Antje Richter's Website

First trained in English and German Studies at Friedrich Schiller University, Jena (East Germany), I later embarked on a second career in Chinese Studies at Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich, with Japanese Studies and Chinese Art and Archaeology as minors. After my doctorate in 1998, I taught at Christian Albrechts University in Kiel (where I habilitated in 2004) and Albert Ludwigs University Freiburg. Since 2007, I have been teaching in the Department of Asian Languages & Civilizations at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

My main research interests lie in the rich literature and culture of early and medieval China. My first book in English, Letter Writing & Epistolary Culture in Early Medieval China, was published by Washington University Press in 2013. The edited volume History of Chinese Epistolary Culture (Brill, 2015) collects twenty-five articles about a variety of topics throughout Chinese history. The prevalence of health reports and inquiries in Chinese personal letters sparked my research interest in illness narratives across genres in medieval China. In my forthcoming book Health & the Art of Living: Illness Narratives in Early Medieval Chinese Literature, I show how health and illness are represented in literary criticism, autobiography, correspondence, historical accounts, poetry, and religious scriptures to find out what role these representations play in larger narrative contexts and what they tell us about the medieval Chinese understanding of health and illness. For a second, related project I also look across genres—this time not so much because I am interested in a particular theme, but rather because I am exploring the role of the imagination in Chinese medieval literature and literary thought.

From 2014 to 2024 I was Editor for East Asia at the Journal of the American Oriental Society (JAOS). Since 2020, I have been President of the Early Medieval China Group.

     

Last update: September 2024