Fairbank Faculty and Associates in Print, Spring 2023

Our colleagues’ research covers a wide range of topics, from economic governance in China to ancient elite chariots and gender justice. An update on their recent work:

William P. Alford, Jerome A. and Joan L. Cohen Professor of Law, co-authored “Pound for Pound? Roscoe Pound’s Adventures in China and the Questions They Pose for Scholars of Contemporary China,” UPenn Asia Law Review.  

Peter K. Bol, Charles H. Carswell Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, published “Reflections on the Zhong Guo and the Yi Di with Reference to the Middle Period” in The China Review and co-authored with Liu Zhou and Hongsu Wang “Automatic Biographical Information Extraction from Local Gazetteers with Bi-LSTM-CRF Model and BERT” for International Journal of Digital Humanities 4.

Rowen Flad, John E. Hudson Professor of Archaeology, co-edited, together with Anke Hein and Bryan Miller, The Art and Archaeology of Ritual and Economy in East Asia: Essays in Honor of Lothar von FalkenhausenUCLA’s Cotsen Institute Press. Flad also co-authored, with Harvard PhD candidate Chengrui Zhang and others, “Elite Chariots and Early Horse Transport at the Bronze Age Burial Site of Shijia,” in the April edition of Antiquity.

Janet Gyatso, Harvard Divinity School Hershey Professor of Buddhist Studies, co-authored, with Pema Bhum, “Mirror on Fire: The Tibetan Reception of Daṇḍin’s Kāvyādarṡa,” in A Lasting Vision: Dandin’s Mirror in the World of Asian Letters, Oxford University Press.

Daniel Koss, Research Scholar and Lecturer in East Asian Languages and Civilizations, published “Economic Governance in Xi Jinping’s ‘New Era’: New Vectors of Party Influence in China’s Financial Sector,” a Background Brief with Singapore’s East Asia Institute.

Meg Rithmire, F. Warren MacFarlan Associate Professor in the Business, Government, and International Economy Unit of Harvard Business School, co-authored The State and Capitalism in China, Cambridge University Press, with Margaret M. Pearson and Kailee S. Tsai. Rithmire also published Precarious Ties: Business and the State in Authoritarian Asia, Oxford University Press. She recently joined the editorial board of The China Journal, and she has been on the editorial board of China Quarterly since fall 2022

Karen Thornber, Harry Tuchman Levin Professor in Literature, has a new book, Gender Justice and Contemporary Asian Literatures, in production with the Modern Languages Association Publications Program. 

Xiaofei Tian, Professor of Chinese Literature, received a Humboldt Research Award for her work on pre-modern Chinese literature. Tian also co-edited Literary History in and beyond China, Harvard Asia Center 2023.

Center Associate Ellen Widmer, Mayling Soong Professor of Chinese Studies at Wellesley College, gave the “Distinguished Professor Lecture” titled “Hidden Trajectories of Talent: Women and Music in Nineteenth-Century China,” at Wellesley.   

Fairbank alumnus Mario F. Pini, a 3-time China-posted Italian diplomat, published Things That a Diplomat Should Not Have Seen, which describes life in China during the first four decades of Communist rule. Pini graduated from Harvard’s Regional Studies East Asia program and was also a Weatherhead Institute fellow.