Christoph Harbsmeier

Holder of a Research Fellowship in Honour of Bernhard Karlgren. Professor of Chinese, University of Oslo. Adjunct Professor of Chinese, Peking University

Christoph Harbsmeier studied Chinese at Merton College in Oxford. In 1981, he received his Ph.D. from the University of Copenhagen, with the thesis Aspects of Classical Chinese Syntax. In addition to his position as Professor of Chinese at the University of Oslo, he serves as Adjunct Professor of Chinese at Peking University, Fudan University in Shanghai, Shanghai Normal University, East China Normal University, Wuhan University, and Zhejiang University in Hangzhou. In recent years, he has also been a Visiting Professor at Charles University in Prague, at the University of Michigan, at the University of Oxford, at Princeton University, at the University of California at Berkeley, at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Paris. Harbsmeier was a Fellow at SCAS in 2004–2005 as well as during the fall of 2008.

Harbsmeier is coordinator of the project Thesaurus Linguae Sericae: A Historical and Comparative Encyclopaedia of Chinese Conceptual Schemes (TLS). The project, in which SCAS is involved, aims at exploring the concepts of the Chinese language and is implemented as an interactive database; the contributors come from many countries. In 2005, Harbsmeier was awarded a major University of Oslo research prize for his work on the TLS project. Harbsmeier’s books include: Wilhelm von Humboldts Brief an Abel-Rémusat und die philosophische Grammatik des Altchinesischen (1979); Aspects of Classical Chinese Syntax (1981); and “Language and Logic”, volume 7.3 in Science and Civilisation in China (ed. J. Needham, 1998). In addition, he has published a monograph on the modern Chinese cartoonist Feng Zikai: The Cartoonist Feng Zikai. Social Realism with a Buddhist Face (1984).

Harbsmeier is a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.