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

Of Admonition and Address: Right-Hand Inscriptions (Zuoyouming) from Cui Yuan to Guanxiu
Tang Studies 38 (2020): 28–56Latest Blog Posts
Article on Poetic Address Published in Tang Studies
I’m happy to announce that my new article on poetic address has come out in the latest issue of Tang Studies. “Of Admonition and Address: Right-Hand Inscriptions (Zuoyouming) from […]
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. […]