“Global Reception of the Classic Zhuangzi: Han to Tang”
University of California at Berkeley, March 8-9, 2019
Workshop Participants
(IEAS Conference Room, 1995 University Avenue)
Friederike Assandri, Visting Assistant Professor, University of Leipzig
Webpage: https://www.zo.uni-heidelberg.de/sinologie/institute/staff/assandri/index.html
Friederike Assandri is an adjunct professor at the China Center of Technical University, Berlin, and research associate of the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Heidelberg. She earned her PhD in sinology at the Ruprecht-Karls-University, Heidelberg. She has published widely on the Twofold-Mystery (chongxuan) philosophy including, amongst others, Beyond the Daode jing: Twofold Mystery Philosophy in Tang Daoism and Dispute zwischen Daoisten und Buddhisten im Fodao lunheng des Daoxuan (596-667).
David Chai, Assistant Professor, Chinese University of Hong Kong
Webpage: http://www.phil.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/web/academic/chai-david/
David Chai is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He earned his PhD from the University of Toronto. His principal area of research is ancient and early medieval Chinese philosophy with an emphasis on Daoism. He has published widely on the Zhuangzi including monographs on Zhuangzi and the Becoming of Nothingness and on Early Zhuangzi Commentaries: On the Sounds and Meanings of the Inner Chapter, as well as various articles comparing the Zhuangzi with Derrida, Habermas, Hegel, and Heidegger.
Jesse Chapman, PhD, Independent Scholar
Email Address: contactjchapman@gmail.com
Jesse Chapman earned a PhD in Chinese Language from the University of California, Berkeley in 2015, and he has since served as a postdoctoral fellow in Chinese Studies at the Center for East Asian Studies at Stanford University and as a visiting lecturer in History at the University of Oklahoma-Norman and at the University of California, Merced. His scholarly interests center on exegesis, the interpretation of signs, and the relationship between technical texts and historical and literary writing. His publications include “Unwholesome Bodies: Reading the Sign of the Amputated Foot in Early China” (Asia Major, 2017), “Lao-Zhuang in the Vernacular: Two Evolutionary Readings,” (Journal of Modern Chinese History, 2017) and a series of articles on East Asian records of celestial phenomena produced in collaboration with the astrophysicist Ralph Neuhäuser (University of Jena). He is currently working on a monograph, entitled Celestial Signs and Classical Authority in Han Times.
Scott Cook, Professor, Yale-NUS College
Webpage: https://www.yale-nus.edu.sg/about/faculty/scott-cook/
Scott Cook received his PhD in Chinese from the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Michigan. Beginning in 2014, he has served as Tan Chin Tuan Professor of Chinese Studies at Yale-NUS College in Singapore. He specializes in pre-Qin textual studies and early Chinese intellectual history. He is author of the books The Bamboo Texts of Guodian: A Study and Complete Translation, vols. 1-2, The Pre-Imperial Confucian Texts of Guodian: Broad and Focused Perspectives, A Multi-Perspective Survey of Lost Warring States Texts among the Shanghai-Museum and Other Chu Manuscripts (Shangbo deng Chujian Zhanguo yishu zonghenglan 上博等楚簡戰國逸書縱橫覽), editor of Hiding the World in the World: Uneven Discourses on the Zhuangzi, and the author of over seventy articles in English and Chinese.
Mark Csikszentmihalyi, Professor, University of California, Berkeley
Webpage: http://ealc.berkeley.edu/people/csikszentmihalyi-mark
Mark Csikszentmihalyi is Eliaser Chair in International Studies and Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his PhD in Asian languages from Stanford University and has published on the culture and history of early China. His publications include Readings in Han Chinese Thought and Material Virtue: Ethics and the Body in Early China. He also co-founded the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion.
Jiang Limei 蒋丽梅, Lecturer, Beijing Normal University
Email Address: pennyjlm@126.com
Jiang Limei earned her PhD in philosophy from Beijing University and is currently an associate professor of philosophy and social sciences at Beijing Normal University. She has widely published on Daoism during the Wei/Jin period with a focus on Dark Learning (xuanxue) and Wang Bi’s commentaries. Her publications include a monograph, titled Studies on Wang Bi’s Commentary on the Laozi (Wang Bi Laozi zhu yanjiu 王弼《老子注》研究), as well as various articles such as “A Comparison between Wang Bi and Tasan’s Commentaries to the Yijing” (“Wang Bi yu Chashan yixue bijiao” 王弼与茶山易学比较), “The Daoist Concept of Self-so (“ziran”) and the Construction of Subjective Freedom” (“Daojia ziran yu zhuti ziyouxing de jianli” 道家自然与主体自由性的建立), “Values of Dao and Ideas of Space in the Zhuangzi” (“Zhuangzi kongjian yishi zhong de jiazhi shijie”《庄子》空间意识中的价值世界), or “Reflections on Wang Bi’s Commentary on the Hexagram “Guan” (Observing)” (“Wang Bi ‘guan’ gua shiyi” 王弼《观》卦释义).
Esther Sunkyung Klein, Lecturer, University of Sydney
Webpage: https://sydney.edu.au/arts/slc/staff/profiles/esther.klein.php
Esther Klein is a lecturer for Chinese in the School of Languages and Cultures at the University of Sydney. She received her PhD in East Asian Studies from Princeton University. Recently, Brill released her first monograph, titled Reading Sima Qian from Han to Song: The Father of History in Pre-Modern China. In addition to her work on Chinese historiography, she has co-published a ground-breaking philosophical translation of the Hengxian excavated manuscript into English (Dao 12.2) and has provided important critiques of the idea that the Zhuangzi’s “Inner Chapters” are the “authentic” and most authoritative voice of Master Zhuang in a couple of articles published in T’oung Pao and Having a Word with Angus Graham.
Liu Xiaogan 劉笑敢, Professor Emeritus, Chinese University of Hong Kong
Richard John Lynn, Professor Emeritus, University of Toronto
Webpage: https://www.utoronto.academia.edu/RichardJohnLynn
Richard John Lynn is Professor Emeritus in the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Toronto. He earned his PhD in Asian Languages from Stanford University. He has published several monographs on Chinese poetics and literature, as well as translated both the Classic of Changes and the Classic of the Way and Virtue as interpreted by Wang Bi (226-249 CE) with Columbia University Press in 1994 and 1999, respectively. Recently, he has been working on a full translation of the Zhuangzi as interpreted by Guo Xiang (c. 252-312 CE) that will be published by Columbia University Press in 2019/20.
Wendy Swartz, Professor, Rutgers University
Webpage: https://asianstudies.rutgers.edu/menu-i/41-faculty/faculty-profiles/74-wendy-swartz
Wendy Swartz is Professor of Chinese Literature in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at Rutgers University. She earned her PhD in pre-modern Chinese literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of Reading Philosophy, Writing Poetry: Intertextual Modes of Making Meaning in Early Medieval China, which examines how poets intertextually used philosophical classics such as the Laozi, Zhuangzi, and the Classic of Changes in order to produce unique reconfigurations and new meanings in their own textual œuvre. In addition, she authored Reading Tao Yuanming: Shifting Paradigms of Historical Reception (427-1900), a monograph that explores Tao’s reception over a fifteen-hundred year span, translated The Poetry of Xi Kang, and is the principal editor of Early Medieval China: A Sourcebook and Memory in Medieval China: Text, Ritual, and Community.
Mercedes Valmisa Oviedo, Assistant Professor, Gettysburg College
Webpage: https://gettysburg.academia.edu/MercedesValmisa
Mercedes Valmisa is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Andrew W. Mellon Faculty Fellow at Gettysburg College. She earned her PhD in East Asian Studies from Princeton University and a MA in Chinese Philosophy from National Taiwan University. She currently works on her first monograph, provisionally titled Adaptive Agency in Early China, which explores a unique solution to the problem of the efficacy of human (inter)action in the face of impermanent contexts, changing conditions, and what seemingly lies beyond human control. In addition, she is currently finishing two articles: “The Reification of Fate in Early China,” which will appear in Early China 42 (2019), and “The Happy Slave Isn’t Free: Relational Autonomy and Freedom in the Zhuangzi,” accepted by Philosophy Compass.
Brook Ziporyn, Professor, University of Chicago
Webpage: https://divinity.uchicago.edu/brook-ziporyn
Brook A. Ziporyn is Professor of Ancient and Medieval Chinese Religion, Philosophy, and Comparative Thought at the University of Chicago’s Divinity School. He received his PhD from the University of Michigan and has published various monographs on the Zhuangzi and Tiantai Buddhism. Currently, he is working on a cross-cultural inquiry into the themes of death, time and perception, tentatively entitled Against Being Here Now, as well as a book-length exposition of atheism as a form of religious and mystical experience in the intellectual histories of Europe, India and China.
Tobias Benedikt Zürn, Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in East Asian Religions, Washington University in St. Louis
Webpage: https://religiousstudies.wustl.edu/people/tobias-benedikt-zürn
Tobias Benedikt Zürn is a postdoctoral teaching fellow in East Asian religions at Washington University in St. Louis. He is a scholar of Daoist and Buddhist textual and visual cultures who explores various forms and practices of embodiment in East Asia. He earned his PhD in pre-modern Chinese religions and thought from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 2016. Recently, he has published an article in Early China 41 (2018), which analyzes the functions of agricultural imagery in the Mengzi, Zhuangzi, and Huainanzi’s discourses of governance and body politics, and contributed an analysis and annotated translation of the Tang tale “Monk Qixu” to William Nienhauser’s Tang Dynasty Tales: A Guided Reader Volume 2. In addition to his work on the Zhuangzi’s global reception history, he is currently working on his first monograph, tentatively titled Of Fabric, Forges, and Chariot Wheels: The Huainanzi’s Construction as a Wuwei-Performing Embodiment of the Way and an article, titled “Writing as Weaving: Intertextuality and the Huainanzi’s Self-Fashioning as an Embodiment of the Way,” forthcoming in the Journal of Asian Studies 79.2 (2020).