| | 1 | Name: | Dr. Martin Kern | | | Institution: | Princeton University | | | Year Elected: | 2015 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 402b | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1962 | | | | | | |
Martin Kern is the inaugural Greg (’84) and Joanna (P13) Zeluck Professor in Asian Studies at Princeton University. Born and educated in Germany, he received his Dr. Phil. In Sinology, German Literature, and Art History from Cologne University in 1996. He taught at the University of Washington and Columbia University before moving to Princeton in 2000. He held fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Studies (2002-03), the American Council of Learned Societies (2006-07), the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation (2006-07), and the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg (2010-11) and was appointed Astor Visiting Lecturer and Fellow Commoner of The Queen’s College, Oxford University (2013), the inaugural Annual M.I. Rostovtzeff Lecturer, Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York University (2010), and Distinguished Professor at the Research Center for Comparative Literature and World Literature, Shanghai Normal University (2014-16). He was awarded a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship.
Among other functions in Europe, China, and the United States, Kern is co-editor of the pre-eminent sinological journal T’oung Pao (since 2010); founding managing editor of Studies in the History of Chinese Texts (2006); co-editor of Handbook of Oriental Studies, academic board member of the International Center for Studies of Chinese Civilization, Fudan University (Shanghai; 2012); and Executive Council member at the Annual World Conference on Sinology, Renmin University (Beijing; 2014).
Kern’s research cuts broadly across the fields of literature, philology, history, religion, and art in ancient and medieval China, with a dual focus on poetry and the formation of ancient Chinese textuality and cultural memory. The author and editor of nine books and some eighty book chapters and articles (as of 2015), he studies the composition, reception, and canonization of early Chinese texts, including through the analysis of recently excavated manuscripts and from comparative perspectives. He publishes on a wide range of topics, including the history of Chinese literature; the performance of texts in political and religious ritual; authorship as a historical and theoretical problem; issues of writing and orality; the early development of Chinese literary thought; style and rhetoric in philosophy and historiography; the rise of Chinese political philosophy; calligraphy; and the history and current issues of Sinology as a global field. | |
| 2 | Name: | Dr. Glenn W. Most | | | Institution: | Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa; University of Chicago | | | Year Elected: | 2015 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 402b | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1952 | | | | | | |
I studied Classics and Comparative Literature in Europe and the United States, and have taught at the Universities of Yale, Princeton, Michigan, Siena, Innsbruck, and Heidelberg. Since 1996 I have been a recurrent Visiting Professor on the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago and since 2001 simultaneously Professor of Greek Philology at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa; since 2010 I have been an External Scientific Member of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. I have published books on Classics (The Measures of Praise: Structure and Function in Pindar's Second Pythian and Seventh Nemean Odes = Hypomnemata 83, Göttingen, Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1985; Theophrastus, Metaphysics, ed. with A. Laks, Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 1993; Studies on the Derveni Papyrus, ed. with A. Laks, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1997; the new Loeb edition of Hesiod, in two volumes, 2006-7), on the history and methodology of Classical studies (F.A. Wolf: Prolegomena to Homer, ed. with A.T. Grafton and J.E.G. Zetzel, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1985; Aporemata 1-6, Göttingen, Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1997ff.; an English translation of Sebastiano Timpanaro’s study of the genesis of the method of Lachmann, 2005), on comparative literature, cultural studies, and the history of religion (Doubting Thomas, Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 2005; The Classical Tradition, co-edited with A.T. Grafton and S. Settis, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2010), on literary theory (The Poetics of Murder: Detective Fiction and Literary Theory, ed. with W.W. Stowe, New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983) and on the history of art (Raffael, Die Schule von Athen. Über das Lesen der Bilder, Frankfurt a.M., Fischer Verlag, 1999; Italian translation 2001), and I have published numerous articles, reviews, and translations in these fields and also on modern philosophy and literature. I was the editor in charge of ancient Greek literature for Der Neue Pauly and directed and co-edited a three-volume selection of the works of Arnaldo Momigliano in German and a new revised edition of the leading American translation of all the surviving Greek tragedies. I am on the editorial board of a number of scholarly journals in Classical studies, philosophy, and other fields. Currently I am finishing a new co-edited Loeb edition of the Presocratic philosophers, a bilingual edition of the ancient and medieval scholia and commentary to Hesiod’s Theogony, and co-edited volumes on the suicide of Ajax in Sophocles’ tragedy and on philological methods in a variety of canonical written traditions.
During my career on both sides of the Atlantic I have tried to combine work in the traditional disciplines of Classical (especially Greek) philology at the highest level of excellence I could attain with research on related disciplines to which Classics could make a significant contribution and from which a significant contribution could be made to scholarship in Classics. This intellectual movement between various foci has enriched and stimulated my work both inside my discipline and outside. To this end I completed two doctorates, one in traditional Classical philology (Greek) in Tübingen, and another in more theoretically and post-classically oriented Comparative Literature at Yale; and my teaching and research have been directed towards both foci. Within the field of ancient Greek I have worked primarily on Greek poetry and philosophy of the Archaic and Classical periods (Hesiod, lyric, tragedy; Presocratics, Plato). My non-Classical activities were directed in the first part of my career primarily to reception studies, Comparative Literature, the history and methodology of Classical scholarship, art history, Biblical studies, and ancient philosophy, and these have continued to be central to my research agenda. In recent years my long-standing interest in the history and methodology of Classical scholarship has developed into an intense commitment to a history of science approach to the comparative study of philological procedures as they have been practiced in various canonical textual traditions, not only Greco-Roman, but also such other ones as Mesopotamian, Jewish, Arabic, Sanskrit, and Chinese. My interest in inter-disciplinarity as providing enrichment and context for my commitment to the discipline of Classical studies is paralleled by a broad network of international collaborations with scholars and institutions throughout Europe and North America (and, more recently, with China as well). | |
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