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Emeritus Profiles
 
     
  HARUO AOKI (Japanese Language & Linguistics)  
 

Haruo Aoki, Professor Emeritus, received his BA from Hiroshima University in English in 1953, his MA in English from UCLA in 1958, and his PhD in Linguistics from U.C.Berkeley in 1965. After teaching for two years at the Stanford Center for Japanese Studies in Tokyo, he returned to Berkeley, where he taught Japanese linguistics and language in what is now the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures until his retirement as Professor in 1991. He has published books in English and Japanese on such topics as Japanese language pedagogy, Japanese linguistics, and Nez Perce, including the monumental Nez Perce Dictionary (University of California Publications in Linguistics, 1994). He is a recipient of the Shinmura Izuru Prize.

 
     
 

CYRIL BIRCH (Chinese Literature)

 
 
Cyril Birch, Agassiz Professor of Chinese and Comparative Literature, retired in 1990 after 44 years of teaching, first in London's School of Oriental and African Studies and then from 1960 onwards at Berkeley. He has held research fellowships at Stanford, and in Hong Kong, Kyoto, and Washington D.C., and visiting professorships at Taiwan National University and in Hawaii, Melbourne, and British Columbia. His publications cover traditional fiction and drama and twentieth century writers. Stories from a Ming Collection (1958) is still in print as a paperback, as are other books, including Anthology of Chinese Literature (2 vols.), Peony Pavilion, and Scenes for Mandarins. He and his wife Dorothy enjoy frequent visits by their two children and three grandchildren to their retreat in the Sierra Nevada foothills.
 
     
 

JAMES BOSSON (Altaic Languages; Tibetan)

 
     
 

KUN CHANG (Chinese Linguistics)

 
 
Kun Chang received his B.A. (1938) in Chinese language and literature from National Tsinghua University and his M.A. (1949) and Ph.D. (1955) from Yale. He became an Academician in Academia Sinica in 1972. After teaching Chinese, Tibetan, and Sanskrit for 12 years at the University of Washington in Seattle, he arrived at Berkeley in 1963, where he taught Chinese Language and historical linguistics until his retirement in 1988. He has conducted research at National Southwestern University, Academia Sinica, and Yenching University (linguistic survey of non-Chinese languages in southwestern China). His fields of publication include Moso, Miao-yao, historical Chinese Linguistics, and, with Betty Shefts Chang, spoken Tibetan.
 
     
 

H. SAMUEL CHEUNG (Chinese Literature & Linguistics)

 
 
Hung-nin Samuel Cheung received his B.A. and M.A. degrees from The Chinese University of Hong Kong and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. In 1974, he joined the Berkeley faculty, teaching Chinese language and literature. He served as Coordinator of the Chinese language program in the early 1990s, and as Chair in 1997-98. Professor Cheung has also taught at the University of Oregon, the University of Hong Kong, and Baptist University of Hong Kong. His research interests include Chinese linguistics, Cantonese dialect, and vernacular Chinese fiction. He is currently Professor of Humanities and Director of the Center for Chinese Linguistics at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. 
 
     
 

JOHN JAMIESON (Chinese Literature)

 
     
 

DAVID KEIGHTLEY (Chinese History)

 
 
David N. Keightley taught early Chinese history at Berkeley between 1969, the year he received his PhD from Columbia University, and 1998. While at Berkeley he served as Chair of the Center for Chinese Studies, Chair of the History Department, and Interim Director of the East Asian Library. He also served as a Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures in 1996-98. He is the author of Sources of Shang History: The Oracle-Bone Inscriptions of Bronze Age China (1978) and The Ancestral Landscape: Time, Space, and Community in Late Shang China (ca. 1200-1045 B.C.), and editor of The Origins of Chinese Civilization (1983). He also wrote the chapter on the Shang dynasty for the Cambridge History of Ancient China (1999). One of the editors and founders of the journal, Early China, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1978 and a MacArthur Fellowship in 1986. One of first American scholars to visit the People's Republic of China (in 1975), he served on various subcommittees of the Committee for Scholarly Communication with the PRC in the late 1980s and early 1990s. A Research Fellow at Cambridge University in 1978-79 and a visiting professor at Peking University in 1981, he is the author of numerous articles on Neolithic and Bronze-Age China, with particular attention to the Late Shang dynasty (ca.12000 to 1045 B.C.). Keightley is currently at work on a book called Working for His Majesty: Labor Mobilization and Management in Late Shang China.
 
     
 

LEWIS LANCASTER (Buddhism; Tibetan)

 
 
Lewis Lancaster, a specialist in the canons of Buddhist texts, was the first student to complete the Ph.D. in Buddhist Studies at the University of Wisconsin. He taught at the University of California, Berkeley, for 33 years, with five years as Chair. By means of a grant from the National Geographic Society, he and a group of students and faculty inventoried texts in monasteries among the Sherpa people in the Himalayas. He then began to research the problems of converting Buddhist texts from Pali and Chinese into computer format, which resulted in major CD ROM databases. That computer experience then led him to form an association of scholars called the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative, which is housed on the Berkeley campus and has a thousand affiliates worldwide. He is now President at Hsilai University in Rosemead.
 
     
 

SUSAN MATISOFF (Japanese Literature)
Susan Matisoff, Professor, received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1973. She taught at Stanford (1972-1999) before joining the Berkeley faculty. After serving as Chair for four years, she continued to teach in the department until 2006. In retirement she is finding more time for research and writing on various topics related to noh drama as well as sekkyō-bushi, a form of early Tokugawa period puppet theater that developed from medieval oral narrative traditions.

 
     
 

JEFFREY RIEGEL (Chinese Literature)
Jeffrey Riegel, Professor, teaches undergraduate readings courses in ancient Chinese poetry and prose and graduate seminars on early Chinese thought, the "Confucian Classics," as well as on paleography and recently-excavated manuscripts. His research interests encompass these and related topics. He is currently preparing a full translation of the Mozi and a study of traditional ghost stories. The Annals of Lü Buwei, a book by Professor Riegel and the late John Knoblock, was published by Stanford University Press in 2001.

 
     
 

PAN-HSIN TING (Chinese Linguistics)

 
 
Prof. Ting graduated from National Taiwan University and received his Ph.D. from the University of Washington at Seattle in 1972. Tutored by eminent scholars such as T'ung-he Tung, Paul Serruys and Fang-kuei Li, Prof. Ting specializes in Chinese dialectology and the phonological history of Chinese. He has exerted great influence on the development of Chinese linguistics as a field by (a) fusing both traditional Chinese scholarship, new fieldwork data and modern linguistics of the West, and (b) holding three important posts, namely (i) Acting Director (1981-85) and then Director (1985-89), Institute of Philology and History, Academia Sinica; (ii) first Professor (1989-94) and then Agassiz Professor of Chinese Linguistics (1994-98) at UC Berkeley; and (iii) Dean of Humanities and Social Science (1996-2004), Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Prof. Ting is also an Academician of Academia Sinica (elected 1986) and an Honorary Member of the Linguistic Society of America (elected 2000).
 
     
 

STEPHEN WEST (Chinese Literature)

 
 

Professor Stephen H. West received his Ph.D. degree from the University of Michigan in 1972. He began his teaching career at the University of Arizona (1972-85) before joining the Berkeley faculty in 1986. He teaches courses in the prose and poetry of late medieval China (the Song and Yuan dynasties), urban literature of the 12th-13th century, and early Chinese drama. His research specialties are in early Chinese theater, urban culture of the late medieval period, and cultural history of the same period.

 
     
     

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