Prof. Jack W. Chen

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) and Literary Information in China: A History (2021).  He has also published various articles and essays on the poet Du Fu, donkey-braying, and network visualization.  He was co-director of the SIF-funded Humanities Informatics Lab (IHGC; 2017–2020) and is broadly interested in lyric theory, computational approaches to literary analysis, information histories, comparative methodologies, and cats. His current project is a study of poems composed by ghosts in medieval China. He lives with two humans, four cats, a hedgehog, and a turtle.