Sean Bradley
is a licensed Naturopathic Physician and practitioner of Chinese medicine. He owns and manages a private medical clinic, Insight Natural Medicine, where he focuses on sports medicine with both amateur and professional athletes. His research focus is early Chinese medical literature and formularies with special interest in the transfer of medicines along the Silk Road as well as the properties of medicinal plants in early Chinese poetry. He received his doctorate in Asian Languages and Literature from the University of Washington in 2022. Bradley received clinical degrees in Naturopathic medicine (ND) and Acupuncture and Oriental medicine (MSAOM) from Bastyr University after completing an intensive study program at the Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine. He also studied Chinese language and literature (MA and BA) at the University of Washington, and botany (BS) at Colorado State University.
Chan Chok Meng, Travis 陳竹茗
received his Master’s degree and doctorate from The University of Hong Kong and graduated with a thesis on Ban Gu’s dynastic eulogy “Dian yin” (Elicitation of the canon) and a dissertation on the Shijing and the origin of Chinese eulogistic literature. His academic interests include the Confucian Classics, (court) literature, history, philology and material culture, with a focus on the Pre-Qin to Han periods. He is currently Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Department of Chinese Language Studies, The Education University of Hong Kong.
Chen Zhinan
is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Dunhuang Academy, Lanzhou. She received her Ph.D. in Chinese Literature and Language from the University of Washington, Seattle, with a dissertation on Xiao Yi’s Jinlouzi. Her research interests span manuscript studies, philology, and classical Chinese textual criticism, particularly as applied to the early and early medieval periods.
Robert Joe Cutter
(PhD University of Washington) is professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Arizona State University. From 1983 until 2005, he was professor of Chinese in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literature at UW-Madison and chair of that department for four years. He also served as director of UW-Madison’s Center for East Asian Studies. In 2005, he was appointed founding director of the ASU School of International Letters and Cultures, a position he held for eleven years. His primary field of interest is early medieval Chinese literature and history.
Y. Edmund Lien
has credentials both in science and Sinology. He began his science education at Taiwan National University where he received his BSEE in electrical engineering in 1968. He subsequently went to the University of California at Berkeley where he received his Ph.D. in 1972 in electrical engineering and computer science. After a career in the computing industry, Dr. Lien retired to pursue a Ph.D. in classical Chinese literature. He received his Ph.D. at the University of Washington in 2011. His dissertation was a study of the renowned Han dynasty scientist and poet Zhang Heng. Dr. Lien analyzed all of Zhang Heng’s astronomical writings. One of Zhang Heng’s astronomical treatises is the subject of an article Dr. Lien published in T’oung Pao in 2012.
Jennifer Liu
is a sinologist and philosopher currently housed in the philosophy department at Seattle University as an Assistant Teaching Professor. She works on Classical Chinese philosophical thought and literature with a focus on the pre-Qin and Han periods, and comparative philosophy between East Asian and West European traditions. She has published articles in both Chinese and English. Presently, she is working on a book manuscript on Yang Xiong’s Taixuan jing and researching the philosophical and pedagogical implications of the Mengzi.
Timothy Michael O’Neill
is Associate Professor of History at Northern Michigan University, where he teaches Asian and World history. His research focuses on the intellectual and cultural history of early China, historiography, history of education, and critical theories of language, authorship, and hermeneutics. His first book, Ideography and Chinese Language Theory: A History, was published by De Gruyter in 2016. He is currently working on a book manuscript on Sima Qian and the Shiji.
Mark Gerald Pitner
is a historian of early China who focuses on the conception of disability and aging in the religious and philosophical discourse of early China. He has also written on developments in Ruism (Confucianism), the history of natural science in China, and is currently working on several projects that explore the role of place in Chinese intellectual history. He is currently Associate Professor of Asian History and director of the Honors Program at Elmira College.
Hsiang-Lin Shih
is Associate Professor of Asian Studies at St. Olaf College (Minnesota). Her first book, Poetry of Loss and the Early Medieval Chinese Court of the Warlord Cao Cao (155–220), published in 2024, shows how writers at the Cao court employed their poetic art to establish, develop, and sustain a community in each difficult moment of their intertwined lives. Her earlier research on Cao Cao’s court and the classical Book of Songs is published in the edited volume The Fu Genre of Imperial China (2019) and the Journal of the Pacific Association for the Continental Tradition (2021).
Jui-lung Su
is an Associate Professor in the Department of Chinese Studies at the National University of Singapore. His research focuses on the literature of the Han, Wei, and Six Dynasties periods, with particular expertise in Chinese poetry and rhapsody (fu
Wang Ping
is professor of Chinese Literature at University of Washington, Seattle. Her research interests lie with the civilization and culture of early and medieval China, its intellectual history and literary traditions, Sinology, and related fields. She has authored two monographs: The Age of Courtly Writing: Wen xuan Compiler Xiao Tong (501–531) and His Circle (Leiden: Brill, 2012) and The Poetic Way of Xie Lingyun—Literary Expression and the Natural World (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2025). She co-edited Southern Identity and Southern Estrangement in Medieval Chinese Poetry with Nicholas Morrow Williams (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2015).
Nicholas Morrow Williams
is professor of Chinese Literature at Arizona State University. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Washington before teaching for eleven years in Hong Kong. His recent publications include the translation Elegies of Chu: An Anthology of Early Chinese Poetry (Oxford World’s Classics, 2022), and a monograph entitled Dialogues in the Dark: Interpreting “Heavenly Questions” across Two Millennia (Harvard University Asia Center, 2025).