Jack W. Chen

BIOGRAPHY

My research and teaching focuses on the literary and intellectual traditions of classical China, as well as broader issues in literary and cultural theory.  I am primarily interested in the medieval period, which is generally understood to span the periods between the Eastern Han and the end of the Tang, or from 100 CE to 900 CE, though I dabble with earlier and later periods on occasion.  I am also interested in computational methods for literary analysis, the history of information management in traditional China, gossip, and cats.  My current projects include co-editing a multivolume cultural history of Chinese literatures, co-editing a volume on "bad reading," and finishing a monograph on ghosts and lyric poetry. I taught previously at UCLA and Wellesley College, and received my BA in Literature from Yale, my MA in Comparative Literature from the University of Michigan, and my PhD in Comparative Literature from Harvard. I am also currently serving as Director of the Institute of the Humanities and Global Studies at UVA.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

BOOKS

• The Poetics of Sovereignty: On Emperor Taizong of the Tang Dynasty. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2010.
• Idle Talk: Gossip and Anecdote in Traditional China. Co-edited with David Schaberg. Berkeley: Global, Area, and International Archive and the University of California Press, 2013.
• Anecdote, Network, Gossip, Performance: Essays on the Shishuo xinyu. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center.
• Literary Information in China: A History. Co-edited with Anatoly Detwyler, Xiao Liu, Christopher M. B. Nugent, and Bruce Rusk. New York: Columbia University Press. 
• Literary History in and beyond China: Reading Text and World. Co-edited with Sarah M. Allen and Xiaofei Tian. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center.

SELECTED ARTICLES

• “Blank Spaces and Secret Histories: Questions of Historiographic Epistemology in Medieval China.” Journal of Asian Studies 69.4 (Nov., 2010): 1071–91.
• “On Hearing the Donkey’s Bray: Friendship, Ritual, and Social Convention in Medieval China.” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 33 (2011): 1–13. 
• “Sovereignty, Coinage, and Kinship in Early China.” positions: east asia critique 21, no. 3 (Fall, 2013): 637–58. 
• “Reading the Quan Tang shi: Literary History, Topic Modeling, Divergence Measures.” Co-authored with Peter Broadwell and David Shepard. Digital Humanities Quarterly 13, no. 4 (2019). http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/13/4/000434/000434.html. 
• “Fictionality in Early and Medieval China.” Co-authored with Sarah M. Allen. In “Medieval Fictionalities: A Forum,” edited by Bruce Holsinger. New Literary History 51, no. 1 (2020): 231–34.
• “Poetry, Ghosts, Mediation,” Qui Parle 31.1 (June 2022): 7–26.
• “On Poems (System and Environment).” In “Literary Cybernetics: A Forum,” edited by Heather A. Love and Lea Pao. New Literary History 54, no. 2 (2023): 1207–13.
• “On the Event, Politics, and the University.” positions politics: praxis (August 6, 2024), https://positionspolitics.org/jack-w-chen-on-the-event-politics-and-the-university/