Speaker: Matthias L. Richter, Associate Professor of Chinese, University of Colorado at Boulder

Audiences in early China were probably more aware of technicalities in texts than we are today, since they had first-hand experience of a predominantly oral textual culture and the management of cognitive load it required. Conventions of structuring texts rooted in this mode of communication must have carried over into the production of texts that were designed for reading. Later readers may not always have recognized such textual forms as intentional. This should give us reason to reconsider whether some features of texts that are commonly considered as accidents of transmission may have been intentional.

Matthias L. Richter, Associate Professor of Chinese, University of Colorado at Boulder, obtained a PhD in sinology from the University of Hamburg in 2000, taught at several German universities and the University of Chicago before joining the faculty of CU Boulder in 2007. His research focuses on Warring States and Early Imperial politico-philosophical literature, particularly questions of rhetoric and redactional strategies, textual criticism, the formational history of texts, and the methodology of studying early Chinese manuscripts.