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 […]
Author: tommazanec
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 […]
New Publication: The Medieval Chinese Gāthā and Its Relationship to Poetry
Was there ever such a concept as “Buddhist poetry” in the medieval Chinese world, widely considered to be the golden age of classical Chinese poetry? My latest article, just published […]
How and Why to Learn Classical Chinese
Recently, a friend asked me how to go about teaching himself classical Chinese. He works for the U.S. State Department and speaks Mandarin very well, but now he wants to […]
Book Review: Spells, Images, and Maṇḍalas by Koichi Shinohara
My review of Spells, Images, and Maṇḍalas by Koichi Shinohara (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014) has recently been published in the Buddhist studies journal Pacific World. From the opening of my […]
Dissertation and New Position
On Tuesday, May 23, 2017, I successfully defended my dissertation, “The Invention of Chinese Buddhist Poetry: Poet-Monks in Late Medieval China (c. 760-960 CE).” In the spirit of scholarly openness, […]
Publication: Guanxiu’s Mountain-Dwelling Poems
My translation of the twenty-four “Mountain-Dwelling Poems” 山居詩 of the poet-monk Guanxiu 貫休 (832–913) has just been published by Tang Studies. It includes a fairly extensive introduction, as well as an […]
Religious Poetry Workshop
Tomorrow marks the start of the Princeton Workshop on Chinese Religious Poetry, organized by myself and Jason Protass. Despite what the poster says, all are welcome to come, even without […]
Paul Rouzer’s Translation of Hanshan (Cold Mountain)
The Hanshan 寒山 (Cold Mountain) poems are among the most celebrated Chinese verses in the West. Some of them were famously translated by Gary Snyder in 1958, after he had studied […]