Michael Nylan is the

Jane K. Sather Jane K. Sather (''née'' Krom; March 9, 1824 – December 11, 1911) was an American philanthropist and one of the University of California, Berkeley's most significant benefactors. She founded the Sather Professorship of Classical Literature and t ...

Chair of History at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

. She writes about history, literature, philosophy, art and archaeology of early imperial China. Nylan was born in 1950 and named after

Saint Michael Michael (; he, מִיכָאֵל, lit=Who is like El od, translit=Mīḵāʾēl; el, Μιχαήλ, translit=Mikhaḗl; la, Michahel; ar, ميخائيل ، مِيكَالَ ، ميكائيل, translit=Mīkāʾīl, Mīkāl, Mīkhāʾīl), also ...

by her mother, thankful for a successful birth after a series of miscarriages. After undergraduate and masters study in history, she studied

Classical Chinese Classical Chinese, also known as Literary Chinese (古文 ''gǔwén'' "ancient text", or 文言 ''wényán'' "text speak", meaning "literary language/speech"; modern vernacular: 文言文 ''wényánwén'' "text speak text", meaning "literar ...

with

Michael Loewe Michael Arthur Nathan Loewe (born 2 November 1922) is a British Sinologist, historian, and writer who has authored dozens of books, articles, and other publications in the fields of Classical Chinese as well as the history of ancient and ear ...

and fell in love with the subject. Her doctoral work an

Princeton University Princeton University is a private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the n ...

was in history and archaeology. She was one of the first American scholars in China after the opening in the 1970s, but her stay at the Institute of Archaeology of the

Chinese Academy of Social Sciences The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) is a Chinese research institute and think tank. The institution is the premier comprehensive national academic research organization in the People's Republic of China for the study in the fields of ...

was unsuccessful, due to her male colleagues' refusal to take a woman on excavations. She was awarded a

Guggenheim Fellowship Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the ar ...

in 2014.

Selected works

* * *

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Nylan, Michael 1950 births Living people American sinologists University of California, Berkeley alumni University of California, Berkeley faculty