East Asian Languages and Cultures

Phone:

(812) 856-7002

Email:

pnvogt@indiana.edu

Office:

GA 2079

Office hours:

Mondays 2:00-4:00 or by appointment (virtual)

My research focuses on the cultural and religious history of early China. I work largely with paleographical materials, such as inscribed bronze vessels and bamboo manuscripts, and take a special interest in “alternate histories” and other texts that didn’t make it into the classical canon.

To date, my work has concentrated on the Western Zhou era (ca. 11th-8th c. BCE), a time of sage kings and culture heroes. My current monograph project, entitled Bound by Bronze: Ritual and Kingship in Western Zhou China, explores the royal ritual of that period based on contemporary bronze inscriptions. Recently, I have begun a second line of research on the ideological, literary, and aesthetic concerns behind later tales of Western Zhou history in sources ranging from ancient manuscripts to modern science fiction.

I offer a broad range of courses on early China and pre-modern East Asia in general, including studies in the classical Chinese language.

I joined the EALC faculty in 2016 after four years at the Institute for Sinology, Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg, Germany.

Research interests:

Early Chinese history
Archaeology of religion
Ritual studies
Kingship in comparative perspective
Inscriptions and manuscripts
Historiography as literature
Ancient history in popular media

Education:

• M.A./M.Phil./Ph.D., Columbia University
  • East Asian Languages and Cultures (History-East Asia)
• B.A., Dartmouth College

Recent and Upcoming Courses:

Recent Publications:

“Western Zhou Government and Society.” In The Oxford Handbook of Early China, ed. Elizabeth Childs-Johnson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020.

“Consumption, Knowledge, and the Limits of the Body in the Xiaochen Texts.” In Qinghua jian yanjiu, vol. 3 (Dec. 2019), 237-260.

“The One Text in the Many: Separate and Composite Readings of an Early Chinese Historical Manuscript” (co-authored with Rens Krijgsman). Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 82.3 (2019), 473-492.