Michael Nylan is the Jane K. Sather Chair of History at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after t ...

. She writes about history, literature, philosophy, art and archaeology of early imperial China. Nylan was born in 1950 and named after

Saint Michael Michael, also called Saint Michael the Archangel, Archangel Michael and Saint Michael the Taxiarch is an archangel and the warrior of God in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. The earliest surviving mentions of his name are in third- and second- ...

by her mother, thankful for a successful birth after a series of miscarriages. After undergraduate and masters study in history, she studied

Classical Chinese Classical Chinese is the language in which the classics of Chinese literature were written, from . For millennia thereafter, the written Chinese used in these works was imitated and iterated upon by scholars in a form now called Literary ...

with

Michael Loewe Michael Arthur Nathan Loewe (2 November 1922 – 1 January 2025) was a British historian, Sinologist, and writer who authored dozens of books, articles, and other publications in the fields of Classical Chinese as well as the history of ancien ...

and fell in love with the subject. Her doctoral work an

Princeton University Princeton University is a private university, private Ivy League research university in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial ...

was in history and archaeology. She was one of the first American scholars in China after the opening in the 1970s, but her stay at the Institute of Archaeology of the

Chinese Academy of Social Sciences The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) is a Chinese state research institute and think tank. It is a ministry-level institution under the State Council of the People's Republic of China. The CASS is the highest academic institution and c ...

was unsuccessful, due to her male colleagues' refusal to take a woman on excavations. She was awarded a

Guggenheim Fellowship Guggenheim Fellowships are Grant (money), grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, endowed by the late Simon Guggenheim, Simon and Olga Hirsh Guggenheim. These awards are bestowed upon indiv ...

in 2014.

Selected works

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References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Nylan, Michael 1950 births Living people American sinologists University of California, Berkeley alumni University of California, Berkeley faculty