About
Jack W. Chen works on early and medieval Chinese literature and thought, with a focus on poetry, poetics, and anecdotal writings. He is the author of The Poetics of Sovereignty: On Emperor Taizong of the Tang Dynasty (2010) and Anecdote, Network, Gossip, Performance: Essays on the Shishuo xinyu (2021), as well as co-editor of Idle Talk: Gossip and Anecdote in Traditional China (2013), Literary Information in China: A History (2021), and the forthcoming Literary History in and beyond China: Reading Text and World (2023). He has also published various articles and essays on the poet Du Fu, donkey-braying, topic modeling, cybernetics, and network visualization. He was co-director of the SIF-funded Humanities Informatics Lab (Institute of the Humanities and Global Cultures; 2017–2020) and is broadly interested in lyric theory, reading practices, computational approaches to literary analysis, information histories, questions of comparative and world methodology, and cats. His current projects include a study of poems composed by ghosts in medieval China, a six volume co-edited literary history of China, and an initiative on the concept of reading across the humanities and cognitive sciences.
