About

Martin Kern is the Joanna and Greg Zeluck ’84 P13 P18 Professor in Asian Studies at Princeton University. His research focuses on the practices of composition, transmission, and hermeneutics of Chinese textual culture over the first millennium BCE. He studies all genres of ancient Chinese literature, including poetry as cultural memory and performance in political and religious ritual, authorship in poetry, philosophy, and historiography, writing and orality, manuscript studies, early literary thought, style and rhetoric in philosophy and historiography, and the history and early formation of Chinese poetry. Kern has directed significant academic initiatives, including the university-wide collaboration 'Comparative Antiquity: A Humanities Council Global Initiative' and the Princeton-Venice Summer School in Classical Chinese and Classical Japanese/Kanbun. He also directs the 'International Center for the Study of Ancient Text Cultures' at Renmin University of China, which is dedicated to the global study of antiquity in comparative contexts. An esteemed scholar, Kern has served as co-editor of T’oung Pao and is involved in editing key reference works in the field. He has held fellowships from numerous prestigious foundations and was awarded the China Special Book Award in 2025. His academic contributions include numerous publications and lectures, and he is an elected member of the American Philosophical Society. Kern earned his Ph.D. and M.A. in Sinology from Cologne University in Germany.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• History
• Virology
• Archaeology
• Internal medicine
• Medicine
• Art
• Pathology
• Literature
• Immunology

Selected publications

• Writing and Community in 300 BCE China

  2025-11-05

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• Preliminary Material

  2023-10-16

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• Introduction: Zuozhuan and the Beginnings of Chinese Historiography

  2023-10-16

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• Poetry Quotation, Commentary, and the Ritual Order: Staging the “Noble Man” in Zuozhuan

  2023-10-16

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• The Shijing詩經 (Classic of Poetry; Book of Odes)

  2023-01-11

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  The Shijing, or Book of Odes (aka Classic of Poetry, Book of Songs, etc.) is the fountainhead of the Chinese literary tradition. An anthology of 305 undated and anonymous poems that probably arose from the regional courts of the Eastern Zhou period (770–256 bce) and according to tradition was arranged by Confucius (551–479 bce), it contains, in this order, 160 “Airs of the States” (guofeng國風), 74 “Minor Court Hymns” (xiaoya小雅), 31 “Major Court Hymns” (daya大雅), and 40 “Eulogies” (song頌). The poems are customarily believed to have been composed between 1000 and 600 bce; ancient accounts mention their recitation as texts and performance as musical pieces. Recent finds of ancient bamboo manuscripts show that written versions of the anthology, especially of the “Airs of the States,” existed since at least the fourth century bce, though no complete anthology including all four sections of the text is documented yet from before the Western Han (202 bce–9 ce). Numerous short quotations from the poems appear in Warring States period (453–221 bce), philosophical texts to invoke the weight and authority of tradition. These testimonials mark the Shijing as the single most quotable and most widely known text in Chinese antiquity and as the cultural hallmark of the educated elite. While the “Hymns” and “Eulogies” were performed in the religious and political rituals of the Zhou royal house to recall the glory of the founding and heyday of the Western Zhou (1046–771 bce), the original context of the “Airs of the States” remains uncertain. Their simple, repetitive structures are often taken as evidence of their origins in folk song, even though the poems have survived only in the writings of the ancient elite. Unlike especially the “Major Court Hymns,” none of the “Airs” offers a sustained narrative, and few contain any historical reference at all; already in antiquity, their semantic ambiguity gave rise to widely different interpretations. At the Western Han imperial court, the Shijing was officially canonized as one of the Five Classics, the core of Confucian learning. Since then, it has attracted thousands of commentaries, subcommentaries, and studies on all of its literary, historical, and linguistic aspects. In recent decades, new discoveries of ancient manuscripts dating from the last four centuries bce have led to yet another flood of books and articles on the Shijing, in particular from Mainland China.

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• Abstandsstrukturen für Leichtbaupaneele mit hoher Delaminationsresistenz

  Technische Textilien · 2022-01-01

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  Das Ziel des Projekts „Integrale Fachwerkleichtbaupaneele“ bestand in der simulationsgestützten Entwicklung integral gewebter, räumlich schub- und druckstabiler Abstandsstrukturen für flächig ausgeprägte Leichtbaustrukturen und Paneele. Gegenüber konventionellen Sandwichmaterialien und anderen textilen Abstandsstrukturen verfügen diese über diagonal sowohl in Kett- als auch Schussrichtung eingebrachte Polfäden, die formschlüssig innerhalb der Decklagen eingebunden sind. Dieses neue, innovative Herstellungsverfahren führt zu Leichtbaupaneelen mit signifikant gesteigerten strukturmechanischen Kennwerten. Gleichzeitig erlaubt es erstmalig auch die Realisierung gekrümmter Paneelstrukturen, die im Gegensatz zu konventionellen Sandwichmaterialien keine verformungsbedingten Eigenspannungen aufweisen. Zum potenziellen Nutzerkreis der Projektergebnisse gehören KMU der Textilindustrie, insbesondere Webereien, und der Verbundwerkstoffindustrie. Die neuen Paneele sind für unterschiedlichste Anwendungsfelder prädestiniert, wie Fahrzeugbau, Schiffsbau, Schienenfahrzeug- und Flugzeugbau, Gebäudeausrüstung sowie den Maschinen- und Anlagenbau.

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• Cultural Memory and the Epic in Early Chinese Literature: The Case of Qu Yuan 屈原 and the<i>Lisao</i>離騷

  Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture · 2022 · 2 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Literature
  • History

  Abstract The present essay combines the theory of Cultural Memory with ideas about textual repertoires, composite text, and distributed authorship that in recent years have been advanced in studies of early and medieval Chinese literature. In its first part, the essay introduces in detail the historical development and key features of Cultural Memory theory. In its second part, it applies this theory to the study of Qu Yuan 屈原 and the Lisao 離騷, the greatest poem of early China. Through detailed philological analysis, the Lisao is described not as a single text by a single author but as a composite, authorless artifact that participates in a larger Qu Yuan discourse distributed across multiple texts in both prose and poetry. This distributed “Qu Yuan Epic” is an anthology of distinct characteristics attributed to the quasi-mythological Qu Yuan persona—a persona that itself emerges as a composite textual configuration into which are inscribed the nostalgic ideals and shifting aspirations of Han imperial literati. This Han social imaginaire recollects the noble exemplar of the old Chu aristocracy; the dual prophecy of the fall of Chu to Qin and of Qin's subsequent collapse; the religious, historical, mythological, and literary traditions of Chu; the embodied paradigm of the ruler-minister relationship; and the gradual formation of the ideal of authorship through the transformation of poetic hero into heroic poet.

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• Simulationsgestützte Entwicklung von Geweben für 3D-FKV-Anwendungen

  Technische Textilien · 2022-01-01

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  Bei der Fertigung von 3D-Bauteilgeometrien aus Faser-Kunststoff-Verbunden kommt es bei der Umformung der textilen Struktur zu unerwünschten Verzerrungen, die z.B. zur Faltenbildung oder Faserfehlorientierung führen. Mit der Entwicklung maßgeschneiderter Gewebe, die in einzelnen Teilbereichen das geforderte lokale Umformvermögen aufweisen, kann dem entgegengewirkt werden. Für die Auslegung und Umsetzung dieser Tailored Weaves wurde eine CAE-Prozesskette validiert sowie ein neuartiges ORW-System konstruktiv-technologisch entwickelt.

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• 1 Chinese

  Princeton University Press eBooks · 2021-08-02

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• Simulationsgestützte Entwicklung und Umsetzung gewebter Beton-Armierungen mit hohem Formschluss

  Technische Textilien · 2021-01-01

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  Das Open-Reed-Weaving (ORW) ermöglicht die Einbringung einer formschlussbildenden Profilierung in die Bewehrungsstrukturen für Textilbeton. Die Herausforderung bei diesem Verfahren liegt hauptsächlich in der Realisierung der für die Betonarmierung benötigten geringen Strukturdehnung. Im Rahmen des IGF-Forschungsprojekts wurde untersucht, inwieweit mit simulationsgestützt entwickelten ORW-Bewehrungsstrukturen eine formschlussbildende Profilierung bei gleichzeitig geringer Strukturdehnung umgesetzt werden kann. Darüber hinaus wurde ermittelt, welche Randbedingungen für eine formschlüssige Kraftübertragung der Betonmatrix auf die Verstärkungsstruktur erfüllt sein müssen.

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Frequent coauthors

• Benjamin A. Elman

  University of Arizona

  6 shared

• Yuri Pines

  5 shared

• Reinhard Emmerich

  University of Münster

  5 shared

• Clemens Treter

  Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

  5 shared

• Raoul David Findeisen

  5 shared

• Hans van Ess

  Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

  5 shared

• Claire Sulmont‐Rossé

  5 shared

• Ja Ian Chong

  University of Arizona

  4 shared

Labs

• East Asian Studies Faculty BookshelfPI

Awards & honors

• Fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation
• Fellowship from the Mellon Foundation
• Fellowship from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation
• Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies
• Fellowship from the Institute of Advanced Study