Victor H. Mair

Victor H. Mair

Victor Henry Mair (born March 25, 1943) is a Philologist specializing in Sinitic and Indo-European languages, and holds the position of Professor of Chinese Language and Literature in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, United States. Among other accomplishments, Mair has edited the standard Columbia History of Chinese Literature and the Columbia Anthology of Traditional Chinese Literature. Mair is the series editor of the Cambria Sinophone World Series (Cambria Press), and his book coauthored with Miriam Robbins Dexter (published by Cambria Press), Sacred Display: Divine and Magical Female Figures of Eurasia, won the Sarasvati Award for the Best Nonfiction Book in Women and Mythology.

Mair received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1976. He has taught at the University of Pennsylvania since 1979. He is also founder and editor of Sino-Platonic Papers, an academic journal examining Chinese, East Asian and Central Asian linguistics and literature.

Mair specializes in early written vernacular Chinese, and is responsible for translations of the Dao De Jing (the Mawangdui Silk Texts version), the Zhuangzi and The Art of War. He has also collaborated on interdisciplinary research on the archeology of Eastern Central Asia. The American Philosophical Society awarded him membership in 2007.

Three of Mair's former students characterize his wide-ranging scholarship.

Victor has always cast his nets widely, and he could routinely amaze us with observations far afield from the Chinese text we were reading in class. Today people often attempt to simulate this cosmopolitanism under the rubric of interdisciplinary study, but for Victor, it was quite untrendy: he simply had an insatiable appetite for knowledge and pushing boundaries. Indeed, border-crossing has been our mentor's dominant mode of scholarship, a mode that has constantly interrogated where those very borders are both geographically and categorically. Though never sporting fashionable jargon, Victor has always taken on phenomena and issues that engage aspects of multiculturalism, hybridity, alterity, and the subaltern, while remarkably grounding his work in painstaking philological analysis. Victor demonstrates the success of philology, often dismissed as a nineteenth-century holdover, for investigating twenty-first-century concerns. (Boucher, Schmid, and Sen 2006:1)