The Division of the Arts & Humanities announces that Robert Ashmore will be chair of the department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, as of July 1, 2022. Ashmore is Associate Professor in the department and specializes in Chinese literature of the third through eleventh centuries. He will serve a three-year term following outgoing chair and professor Andrew Jones.
Ashmore holds a special interest in lyric poetry and poetic theory, song and musical performance, and traditional concepts of identity and personality. His book The Transport of Reading: Text and Understanding in the World of Tao Qian (Harvard East Asian Monographs, 2010), revisits Tao's approach to his readers by attempting to situate it within the particular poetics of address that characterized the Six Dynasties classicist tradition. He is currently completing work on a book manuscript on the literary culture of the early ninth century.
Ashmore received his M.A. in classical Chinese literature from Beijing University in 1992 and continued his graduate studies in the department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University, where he received his Ph.D. in November 1997.