Phi Beta Kappa
News & Notes
Prof. Martin Kern is our 2025 Visiting Scholar
Join us on Thursday, February 20 at 4:00pm in CMU 120 on the UW campus for Visiting Scholar Prof. Martin Kern's talk “Material History: Ancient Manuscripts and the Rewriting of the Ancient Chinese Past”.
Talk: Over the past fifty years, an ever-increasing number of ancient Chinese manuscripts on bamboo, wood and (rarely) silk have been discovered. Found in waterlogged tombs and wells in south central China as well as in above-ground ruins in the arid Central Asian northwest, these manuscripts date from the fourth century BCE through the third century CE, when paper finally became the dominant stationery for Chinese writing. Their contents cover virtually all areas of knowledge: historical, philosophical, and literary writings that can be compared to the received tradition; technical works on medicine, divination, mathematics, and other disciplines; and an enormous and still growing body of administrative and legal writings that give us unprecedented insights into the sociopolitical and economic structures of ancient China.Speaker: Martin Kern is the Joanna and Greg ’84 P13 P18 Zeluck Professor in Asian Studies at Princeton University. He specializes in the study of Chinese antiquity. The author and editor of numerous books and articles crossing the disciplines of literature, history, religion, and art, he studies the practices of textual composition, transmission, and hermeneutics in the Chinese manuscript culture of the first millennium BCE. He is further interested in the comparative study of antiquity and currently co-edits Philological Practices: A Comparative Historical Lexicon, a project spanning more than twenty premodern philological traditions from around the globe. His current monograph projects include Performance, Memory, and Authorship in Ancient China: The Formation of the Textual Tradition and The Chinese “Classic of Poetry” in Ancient Manuscripts: Studies in Poetry, Poetics, and the Sociology of Text. Kern also served as President of the American Oriental Society (2023–2024) and directs the “International Center for the Study of Ancient Text Cultures” at Renmin University of China (Beijing).
2023 Annual Meeting: Tuesday, October 3
The annual meeting of the Washington Alpha Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa at the University of Washington will be held Tuesday, October 3, 12-1 pm, in CMU 218 D.
All members of the Chapter are welcome to attend.
2021 Induction ceremony: Wednesday, June 9, 6:00pm
The 2021 induction ceremony will be held remotely on Wednesday, June 9, at 6pm. Congratulations to our inductees! Our speaker is Prof. Alexes Harris of the Department of Sociology. Friends and family of inductees are encouraged to participate—rsvp to uwpbk@uw.edu.