Jack Chen
Office Address: New Cabell Hall B059
Biography
Jack W. Chen (Professor, East Asian Languages and Cultures) has served as Institute director since August 2023. He has advanced the IAH’s multiple roles as an incubatory space for arts and humanities research, as an intellectual commons for cross-disciplinary collaboration, and as a creative space for new art, music, performance, and literature. Chen has been an integral part of the Institute’s community of scholars since he was hired by the College with a co-appointment as a Mellon Fellow in Fall 2016. In that same term, led by former Institute Director Debjani Ganguly, he and Scholars’ Lab Director Alison Booth secured a significant Strategic Investment Fund grant to support the three-year Humanities Informatics Lab (2017–2020).
Chen’s research interests draw both on his training in comparative literature and in classical Chinese literary studies. He has published extensively on various aspects of early and medieval Chinese literature, reframing philological and textual concerns through different theoretical and methodological approaches, spanning critical theory, computational analysis, information history, and animal studies. He has authored two monographs, co-edited three essay collections, and published numerous journal articles and essays. He is now co-editing a six-volume cultural history of Chinese literature and finishing a monograph on ghosts and poetry. Among his other projects is a co-edited volume on bad reading. Chen has taught previously at UCLA and Wellesley College, and he received his BA in Literature from Yale, his MA in Comparative Literature from the University of Michigan, and his PhD in Comparative Literature from Harvard.
Selected Publications and Current Work
Books
A Cultural History of Chinese Literatures. Co-edited with Carlos Rojas. 6 vols. London: Bloomsbury. [Forthcoming]
2024/25 A Cultural History of Chinese Literatures, vol. 2, The Medieval Period (200–900 CE). London: Bloomsbury. In progress.
2023 Literary History in and beyond China: Reading Text and World. Coedited with Sarah M. Allen and Xiaofei Tian. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center.
2021 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.
2021 Anecdote, Network, Gossip, Performance: Essays on the Shishuo xinyu. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center.
2013 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. Open Access.
2010 The Poetics of Sovereignty: On Emperor Taizong of the Tang Dynasty. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center.
Selected Recent Articles, Chapters, and Translations
2023 “On Poems: System and Environment.” Part of “Literary Cybernetics: A Forum,” edited by Heather A. Love and Lea Pao. New Literary History 54, no. 2 (1207–13).
2023 “Ghost Poetry as a Problem for Literary History,” in Literary History in and beyond China: Reading Text and World, ed. Allen, Chen, and Tian. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2023): 51–70.
2022 “Poetry, Ghosts, Mediation,” Qui Parle 31, no. 1 (June 2022): 7–26.
2021 “Lines, Couplets, Stanzas,” in Literary Information in China: A History, ed. Chen, et al. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021), 119–24.
2021 “Introduction: For a History of Literary Information in China.” Coauthored with Anatoly Detwyler, Xiao Liu, Christopher M. B. Nugent, and Bruce Rusk. In Literary Information in China: A History, ed. Chen, et al. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021), xxi–xxxii.
2020 “Fictionality in Early and Medieval China.” Co-authored with Sarah M. Allen. New Literary History 51.1 (2020): 231–34.
2020 “Foundings of Home: On Du Fu and Poetic Success,” in Xiaofei Tian, ed., Reading Du Fu: Nine Views (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2020), 15–26.
2020 “Chapter 1: The Way of the Sovereign”; “Chapter 2: The Organization of Governance”; “Chapter 25: On Profligacy and Reckless”; and “Chapter 26: On Greed and Baseness,” in Wu Jing, The Essentials of Governance, ed. Hilde De Weerdt, Glen Dudbridge, and Gabe Van Beijeren (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), pp. 7–16, 17–32, 208–15, 216–21. Translation of Wu Jing 吳 競 (ca. 669–749), Zhenguan zhengyao 貞觀政要.
2019 “Reading the Quan Tang shi: Literary History, Topic Modeling, Divergence Measures.” Co-authored with Peter Broadwell and David Shepard. Digital Humanities Quarterly 13.4 (2019). http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/13/4/000434/000434.html.
2018 “Du Fu: The Poet as Historian,” in Cai Zong-qi, ed., How to Read Chinese Poetry in Context: Chinese Poetic Culture from Antiquity through the Tang (Columbia University Press, 2018), pp. 236–47.
2018 “On Mourning and Sincerity in the Li ji and the Shishuo xinyu,” in Wendy Swartz and Robert F. Campany, eds., Memory in Medieval China: Text, Ritual, and Community (Leiden: Brill, 2018), pp. 63–81.
Recent Talks
2023 “The Ghost as After.” Keynote Lecture for Centre for Humanities Research Winter School: “The After.” University of the Western Cape, South Africa, August 9, 2023.
2023 “Reading as Conversation.” Reading: A Conversation. Institute of the Humanities & Global Cultures, University of Virginia, May 27, 2023.
2023 “Modern, Medieval.” Keynote Lecture for “Historicism beyond Periodization: Transhistorical Methods in Chinese Literary Studies.” University of Chicago, April 21, 2023.
2023 “Ghosts and Cybernetics.” “A Cross-Cultural Conversation on Wonder Collections,” organized by Karl Steel. Medieval Academy of America 98th Annual Meeting. February 24, 2023.
2022 “文學史、主題模型、散度度量：以閱讀《全唐詩》為例。”[Literary History, Topic Modeling, Divergence Measures: Reading the Quan Tang shi as an Example]. 第三届清华数字人文学国际论坛：古典诗歌与声律专场 [Third International Conference on Digital Humanities at Tsinghua University]. Tsinghua University, November 13, 2022.
2022 “Toward a Poetic History of Cats in China: On Care and the Ordinary.” Seminar: “Beyond Anthropocentrism: Animals and Literature,” organized by Ursula K. Heise. Annual Meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association. National Taiwan Normal University, June 16, 2022.
2022 “Ghost Poetry and Literary History.” University of Tennessee Humanities Center Distinguished Lecture Series. University of Tennessee, April 11, 2022.
2022 “A Funny Ghost Story, a Not-So-Funny Ghost Story, and a Ghost Story That Won’t Be Funny to You.” “Humor in Middle Period Chinese Literature.” Association of Asian Studies Annual Meeting. Honolulu, March 27, 2022.
2022 “Knowing and Unknowing Ghosts.” “On the Human / Nonhuman / Posthuman in Medieval China II.” 97th Annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America. University of Virginia, March 13, 2022.
2022 “A Fourth-Century Buddhist Monk as Reader.” “Phenomenologies of Reading.” Modern Language Association Annual Convention. Washington D.C., January 6, 2022.
2021 “Ghosts, Lyric, Mediation.” Panel: Lyric Geographies. 3rd International Network for the Study of Lyric Worldwide Conference: Open Windows on Lyric. Leuven, June 18, 2021 (virtual).
2019 “Poetry as Mind and Matter.” Materiality of Knowledge in Chinese Thought: Past and Present. University of Oxford/Yuelu Academy. Changsha, September 4, 2019.
2019 “Information Systems as/in Chinese Literary History.” Rare Book School Summer Lecture Series. University of Virginia, June 3, 2019.
2019 “Looking Back Across the River: Nostalgia as Migrancy in the Shishuo xinyu.” Border-Crossing and Migration in Early Medieval China. Harvard University, May 23, 2019.