About
Tom Mazanec
Tom Mazanec is assistant professor of premodern Chinese literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in the Department of East Asian Languages & Cultural Studies and, by affiliation, the Departments of Comparative Literature and of Religious Studies, He received a joint Ph.D. in East Asian Studies and Interdisciplinary Humanistic Studies from Princeton University in 2017, his M.A. in Comparative Literature from the University of Colorado, Boulder in 2011, and his B.A. in English and Chinese from Calvin College in 2007.
His research is focused on Chinese literature of the medieval period (third through tenth centuries CE). His first book project concerns the emergence of Chinese Buddhist poetry and the rise of the poet-monk in the ninth and tenth centuries CE. Other research interests include literary theory, translation studies, religious studies, and digital humanities. He’s also an avid collector of bizarre and obscure translations of Chinese poetry into English.
On this website, you’ll find his CV, information on his research projects (including network maps of medieval Chinese exchange poetry), links to Sinological resources, and his blog. His email address is mazanec@ucsb.edu, and his profile at UCSB can be found here.
Photo credit: Jillian Title.
Publications
Review of The Halberd at Red Cliff: Jian’an and the Three Kingdoms by Xiaofei Tian
Studies in Late Antiquity 4.3 (2020): 353–359
Review of the Organization of Distance by Lucas Klein
Journal of Translation Studies 3.2 (2019): 115–21
How Poetry Became Meditation in Late-Ninth-Century China
Asia Major 32.2 (2019): 113–151Teaching
China in Translation: Theory, Art, History
Chinese / Comparative Literature 139 (Spring 2018)
Bibliography and Research Methods
Chinese 211 (Winter 2019)
Introduction to Classical Chinese II
Chinese 101B (Winter 2019)Latest Blog Posts
Call for Papers: The Worst Chinese Poetry: A Virtual Workshop
April 5–9, 2021 Organized by Thomas Mazanec, Xiaorong Li, and Hangping Xu (UC Santa Barbara) Call for Papers Good poems are all alike, but every bad poem is bad in […]
Talk at Stanford: “On the Fungibility of Money, Merit, and Meter: Debts in the Late Tang”
I will be giving a talk at Stanford University on some of my most recent research, namely on concepts of debt in medieval China and how they relate to literature. […]
Patterns and Networks in Classical Chinese Literature: Notes from the Digital Frontier
Conference Announcement Patterns and Networks in Classical Chinese Literature: Notes from the Digital Frontier Twelve scholars from around the globe will present examples of the groundbreaking research taking place […]