Luke Waring

My research centers on early Chinese texts and textuality.  More specifically, I am interested in how early Chinese elites engaged with written texts as material artifacts.  My first book project, based on my recent doctoral dissertation, is provisionally titled "Writing and Materiality in an Ancient Chinese Kingdom: The Textual Culture of the Mawangdui Tombs."  With this interdisciplinary project, a case study of the different kinds of writing (manuscripts on silk, bamboo, and wood as well as inscribed artifacts, paintings, and textiles) found in three southern Chinese tombs dating to the mid-second century BCE, I examine the ways early Chinese elites interacted with texts as things-- objects to be produced, used, repurposed, displayed, performed, viewed, owned, gifted, and eventually buried.  In the process, I show that written texts in early China were not silent messages or inert records but formed part of the elite material and visual cultures of their time.