Martin Kern is the Joanna and Greg ’84 P13 P18 Zeluck Professor in Asian Studies and Chair of the Department of East Asian Studies at Princeton University. He also serves as co-editor of T’oung Pao and is a member of the American Philosophical Society. At Princeton, Kern directs the university-wide collaboration “Comparative Antiquity: A Humanities Council Global Initiative.” At Renmin University of China (Beijing), he is the Xin’ao Distinguished Visiting Chair in the Humanities and directs the “International Center for the Study of Ancient Text Cultures.” Kern’s numerous publications, including ten authored or edited books, address topics across all genres of ancient Chinese literature, including poetry as cultural memory and as performance in political and religious ritual; authorship; writing and orality; methodological issues in manuscript studies; early literary thought; and style and rhetoric in philosophy and historiography. As a Guggenheim Foundation fellow, he currently spends his sabbatical year at Ca’ Foscari University, Venice, to complete his new monograph Performance, Memory, and Authorship in Ancient China: The Formation of the Poetic Tradition.