Queen's Now

Viewing archives for Asian & Middle Eastern Studies and Joint Schools

Introduction

I completed both my undergraduate and master’s degrees at St. John’s College, Oxford, reading European and Middle Eastern Languages (Spanish & Persian) and Oriental Studies respectively. After a short break from academia, I pursued my doctoral studies in Persian literature in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Chicago, where I have lived happily as an aspiring Midwesterner for much of the last eight years. I have also lived, worked, and studied in Spain, Iran, Oman, and India at various points over the last decade or so. 

Teaching

I have taught classes on Persian literature, Persian language, women’s writing in Islamic literary history, Islamic thought & literature, and Islamic Spain, and supervised BA theses in Middle Eastern Studies. I look forward to exploring teaching and mentoring opportunities at Queen’s for undergraduates working on Islamicate, medieval, and early modern literary traditions.

Research

My research interests are primarily in Persian literature–both premodern and modern–and other Islamicate literatures with which Persian interacted. My first monograph will focus on conceptions of wonder in Islamic thought and its importance to the creative psychology of Persian poets in Iran and India during the medieval and early modern periods.

More broadly, I am interested in the relationship between literature, history, philosophy, and theology, and as such also contribute to the field of Islamicate cultural history. Methodologically, I strive to bring insights from the history of emotions to the study of Islamicate cultural history, and to examine voices, genres, and experiments at the periphery of the Persian canon.

Publications

“Inimitable Complexity: Amir Khosrow and the Persian Poetics of Wonder,” Journal of Persianate Studies, (forthcoming).

“Persianizing Bengal: Munīr Lāhorī and the Poetics of Natural Wonders in Manifestation of the Rose (Maẓhar-i gul),” Delos: A Journal of Translation and World Literature, Special Issue on Indo-Persian literature edited by Jane Mikkelson, (forthcoming).

“Borges and Persian Literature” in Borges in Context edited by R. Fiddian, 219-227. Literature in Context, Cambridge Univ. Press, 2020.

“Forugh Farrokhzad and the Persian Literary Canon,” Iran Namag 1, no. 4 (2016): 14–51.

Introduction

I grew up in Devon, went to school in Bedford, and studied Classics with Akkadian as an undergraduate at the University of Birmingham. I stayed on as a doctoral student in Ancient History and Archaeology (Assyriology) and then as a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow. I spent three years in Finland as a State Archives of Assyria Editor at the University of Helsinki. After teaching at UK universities for three years, I moved to Oxford as a Departmental Lecturer in the Faculty. I was then appointed to the part-time Shillito Fellowship in Assyriology in 2006, alongside a Tutorial Fellowship at St Benet’s Hall (2007-22). I was awarded the title of Associate Professor in 2021 and joined Queen’s as a Senior Research Fellow in 2022.  

Teaching

I teach for the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and give language and text classes in Akkadian and lecture on ancient Middle Eastern religion and literature. As well as teaching small groups of undergraduates and Master’s students across the colleges, I also supervise Master’s and DPhil students.

Research

My broad research interests are in the religion, literature, and intellectual history of ancient Mesopotamia, an area approximately corresponding to modern-day Iraq. Most of the textual sources are written in Akkadian cuneiform on clay tablets from the first millennium BCE. I am particularly interested in cuneiform knowledge production, ritual, and astral mythology in Babylon in the later first millennium BCE, with a focus on the changing fortunes of the Esagil temple under a succession of externally imposed empires. A related research focus is Akkadian literature, including narrative poetry, and its cultural contexts and cuneiform reception over time. My research is closely linked to my teaching and seeks to understand texts and their impact in their ancient cultural settings. 

Publications

List of publications.

Courses

  • BA (Hons) Asian and Middle Eastern Studies
  • BA (Hons) Classics and Asian and Middle Eastern Studies
  • BA (Hons) European and Middle Eastern Languages

Admissions

At Queen’s there is a tradition of more than a century in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and a firm commitment to the subject as an aspect of the College’s long-standing strength in language-based subjects. Students constitute a significant group within the College and find themselves fully involved in the life of the College, which forms a friendly and supportive base for their social and academic activities. The College normally admits about five students each year for Asian and Middle Eastern Studies courses. With Fellows in Chinese and Japanese, as well as the Professor of Egyptology, the College has a special interest in Chinese, Japanese, and Egyptology, but it welcomes applications for all courses taught in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies apart from Arabic, Persian and Turkish (as main courses).

The courses

Asian and Middle Eastern Studies embraces a very wide range of courses, including Arabic, Assyriology, Chinese, Egyptology, Hebrew Studies, Japanese, Jewish Studies, Persian, Sanskrit, and Turkish. Most of these courses last four years and include a period of one year spent in the relevant country, normally in the second year of the course. The College has generous funds available to support the period abroad for language study.

Candidates are not expected to have prior knowledge of any Near, Middle or Far Eastern language, although some candidates may have had an opportunity to study these beforehand, and sometimes up to A-level standard. The BA course is designed to accommodate such differences, and the intensive nature of the teaching means that undergraduates with no previous knowledge soon catch up with those who have studied before. While it is helpful to have a foreign language at A-level, it is not a requirement as long as a candidate can show genuine interest and linguistic aptitude.

Teaching

Teaching in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies is mainly organized centrally by the Faculty, with students at all colleges following the same required teaching and selecting freely from options in their areas of interest. In the case of Chinese and Japanese, teaching is held both in College and in the China Centre, Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, or Nissan Institute of Japanese Studies, while for other courses teaching may take place in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, the Griffith Institute, or the Ashmolean Museum. Facilities within the College include a substantial collection on relevant topics in the College library and the Peet Library in Egyptology. The teaching provided by Dirk Meyer, the Fellow in Chinese, covers classical Chinese language, culture and philosophy, whilst Jennifer Guest, the Fellow in Japanese, teaches pre-modern Japanese language and literature. Richard Bruce Parkinson, the Professor of Egyptology, teaches most aspects of the course in Egyptology, as well as teaching in the history and culture of the region that will be followed by students in both Egyptology and Assyriology.

Applying

As at all colleges, candidates are required to submit two pieces of written work, preferably of two different kinds, of which at least one should be in English. This should normally be marked schoolwork.

There will be at least two interviews, normally one subject-related interview at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies or China Centre and one interview at the College. The college interview will include discussion of a short text, supplied immediately before or during the interview, which is used as a prompt for analysis and for a tutorial-style discussion. This may lead on to more general discussion, for example about the candidate’s interest in their chosen course and what kinds of related reading or thinking they have done so far. We are looking for candidates with a genuine commitment to cultural and linguistic study, openness to studying new areas, and an ability to form independent judgements on what they have read. We are not looking for any one particular set of knowledge or experiences, and it is not necessary to have previously studied any particular language or subject at school. Above all, we are seeking to assess potential.


Introduction

I grew up in County Durham, went to Barnard Castle School and then studied Egyptology as an undergraduate at Queen’s. I stayed on to do a doctorate, and then taught at the Oriental Institute for a few terms before spending two years as a junior research fellow at University College. Oxford. I left this to become a curator in the Egyptian department at the British Museum for 23 years (where projects included the display of the Rosetta Stone and the Nebamun wall-paintings) before coming back to Queen’s in 2013.

Teaching

Much of my teaching is done centrally in the Griffith Institute and the Ashmolean Museum, where I teach a range of undergraduate and graduate courses, including lectures and tutorials on the history and culture of dynastic Egypt, Egyptian art and architecture, as well as museum classes studying artefacts. My favourite are classes where we read texts together. I supervise graduate students on a range of topics, and especially welcome literary ones.

Research

My main interest is ancient Egyptian poetry of the classic age (1940–1640 BC), and my research is very closely linked to my teaching of texts. As well as the philological study of manuscripts, I work on material contexts, actors’ perspectives, literary theory and modern receptions in literature, art and film. I am interested in issues of performance practice, cultural power, and sexuality in Ancient Egyptian culture, and from this I’ve also published on LGBT history across world cultures. I enjoy the experience of attempting an integrated reading of ancient texts, thinking about their emotional and intellectual impact on their audiences (both ancient and modern), and am working on a new commentary on The Tale of Sinuhe.

Publications

Please see my Faculty webpage for research updates and a full list of publications. 

Current research is focused on the Tale of Sinuhe and on issues of LGBTQ+ history; recent highlights include: 

Introduction

I am Professor of Chinese Philosophy and Fellow and Moral Tutor at Queen’s with responsibility for undergraduate and postgraduate students in Oriental Studies. My research and teaching interests lie in early Chinese philosophy.

For my undergraduate years, I read Classical Chinese Literature and Philology (zhongwen xi) at National Taiwan University. I subsequently moved to Heidelberg, Germany, to continue my studies in Sinology and Philosophy. I obtained my PhD at Leiden University, The Netherlands. I have been a visiting scholar at Princeton University; Renmin University, Beijing; National Taiwan University, Taipei. In the academic year 2014–2015, I was the Bernhard Karlgren Fellow of the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study. I am Senior Research Fellow of Jao Tsung-I Academy (JAS), Hong Kong Baptist University; Senior Research Fellows of United International College (UIC), Zhuhai; Adjunct Professor at Yuelu Academy, University of Hunan.

I am Founding Director of the Centre for Manuscript and Text Cultures at Oxford (CMTC), which examines material aspects of writing and text production, as well as transmission and the interface between the oral and the written, across pre-modern literate societies. Central to the Centre’s activities are once-termly workshops, twice-termly colloquia, and yearly conferences. The Centre also hosts a media channel (CMTC media) and a new journal, Manuscript and Text Cultures (MTC), for which I serve as Senior Editor together with Angus M. Bowie. The production editor is Yegor Grebnev, UIC. The double-blind peer-reviewed journal appears in themed issues, digitally and in print.

Teaching

I am responsible for the faculty’s Chinese Philosophy teaching and text reading classes at both undergraduate and graduate levels. I give lectures, tutorials, and classes on influential Chinese philosophers including Mengzi, Xunzi, Zhuangzi. In addition to this I teach special subjects (classes, lectures, and tutorials) such as Text and Manuscript Cultures in Early China; The Myth of the Confucian Classics in the Warring States Period; Interrelation of pre-codified Shu (Documents); Argumentation in Early Chinese Philosophy; Early Chinese Textuality. I normally supervise up to eight PhD students.

Research

My research is problem-based and studies the form of an argument in philosophical discourse. By exploring the strategies of thought production in ancient China and the interplay of material conditions and ideas, I’m developing a philological philosophy that foregrounds the socio-material basis of systematic thinking. My books range from discussions of the strategies of meaning production in the Shangshu (Venerated Documents), the Shijing (The Classic of Songs), to excavated manuscripts from the Warring States period. (Recent books include: Philosophy on Bamboo: Text and the Production of Meaning in Early China, Brill 2012; Literary Forms of Argument in Early China, co-edited with Joachim Gentz, Brill 2015; Origins of Chinese Political Philosophy: Studies in the Composition and Thought of the Shangshu (Classic of Documents), co-edited with Martin Kern, Brill 2017; 竹上之思:早期中國的文本與意義生成 (a translation of Philosophy on Bamboo), Zhonghua 2021; Documentation and Argument in Early China: The Shangshu (Venerated Documents) and the Shu Traditions, De Gruyter 2022; Songs of the Royal Zhōu and the Royal Shào: Shī of the Ānhuī University Manuscripts, co-authored with Adam Schwartz, Brill 2022.).

Publications

For a list of publications, please see my faculty website. 

Introduction

I grew up in western New York state, in a family of very recent immigrants from the UK – which may have contributed to my fascination with languages and their diverse varieties. After an undergraduate degree in linguistics at Yale, I spent a year studying Chinese in Beijing, and then completed a PhD in Japanese literature at Columbia University. As part of that degree, I spent several years as a researcher at Waseda University in Tokyo and completed an MA there through their double-degree exchange program. I took up my current post in Oxford in 2013.

Teaching

Teaching in Japanese is centrally organised in the Faculty of Oriental Studies, where I teach courses in classical Japanese language and literature, including the third-year classical course, unseen classical translation and kanbun (Chinese-style writing) for finalists, and options on texts ranging from the Tale of Genji to the poetry of Bashō. I also supervise DPhil students working on a range of topics in premodern Japanese literature and literary thought, as well as students on the MSt Japanese Studies and MPhil in Traditional East Asia who have chosen to specialise in premodern Japanese literary texts.

Research

My research focuses on the reception of Chinese texts and modes of writing in early Japan, particularly in the Heian court of around the 10th-13th centuries – the age of iconic works like the Pillow Book and Tale of Genji, and of crucial developments in poetic and literary thought. I am interested in understanding how the practices of literacy surrounding Chinese-style texts were acquired and transmitted, how premodern Japanese readers and writers used these texts as a creative resource, and how these patterns fit into the broader comparative context of transregional literary languages in the premodern world.

Publications

Please see my Faculty webpage for research updates and a full list of publications. 

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