Prof. Michael Nylan, Ph.D.

Previous Visiting Fellow

Michael Nylan is Professor of the Early History of China at the University of California in Berkeley.

She is one of the world's most prolific specialists of research into the early Chinese dynasties. As a specialist for erudition, culture and history of the early Han Dynasty, she has worked on projects including the discovery, preservation and presentation of early Chinese classics, and has produced several monographs on the subject. Of these works, the book "The Five Confucian Classics" is worthy of particular attention, and has quickly become a standard work. In her research, she is concerned with both the socio-political context and the aesthetic theories and material culture of early China. She is the coeditor of China's Early Empires (a supplementary volume to The Cambridge History of China) and the series Classics of Chinese Thought (University of Washington Press).

Prof. Nylan is coming to the LMU to work with Prof. Dr. Hans van Ess (CAS Senior Researcher in Residence 2011/12) from the Institute for Sinology on a book project centered around the comparison of the two earliest dynasties of China. She was in Munich from mid May to mid June 2011, and will be here once again in July 2012 as a guest of Prof. Dr. Hans van Ess.