Position:

Departmental Lecturer in Classical Chinese

Faculty / College Address:

Oriental Institute

Email:

justin.winslett@orinst.ox.ac.uk

Research Interests:

• The extrahuman and strange in Early and Middle China
• Religion, myth and folklore in Early and Middle China
• Early Chinese history
• Early Chinese intellectual traditions

Current Projects:

I am currently engaged in two related projects concerning the extrahuman in Early China.

The first is a continuation of my doctoral research on the term shen 神 in its capacity as an extrahuman in pre-220 CE Chinese texts. My doctoral thesis looked at nine texts from between the 4th C BCE to the 3rd C CE to show how these texts represent and construct shen and what this may tell us of how they could have been understood by the populations that produced these texts. I am currently expanding this analysis to the wider range of available texts from this period in order to produce a survey of shen in pre-3rd C texts.

The second is a book project titled Theism in Pre-Qin China which is being co-authored with Kelly Clark (Calvin College). This book will primarily analyse the use of extrahuman agents, notably the High Deities of Di 帝, Shangdi 上帝 and Tian 天 in various pre-Qin (pre-221 BCE) texts, in both respect to the texts that they are found in and contemporary theories in cognitive science to understand how these agents are employed and represented in these texts and what this means for the intellectual and religious life of the time. This will be published in late 2011/early 2012.

Courses Taught:

• Introductory Classical Chinese
• Classical Readings
• Shiji 史記
• Graduate Classical Reading Seminar
• Tutorials-History and Historiography

Recent Publications:

• 'The Evolutionary Psychology of Chinese Religion: The High Deities' in Journal of the American Academy of Religion. Co-Authored with Kelly Clark. Forthcoming