Tamara T. Chin
Tamara Chin is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature. Her research and teaching interests include Han dynasty literature and culture; ancient inter-cultural exchange, particularly in relation to the Silk Road; comparative studies of early Greek and Chinese texts; modern uses of ancient texts; and gender and sexuality studies.
She is associated faculty in the departments of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, and of Classics, and is a member of the Committee on Central Eurasian Studies (CCES).
Contact:
Email: tchin@uchicago.edu
Office: Classics 120
Research:
Tamara Chin is currently working on two book projects. The first explores domestic dissent against imperial expansion during the Han dynasty. It focuses on a set of literary and material forms ostensibly created to both represent and enable Chinas largest-scale expansion in history (e.g. ethnographic account, fu-rhapsody, imperial coinage). It argues that the earliest instances of these new modes of imperial self-representation aesthetically register ambivalence towards imperialism. In doing so, they join a catalog of more open political and military resistance but also pose problems for normative narratives of empire.
Her second book project follows the afterlife of Han histories of expansion, specifically nineteenth century comparative readings of them alongside Greco-Roman geographies in the invention of the idea of the Silk Road. The book examines the hermeneutic practices behind the modern construction of the Silk Road as an ideal of ancient inter-cultural exchange, and the political and linguistic conditions of the global dissemination of this ideal in the early twentieth century.
Recent and Current Course Offerings in Comparative Literature:
- Mimesis (graduate seminar)
- Ancient Cosmopolitanism and Its Discontents (graduate seminar)
- Anthropology and/of Early Chinese Literature (graduate seminar)
- Silk Road Fictions (undergraduate course)
- Historicizing Desire (undergraduate course)
Recent Publications:
- "Orienting Mimesis: Marriage and the Book of Songs," in: Representations (2006)