wisconsin, Madison and a Magister Artium from the Ludwig-Maximilian’s University, Munich. His first monograph Text/Bodies: The Huainanzi’s Construction as a Powerful Scripture of the Way reconstructs the earliest conceptualization of efficacious writings in East Asia. Among others, he has published his work in the Journal of Asian Studies and Early China. Recently, he placed a piece on the conceptualization of writings as traces (ji 跡) in the edited volume The Craft of Oblivion: Aspects of Forgetting and Memory in Ancient China (SUNY Press, forthcoming), and contributed an essay on “Reception History and Early Chinese Classics” to Religions’ special issue on Global Laozegetics (quanqiu Laoxue 全球老學).