Phone:

(812) 856-7002

Email:

pnvogt@iu.edu

Department:

Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures

Campus:

IU Bloomington

About Nick Vogt

• M.A./M.Phil./Ph.D., Columbia University
  • East Asian Languages and Cultures (History-East Asia)
• B.A., Dartmouth College

Early Chinese history
Archaeology of religion
Ritual studies
Kingship in comparative perspective
Inscriptions and manuscripts
Historiography as literature
Ancient history in popular media

My research focuses on the cultural and religious history of early China. I work largely with paleographical materials, such as inscribed bronze vessels and bamboo manuscripts, and take a special interest in “alternate histories” and other texts that didn’t make it into the classical canon.

To date, my work has concentrated on the Western Zhou era (ca. 11th-8th c. BCE), a time of sage kings and culture heroes. My current monograph project, entitled Bound by Bronze: Ritual and Kingship in Western Zhou China, explores the royal ritual of that period based on contemporary bronze inscriptions. Recently, I have begun a second line of research on the ideological, literary, and aesthetic concerns behind later tales of Western Zhou history in sources ranging from ancient manuscripts to modern science fiction.

I offer a broad range of courses on early China and pre-modern East Asia in general, including studies in the classical Chinese language.

I joined the EALC faculty in 2016 after four years at the Institute for Sinology, Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg, Germany.