Peter K Bol
· EALC: Charles H. Carswell Professor of East Asian Languages and CivilizationsVerifiedHarvard University · Language and Literatures of Asia
Active 1982–2025
About
Peter K Bol is the Charles H. Carswell Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University, on leave for Fall 2026. His research interests focus on the history of China’s cultural elites at the national and local levels from the 7th to the 17th century. He is associated with the Committee on Regional Studies—East Asia at Harvard University, located at 1730 Cambridge Street, Suite 105, Cambridge, Massachusetts. His academic work emphasizes understanding the development and influence of China's cultural elites over several centuries, contributing to the field of East Asian studies and Chinese history.
Research topics
- Sociology
- Computer Science
- Social Science
- Data science
- Epistemology
- Data Mining
- Geology
- Geography
- Paleontology
- Philosophy
- History
- Archaeology
Selected publications
Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies · 2025-06-01
article1st authorCorrespondingGeocoding the past world: unearthing coordinates of early China from texts using generative AI
International Journal of Geographical Information Systems · 2025-04-24 · 5 citations
articleSenior authorExtracting geographic information from historical texts presents unique challenges. To address these challenges, this study leverages generative large language models (LLMs) to extract historical toponyms and their corresponding location references from texts. The coordinates of the extracted toponyms are then identified by a historical geocoder, which also calculates their maximum error distances based on the location references, indicating the degree of uncertainty. Both the extraction and geocoding processes are integrated into a novel tool named ‘His-Geo’ (https://github.com/yukiyuqichen/His-Geo). To evaluate the results, this study also curates a manually annotated dataset, the Early China Historical Geographic Corpus (CHGC-Early), filling the gap in the absence of geographic data for early China in existing gazetteers and providing a benchmark dataset for training and evaluating approaches for tasks related to geographic information extraction from premodern Chinese texts. The evaluation results show a satisfactory 0.831 F1 score for the GPT-4o model, demonstrating the remarkable capability of generative large language models in extracting geographic information from lengthy, unstructured texts that encompass diverse and sometimes conflicting views.
Psychological Change and Kinship Intensity in China over Two Millennia
2025-06-09 · 2 citations
preprintOpen accessA growing body of evidence suggests that important aspects of psychology culturally co-evolve with different institutions and social norms over historical time. Here, using two classical Chinese corpora, we apply a new computational text-analysis pipeline to capture psychological characteristics across time (770 BCE to 1911 CE) and space (270 prefectures). Our results offer two key insights. First, our psychological measures demonstrate both substantial regional variation and non-linear temporal dynamics, bringing into question any monolithic, static, linear, or essentialized views of Chinese psychology. Second, to explain historical and regional diversity in psychological traits, we test and find support for the hypothesis that family organizations—captured by kinship intensity—predictably co-evolve with particular socio-cooperative aspects of psychology. Our contribution extends efforts to measure psychological attributes from textual sources beyond Western societies (and predominantly English-language data) and highlights the importance of kinship in shaping psychological outcomes in Chinese history.
Government, Society, and State:
2024-06-14
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingJournal of Chinese History · 2024-02-12
article1st authorCorrespondingAn abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
Digital Scholarship in the Humanities · 2024-01-31 · 1 citations
articleSenior authorAbstract Kinship is an important issue in history studies. The kinship database is the key resource to analyze the structure, succession, and evolution of families. However, one kinship could be expressed by different words, and one kinship word may be vague and ambiguous in natural languages, especially in pre-modern Chinese. As in the well-known China Biographical Database, which contains 484,066 kinship instances, there are more than 400 kinship words. Thus, the relations extracted from history texts cannot be directly used to build family networks. In this article, we put forward a novel method to normalize kinship relations by three basic relations: father–descendant, mother–descendant, and husband–wife, as well as the gender of each person. All types of kinships are normalized to these three basic relations. In this way, we identified 178,390 basic kinship relations to fully describe the original 462,147 unambiguous kinship instances, while finding 3,989 inconsistencies and inferring 5,805 missing persons. Then, we generate 29,423 families by basic kinship relations and analyze the properties of families, such as their sizes, depths, and intermarriages across families. This type of family analysis had been almost impossible prior to normalizing kinship relations. Therefore, this technique enables improved family database construction and deeper quantitative analysis.
Chu Hsi’s Redefinition of Literati Learning
2023-11-09 · 8 citations
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingHarvard University Asia Center eBooks · 2022-09-29
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingAppendix 6.2: Wuzhou Biographical and Literary Anthologies
Harvard University Asia Center eBooks · 2022-09-29
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingHarvard University Asia Center eBooks · 2022-09-29
book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
Frequent coauthors
- 25 shared
Brian Suher
University of Hong Kong
- 25 shared
Wendy Swartz
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
- 25 shared
Ji Hao
University of Hong Kong
- 25 shared
Atsuko Sakaki
University of Toronto
- 25 shared
J. W. Farmer
Harvard University Press
- 25 shared
Dylan Sanders
University of Toronto
- 25 shared
Keith N. Knapp
- 25 shared
Andrew Chittick
Beijing City University
Education
- 1986
Ph.D., East Asian Languages and Civilizations
Harvard University
- 1982
M.A., East Asian Languages and Civilizations
Harvard University
- 1979
B.A., History
University of California, Berkeley
- Resume-aware match score
- Save to shortlist
- AI-drafted outreach
See your match with Peter K Bol
PhdFit ranks faculty by your research interests, methods, and publications — grounded in their actual work, not templates.
- Free to start
- No credit card
- 30-second signup