Notes on Contributors
Paul R. Goldin
is Professor of East Asian Languages & Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Rituals of the Way: The Philosophy of Xunzi (1999); The Culture of Sex in Ancient China (2002); After Confucius: Studies in Early Chinese Philosophy (2005); Confucianism (2011); and The Art of Chinese Philosophy: Eight Classical Texts and How to Read Them (2020). In addition, he edited the revised edition of R.H. van Gulik’s classic study, Sexual Life in Ancient China (2003), and has edited or co-edited six other books on Chinese culture and political philosophy.
Yohei Kakinuma
is Professor at Waseda University (Japan) and Director of the Yangzi River Valley Culture Research Institute. Publications include Chūgoku kodai kahei keizai shi kenkyū
Maxim Korolkov
is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Chinese Studies at Heidelberg University and Research Associate at the Institute of Oriental Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences. His research focuses on the deep history of imperial state formation in East Asia and the history of China’s networks of long-distance cultural and economic interactions. Korolkov’s publications include “Arguing about Law: Interrogation Procedure under the Qin and Former Han Dynasties,” Études chinoises XXX (2011); “‘Greeting Tablets’ in Early China: Some Traits of the Communicative Etiquette of Officialdom in Light of Newly Excavated Inscriptions,” T’oung Pao 98 (2012); “State-Induced Migration and the Creation of State Spaces in Early Chinese Empires: Perspectives from History and Archaeology” (co-authored with Anke Hein), Journal of Chinese History (2020); and “Fiscal Transformation during the Formative Period of Ancient Chinese Empire (Late Fourth to First Century BCE),” in Ancient Taxation: The Mechanics of Extraction in Comparative Perspective (2021). His book The Imperial Network in Ancient China: The Foundation of Sinitic Empire in Southern East Asia is forthcoming in 2021.
Elisa Levi Sabattini
earned her Ph.D. in Chinese Studies in 2006, with a focus on Chinese philology and early Chinese thought and history, at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice (Italy) in co-tutelage with INALCO – Paris (France). Her research interests include early Chinese political thought and aesthetic practice. She served as Associate Professor in Chinese Studies at the University of Sassari and later in Chinese Philology at L’Orientale University of Naples (Italy). She is author of several articles published in peer reviewed journals and book chapters, such as “War Economy during the Han Dynasty,” in The Political Economy of the Han and its Legacy (2019); “How to Surpass the Qin: On Jia Yi’s Intentions in the Guo Qin lun,” Monumenta Serica 65.2 (2017); “The Physiology of Xin (Heart) in Chinese Political Argumentation: the Western Han Dynasty and the Pre-Imperial Legacy,” in Frontiers of Philosophy in China 10.1 (2015); “‘People as root’ (min ben) Rhetoric in the New Writings by Jia Yi (200–168),” in Political Rhetoric in Early China: Extrême-Orient, Extrême-Occident 34 (2012). She is the author of the book Lu Jia. Nuovi argomenti. Un trattato politico della Cina antica (2012) and co-author and co-editor of several other books, such as Lu Jia’s New Discourses: A Political Manifesto from the Early Han Dynasty (2020) (together with Paul R. Goldin).
Andrew Seth Meyer
earned his BA in East Asian Studies at Brown University (USA) and his Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Civilization at Harvard University (USA). He has studied at Tunghai University in Taiwan, Beijing University in the PRC, and Kyoto University in Japan. He is a co-translator of The Huainanzi: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Government in Early Han China (2010), translator of The Dao of the Military: Liu An’s Art of War (2012), and author of “The Altars of the Soil and Grain are Closer than Kin: The Qi Model of Intellectual Participation and the Jixia Patronage Community” (Early China 2010–11), among other studies of early Chinese intellectual history. He has taught at Brooklyn College, the City University of New York (USA) since 2000, where he currently serves as Professor of History.
Yuri Pines 尤銳
is Michael W. Lipson Professor of Asian Studies, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Chair Professor at Nankai University and Visiting Professor, Beijing Normal University. His research focuses on early Chinese political thought, traditional Chinese political culture, early Chinese historiography, history of pre-imperial (pre-221 BCE) China, and comparative studies of imperial formations worldwide. His monographs include Zhou History Unearthed: The Bamboo Manuscript Xinian and Early Chinese Historiography (2020); The Book of Lord Shang: Apologetics of State Power in Early China (2017); The Everlasting Empire: The Political Culture of Ancient China and Its Imperial Legacy (2012); Envisioning Eternal Empire: Chinese Political Thought of the Warring States Era (2009); and Foundations of Confucian Thought: Intellectual Life in the Chunqiu Period, 722–453 B.C.E. (2002). He co-authored (with Gideon Shelach and Yitzhak Shichor) All-under-Heaven: Imperial China (three volumes, in Hebrew, 2011, 2013, and forthcoming); Yuri Pines co-edited together with Michal Biran and Jörg Rüpke The Limits of Universal Rule: Eurasian Empires Compared (2021); with Li Wai-yee Keywords in Chinese Culture (2020); with Paul R. Goldin and Martin Kern Ideology of Power and Power of Ideology in Early China (2015); and with Lothar von Falkenhausen, Gideon Shelach and Robin D.S. Yates Birth of an Empire: The State of Qin revisited (2014). He also published over 100 articles and book chapters.
Christian Schwermann
earned his Ph.D. in Sinology at the University of Bonn, Germany, and his Habilitation in Sinology at the University of Münster, Germany. His research focuses on classical Chinese language and literature, historical semantics, and early Chinese political thought. He is author of “Dummheit” in altchinesischen Texten: Eine Begriffsgeschichte [“Stupidity” in Early Chinese Texts: A Conceptual History] (2011); and co-editor (together with Raji C. Steineck) of That Wonderful Composite Called Author: Authorship in East Asian Literatures from the Beginnings to the Seventeenth Century (2014); (together with Karina Kellermann and Alheydis Plassmann) of Criticising the Ruler in Pre-Modern Societies – Possibilities, Chances, and Methods (2019); and (together with Christoph Harbsmeier and Christian Wittern) of the Thesaurus Linguae Sericae (2020–). He serves as Professor of Chinese Language and Literature at the Ruhr University Bochum, Germany, and as Principal Investigator of the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies (BCDSS) at the University of Bonn, Germany.
Hans van Ess
born 1962 near Frankfurt, grew up in Tübingen in Southern Germany. After studying Sinology, Turkic Studies and Philosophy at the University of Hamburg he spent two years at Fudan University in Shanghai from 1986 to 1988 before finishing a PhD on China’s history of thought in 1992. From 1992–1995 van Ess worked as an area manager at the German Asia-Pacific Business Association in Hamburg and as assistant professor at the Institute for Sinology of the University of Heidelberg. In 1998 he was appointed as Chair at the Institute for Sinology at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich. In 2015 he was elected president of the Max-Weber-Foundation – German Institutes in the Humanities Abroad. His publications focus on Confucianism of the Han and Song periods and on the historiography of the Han dynasty. Recent publications include: Politik und Geschichtsschreibung im alten China. Pan-ma i-t’ung [Politics and Historiography in Ancient China. Pan-ma i-t’ung]
Robin D.S. Yates
James McGill Professor of East Asian Studies and History and Classical Studies, McGill University, former Chair of the Society for the Study of Early China and Editor of the journal Early China, was inducted into the Royal Society of Canada, Division of the Humanities of the Academy of the Arts and Humanities, in 2010. He specializes in the history of Chinese law, the social and cultural history of pre-modern China including slavery, the history of Chinese military science and technology, and the history of Chinese women. His most recent book, a collaboration with Anthony J. Barbieri-Low, Law, State, and Society in Early Imperial China: A Study with Critical Edition and Translation of the Legal Texts from Zhangjiashan Tomb no. 247, was published by Brill in two volumes in 2015 and was awarded Honorable Mention in the Patrick D. Hanan Book Prize for Translation (China and Inner Asia), Association for Asian Studies, in 2018. He is currently researching and publishing on the newly discovered and recovered legal and administrative documents dating from the Qin and Han periods, especially the site of the Qin Qianling County, modern Liye, Hunan Province, and those found in Changsha, including the Eastern Han documents from Wuyi Square.