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American linguist and sinologist From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Stephen Owen (born October 30, 1946) is an American sinologist specializing in Chinese literature, particularly Tang dynasty poetry and comparative poetics. He taught Chinese literature and comparative literature at Harvard University and is James Bryant Conant University Professor, Emeritus; becoming emeritus before he was one of only 25 Harvard University Professors. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.[1]
Stephen Owen | |||||||
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Born | St. Louis, Missouri, U.S. | October 30, 1946||||||
Nationality | American | ||||||
Alma mater | Yale University (BA, PhD) | ||||||
Spouse | Xiaofei Tian | ||||||
Scientific career | |||||||
Fields | Chinese poetry, comparative literature | ||||||
Institutions | Harvard University | ||||||
Doctoral advisor | Hans Fränkel | ||||||
Chinese name | |||||||
Chinese | 宇文所安 | ||||||
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Owen graduated from Yale University in 1968 and continued at Yale as a graduate student, receiving his doctorate in 1972 under Hans Fränkel. He taught at Yale from 1972 to 1982, when he went to Harvard. He has been a Fulbright Scholar and received a Guggenheim Fellowship,[2] among many other awards and honors.[3] In 2015, he completed a six-volume annotated translation of the complete surviving poems of Du Fu, culminating an eight-year project.[4][5] He was jointly awarded the 2018 Tang Prize in Sinology with Yoshinobu Shiba, "for his penetrating scholarship and theoretical ingenuity in Classical Chinese prose and poetry, especially Tang poetry and its translation."[6][7][8]
Owen has written or edited dozens of books, articles, and anthologies in the field of Chinese literature, especially Chinese poetry.[3] Harvard Magazine reported in 1998 that colleagues saw Owen as "a soaring and highly imaginative free spirit," comparing him to the eighth-century Chinese calligrapher Huaisu and to the foremost Tang dynasty poet, "the unfettered, convention-defying Li Bai..."[9]
Of The Poetry of Meng Chiao and Han Yü, James J. Y. Liu said that it "represents a remarkable achievement, especially for a first book..."[10] A reviewer in China Review International wrote "reading Stephen Owen's The Making of Early Chinese Classical Poetry shocked me, the way a seismic shift in paradigms will."[11]
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