Campus
- Downtown Toronto (St. George)
Biography
Nathan Vedal specializes in the intellectual, cultural, and literary history of late imperial China and early modern East Asia between roughly the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. His first monograph, The Culture of Language in Ming China, which won the Morris D. Forkosch Book Prize from the Journal of the History of Ideas, examines the history of language study and the formation of scholarly disciplines in China from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. His forthcoming book, Translation, Emulation, and Manchu Literary Culture, considers Manchu literary-intellectual culture with a focus on the relationship between Chinese thought/aesthetics and Manchu literary production. Other research interests include early modern encyclopedic practices and forms of visualizing knowledge. His research has been funded by fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Study, ACLS, Luce/ACLS, and grants from SSHRC and NEH. He received his BMus from the Curtis Institute of Music, and MA and PhD from Harvard University. Prior to coming to the University of Toronto, he was a faculty member at Washington University in St. Louis and held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for Humanities and Information at Penn State.
Publications
Books
Translation, Emulation, and Manchu Literary Culture. Under contract, Harvard University Asia Center.
2022. The Culture of Language in Ming China: Sound, Script, and the Redefinition of Boundaries of Learning. New York: Columbia University Press.
Journal Articles
2024 “Annotating the Strange: Evidential Learning, Poetic Exegesis, and Manchu Translation in the Nineteenth-Century Reading of Liaozhai zhiyi,” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews. 46: 91–125.
2023 “Literati of the Garrisons: The Civil Service Translation Examination and Manchu Literary-Intellectual Culture in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” Journal of Asian Studies. 83.3: 339–61.
2022 “Dame Wang’s Dumplings: Mediating the Obscene in Manchu Translations of Erotic Literature at the Turn of the Eighteenth Century,” Nan Nü: Men, Women and Gender in China. 24.2: 263–95.
2021 “The Manchu Reading of Jinpingmei: Glossing, Encyclopedism, and Translingual Practices in Early Eighteenth-Century China,” Late Imperial China. 42.2: 1–48.
2020 “From Tradition to Community: The Rise of Contemporary Knowledge in Late Imperial China,” Journal of Asian Studies. 79.1: 77–101.
2018 “New Scripts for All Sounds: Cosmology and Universal Phonetic Notation Systems in Late Imperial China,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies. 78.1: 1–46.
2015 “Never Taking a Shortcut: Examination Poetry of the Tang Dynasty,” Tang Studies. 33: 38–61.
2013 “ ‘Preferring Omission over Falsity’: The Politics of Compilation in the Kangxi Classic of Characters 康熙字典,” Historiographia Linguistica. 40.1: 3–37.