Victor H. Mair

Victor Henry Mair (

After completing his Ph.D., Mair joined the faculty at Harvard as an assistant professor and taught there for three years. In 1979, Mair left Harvard to join the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania, where he has remained ever since. He is also founder and editor of Sino-Platonic Papers, an academic journal examining Chinese, East Asian and Central Asian linguistics and literature.

Mair specializes in early

In 1969, Mair married Chang Li-ch'ing (Chinese: 張立青; pinyin: Zhāng Lìqīng; 1936–2010), a Chinese-Taiwanese scholar who taught Mandarin Chinese at the University of Washington, Tunghai University, Bryn Mawr College, Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Swarthmore College.^[3] Together they had one son, Thomas Krishna Mair.

Three of Mair's former students characterize his wide-ranging scholarship.

Victor has always cast his nets widely, and he could routinely amaze us with observations far afield from the Chinese text we were reading in class. Today people often attempt to simulate this cosmopolitanism under the rubric of interdisciplinary study, but for Victor, it was quite untrendy: he simply had an insatiable appetite for knowledge and pushing boundaries. Indeed, border-crossing has been our mentor's dominant mode of scholarship, a mode that has constantly interrogated where those very borders are both geographically and categorically. Though never sporting fashionable jargon, Victor has always taken on phenomena and issues that engage aspects of multiculturalism, hybridity, alterity, and the subaltern, while remarkably grounding his work in painstaking philological analysis. Victor demonstrates the success of philology, often dismissed as a nineteenth-century holdover, for investigating twenty-first-century concerns. (Boucher, Schmid, and Sen 2006:1)

Mair is a contributor to the linguistics blog Language Log.^[4]

Pinyin advocacy

Mair is a long-time advocate for writing Mandarin Chinese in an alphabetic script (viz., pinyin), which he considers advantageous for Chinese education, computerization, and lexicography.

In the first issue of Sino-Platonic papers (1986), he suggested the publication of a

In 1990, after unsuccessfully trying to obtain financial support for an alphabetically collated Chinese-English dictionary, Mair organized an international team of linguists and lexicographers who were willing to work as part-time volunteers. Under the editorial leadership of John DeFrancis, they published the first general Chinese-English single-sort dictionary in 1996. According to the "Acknowledgments" (1996:ix), "This dictionary owes its genesis to the initiative of Victor H. Mair of Pennsylvania." A revised and expanded edition was published in 2000.

Selected works

• Sino-Platonic Papers

Works listed in Library of Congress (Chronological order)

• Victor H. Mair, Tun-Huang Popular Narratives (Cambridge [Cambridgeshire]; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Influences from India seen in texts from Dunhuang caves.
• Victor H. Mair, Painting and Performance : Chinese Picture Recitation and Its Indian Genesis (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1988).
• Victor H. Mair, Cheng Mei Bo Wang, Mei Cherng's "Seven Stimuli" And Wang Bor's "Pavilion of King Terng" : Chinese Poems for Princes (Lewiston, NY, US: E. Mellen Press, 1988).
• Victor H. Mair, T'ang Transformation Texts: A Study of the Buddhist Contribution to the Rise of Vernacular Fiction and Drama in China (Cambridge, Mass.: Council on East Asian Studies Harvard University: Distributed by Harvard University Press, 1989). Popular narratives of Buddhist motifs, known as bianwen (變文)
• Laozi, Victor H. Mair, tr. Tao Te Ching: The Classic Book of Integrity and the Way (New York: Bantam Books, 1990).
• Victor H. Mair Yongquan Liu, Characters and Computers (Amsterdam, Netherlands; Washington: IOS Press, 1991).
• Victor H. Mair, The Columbia Anthology of Traditional Chinese Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).
• Victor H. Mair, The Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Peoples of Eastern Central Asia (Washington, D.C.: Institute for the Study of Man Inc. in collaboration with the University of Pennsylvania Museum Publications, 1998).
• Zhuangzi Victor H. Mair, tr. Wandering on the Way: Early Taoist Tales and Parables of Chuang Tzu (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1998).
• Songling Pu, Denis C. Mair Victor H. Mair, tr.
  Liaozhai Zhiyi
  Xuan (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 2000).
• ISBN 0-500-05101-1
• Victor H. Mair, The Columbia History of Chinese Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001).
• Songling Pu, Denis C. Mair Victor H. Mair, tr. Liao Zhai Zhi Yi Xuan (Beijing Shi: Wai wen chu ban she, Di 1 ban., 2001).
• Victor H. Mair, Nancy Shatzman Steinhardt, Paul Rakita Goldin, eds. Hawai'i Reader in Traditional Chinese Culture (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2005).
• Victor H. Mair, Contact and Exchange in the Ancient World (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2006).
• Victor H. Mair, tr. The Art of War / Sun Zi's Military Methods (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).
• Victor H. Mair and Erling Hoh, The True History of Tea (
  ISBN 978-0-500-25146-1
  (Hardcover).
• Miriam Robbins Dexter and Victor H. Mair, Sacred Display: Divine and Magical Female Figures of Eurasia (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2010).
• Victor H. Mair and Mark Bender (editors). The Columbia Anthology of Chinese Folk and Popular Literature. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).
• Victor H. Mair (editor). Buddhist Transformations and Interactions: Essays in Honor of Antonino Forte (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2017).

Notes

References

External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to Victor H. Mair.

• Official homepage
• 'The Tarim Basin Mummies' by Victor Mair on
  University of Pennsylvania Museum
  (video)
• Sacred Display - Award for Best Nonfiction Book in Women and Mythology