Distinguished Visiting Fellow
Michael Nylan (Sather Professor of History, University of California-Berkeley) is a truly interdisciplinary scholar. Her single goal is to know as well as possible the extant texts and artifacts that her historical subjects knew during the early empires in China. This goal has meant delving into multiple forms of historical inquiry (including gender studies and the social practices of manuscript culture), as well as archaeology and comparative research on Rome, Greece, and early China, the assorted technical arts, rhetoric, and philosophy. Her research interests include seven centuries of Warring States through A.D. 316, with an emphasis on sociopolitical context; aesthetic theories and material culture; cosmological beliefs; gender history; and the history of such emotions as “daring” and “salutary fear” (aka prudential caution). She also studies the "use and abuse" of history since 1840 in the Sinosphere.
Her current research is on the Four Fathers of History (Herodotus, Thucydides, Sima Qian, and Ban Gu), the distinctive sociopolitical and cultural institutions for classical learning in the two Han dynasties (the last two centuries B.C. and the first two centuries A.D.), and the politics of the common good from the emperor on down to the local level. She has produced many articles in multiple languages, and at least seventeen books including monographs, essay collections, translations, editions, and children’s stories. Her most recent books are The Chinese Pleasure Book (2018), Sun Tzu’s Art of War (2019) and with it The Norton Critical Edition of the Sunzi, a collection of essays plus translation 2021), and two forthcoming (2021) books, The Technical Arts in Shiji and Hanshu: the view from Early China (co-edited with Mark Csikszentmihalyi), and the Documents classic (co-translated with He Ruyue, of Shaanxi Normal University).