Biography and Expertise
My research focuses on pre-imperial China, before the second century BCE.
My most recent book, Spring and Autumn Historiography: Form and Hierarchy in Ancient Chinese Annals (Columbia, 2023), concerns one of the earliest historical records transmitted from ancient China down to today, called the Spring and Autumn (Chūnqiū 春秋). My main concern is not history—what happened?—but historiography—what interpretation did the record-keepers impose onto the events they recorded, and what do the records tell us about their priorities, and how they viewed themselves and others?
In The Commentarial Transformation of the Spring and Autumn (SUNY, 2016), I address a question that has puzzled scholars for centuries: how did the ostensibly objective Spring and Autumn records come to be understood as conveying the judgments of Confucius? I explore two sets of commentaries that are embedded in the Zuǒ Tradition, and shows how early interpretations of the Spring and Autumn provide the missing link between ancient historiographical practices and the later orthodox interpretation.
I have a secondary interest in Chinese linguistics, and together with Richard VanNess Simmons (Rutgers/HKU) I co-edited Studies in Chinese and Sino-Tibetan Linguistics: Dialect, Phonology, Transcription and Text (Academia Sinica, Institute of Linguistics, 2014).