Contact Philology

Abstract: The study of language contact lacked prestige in traditional Philology. In Europe and China, philologists partitioned the past into distinct national languages. This talk asks how historical interactions across languages became a recognized modern research object. It revisits the early twentieth-century discovery in Dunhuang (western China) of a cave library of ancient texts in Sino-Tibetan, Indo-European, Semitic, and Turkic languages – and examines the broader transregional clash of colonial and anticolonial, capitalist and communist, politics through which linguistic experts made language contact meaningful.

Bio: Tamara Chin is an associate professor of comparative literature at Brown University and author of Savage Exchange: Han Imperialism, Chinese Literary Style, and the Economic Imagination; and The Silk Road Idea: Ancient Contact in the Modern Human Sciences, 1870-1970 (forthcoming 2026).