Tamara Chin works on comparative approaches to antiquity, with a focus on: Han dynasty China; ancient interculturality and the Afro-Eurasian "Silk Road"; and with broader interests in early and medieval China, modern conceptions of antiquity; economic and environmental history; literary and aesthetic form; gender/sexuality studies.
Her first book, Savage Exchange: Han Imperialism, Chinese Literary Style, and the Economic Imagination (Harvard University Press, 2014), examines the politics of literary representation during ancient China’s earliest expansion of local and long-distance (“Silk Road”) markets in the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE). It draws on excavated an received materials to introduce a literary-cultural approach to Chinese economic thought. It argues the importance of the history of contact and of cross-cultural aesthetics to the study of Chinese literature and East-West comparison .
She is currently working on two further book projects. One builds directly on the concerns and methods of Savage Exchange, shifting its literary focus to the overland and maritime Silk Roads, 1-600 CE, especially between China, India, and Central Asia. The other book project looks at the modern idea of the Silk Road, and at the production of the idea of pre-modern globalization across a range of disciplines, including literary studies, geography, and economic history.
