Michael Nylan is the Jane K. Sather Chair of History at the University of California, Berkeley. She writes about history, literature, philosophy, art and archaeology of early imperial China.[1]

Michael Nylan
Born1950 (age 73–74)
NationalityAmerican
Alma materUniversity of California, Berkeley (B.A.)
University at Buffalo (M.A.)
Princeton University (Ph.D.)
AwardsGuggenheim Fellowship
Scientific career
FieldsEarly Chinese History
InstitutionsUniversity of California, Berkeley
Chinese name
Chinese戴梅可
Transcriptions
Standard Mandarin
Hanyu PinyinDài Méikě

Nylan was born in 1950 and named after Saint Michael by her mother, thankful for a successful birth after a series of miscarriages.[2] After undergraduate and masters study in history, she studied Classical Chinese with Michael Loewe and fell in love with the subject. Her doctoral work an Princeton University was in history and archaeology.[3] She was one of the first American scholars in China after the opening in the 1970s, but her stay at the Institute of Archaeology of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences was unsuccessful, due to her male colleagues' refusal to take a woman on excavations.[2] She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2014.[4]

Selected works

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  • Ying Shao's Feng su t'ung yi: An Exploration of Problems in Han Dynasty Political, Philosophical, and Social Unity (Ph.D thesis), Princeton University, 1983.
  • The Five "Confucian" Classics, Yale University Press, 2001, ISBN 978-0-300-08185-5.
  • The Chinese Pleasure Book, Princeton University Press, 2018, ISBN 978-1-942130-13-0.

References

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  1. ^ "Michael Nylan". Berkeley Department of History.
  2. ^ a b Varadarajan, Tunku (April 1, 2020). "Sun Tzu and the Coronavirus". defining ideas. Hoover Institution.
  3. ^ Qian, Ying (December 10, 2013). "In Conversation with Michael Nylan". The China Story. Archived from the original on January 7, 2014.
  4. ^ "Michael Nylan". John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.