Tamara Chin works on comparative and intersectional approaches to the ancient world—with a focus on early Chinese texts; contact and exchange; cross-cultural aesthetics; and the politics of knowledge.
I am interested in both traditional and experimental approaches to ancient texts. My background is in philology and literary theory, beginning as a Hellenist, then taking up classical Chinese at a time when archaeology was transforming the archives and horizons of early Chinese studies. As a result, I like working with different types of poetic, historiographic, economic and visual texts and thinking about how disciplinary training and cultural habits shape the questions we bring to them.
Two book monographs each take as a starting point the disjunct between different disciplinary approaches to the connected past. Savage Exchange (2014) focuses on one hub of the ancient Silk Road (Han dynasty China) and asks how literary analysis can participate in ongoing debates about Chinese economic history and frontier archaeology. The Silk Road Idea (forthcoming) looks at the modern intellectual and political baggage that we have inherited to study historical contact. It revisits the 1870-1970 period to see how geographers, historians, philologists, and linguists in different parts of the world fashioned the connected past into a systematic research object.
Books
Savage Exchange: Han Imperialism, Chinese Literary Style, and the Economic Imagination (Harvard, 2014; pbk 2020) asks how first century BCE Chinese writers made sense of the largest-scale imperial expansion of political frontiers and markets in premodern China. Each chapter examines a key genre or symbolic practice (philosophy, fu-rhapsody, historiography, money, kinship) through which different groups battled to reshape the meaning of Chinese political empire and Silk Road trade. By juxtaposing well-known texts with recently excavated literary and visual materials, the book elaborates a literary and cultural approach to Chinese economic thought. 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.
The Silk Road Idea: Ancient Contact in the Modern Human Sciences, 1870-1970 (forthcoming with UChicago Press) tells the story of how historical contact became a modern object of inquiry. During the century spanning New Imperialism and Cold War decolonization, most academic disciplines partitioned the past into discrete nations and languages. Transnational contact nonetheless became a rigorous historical topic through the rise and fall of an overlooked set of subfields and genres. For many in East Asia and Europe – and some in South Asia and East Africa – historical connections with China became a key example in reorienting world history from roots to routes. Each chapter addresses a different discipline and framework for analyzing contact: maps in Geography; narratives in History; words in Philology; and sounds in Linguistics. Against Europe-centered histories of knowledge, The Silk Road Idea shows how the task of globalizing classical antiquity became crucial for Western and Non-Western, colonial and anticolonial, capitalist and communist research agendas.
Teaching
I welcome students interested in traditional philological or experimental approaches to ancient texts; Han dynasty and early Chinese texts; global classical reception studies, China/Greece studies; Silk Road studies.
I also welcome comparatists working on any period who are interested in the intersections of social history and aesthetic form; non-Western historiography, economic thought; cross-cultural aesthetics and poetics; Afro-Asianism, feminist/queer/postcolonial/ecological methods; animation.
BA Harvard College, Classics and Literature
PhD UC Berkeley, Comparative Literature.
