Contact: Paul Fischer, Department of Philosophy & Religion, (270) 745-5758.

About the lecture: Professor Scott Cook of Grinnell College will present Excavated Bamboo Manuscripts and the Study of Early Chinese Texts.

Using insights gleaned from early bamboo manuscripts unearthed over recent years, Dr. Cook's talk will discuss how the ancient Chinese works that have been transmitted down to us over the past two millennia came to be formed and the types of errors and changes that were introduced during that process.

Dr. Cook earned his PhD in Chinese from the University of Michigan in 1995 and is Professor of Chinese and Chair of Chinese Studies at Grinnell College, where he has been teaching since 1996.  He specializes in pre-imperial textual studies and early Chinese intellectual history, with emphases in recently excavated bamboo manuscripts and musical thought.  He is the author of The Bamboo Texts of Guodian: A Study and Complete Translation, Vols. I and II (Cornell East Asia Series 2012) and Hiding the World in the World: Uneven Discourses on the Zhuangzi (Albany: SUNY Press, 2003).  He has published numerous articles in both English and Chinese, most recently in Bulletin of the Department of Chinese Literature, National Taiwan University; Journal of Chinese Philosophy; Guwenzi yanjiu (Paleographic Studies), and The Journal of Chinese Philosophy and Culture.