Associate Professor of Comparative Literature
Tamara Chin works on comparative approaches to the ancient world. The Silk Road Idea: Ancient Contact and the Modern Human Sciences, 1870-1970 is a multiregional account of the study of premodern contact in the disciplines of geography, history, philology, and linguistics during the century spanning New Imperialism and Cold War decolonization.
Her first book, Savage Exchange: Han Imperialism, Chinese Literary Style, and the Economic Imagination (Harvard, 2014; pbk 2020) examined the politics of representation during the Han dynasty expansion of Chinese political empire and Silk Road trade. It received the American Comparative Literature Association Harry Levin Prize; Honorable Mention for the Association of Asian Studies Joseph Levenson Pre-1900 China Book Prize; International Convention of Asia Scholars Ground-Breaking Subject Matter Accolade.
Teaching and research interests include: Han dynasty literary and material culture; feminist economics and the history of economic thought; global classical reception studies; cross-cultural aesthetics; comparative China/Greece studies; ancient contact and exchange.
BA Harvard College, Classics and Literature
PhD UC Berkeley, Comparative Literature.
