Victor H. Mair


Victor Henry Mair is an American sinologist. He is a professor of Chinese at the University of Pennsylvania. 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, and his book coauthored with Miriam Robbins Dexter, Sacred Display: Divine and Magical Female Figures of Eurasia, won the Sarasvati Award for the Best Nonfiction Book in Women and Mythology.

Life and career

Victor H. Mair was born on March 25, 1943, in East Canton, Ohio. After high school, Mair attended Dartmouth College, where, in addition to his studies, he was a member of the Dartmouth Big Green men's basketball team. He graduated with an A.B. in 1965, then joined the Peace Corps and served in Nepal for two years. After leaving the Peace Corps in 1967, Mair returned to the United States and enrolled in the Buddhist Studies program at the University of Washington, where he began studying Buddhism, Sanskrit, and Classical Tibetan. In 1968, Mair won a Marshall Scholarship and moved to the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London to further study Chinese and Sanskrit, receiving a B.A. in 1972 and an M.Phil. in 1974. He then went to Harvard University to pursue doctoral studies in Chinese under the New Zealander scholar Patrick Hanan. He received a Ph.D. in 1976 with a doctoral dissertation entitled "Popular Narratives From Tun-huang", a study and translation of folk literature discovered among the Dunhuang manuscripts.
After completing his Ph.D., Mair joined the faculty at Harvard as an assistant professor and taught there for three years. In 1979, Mair left Harvard to join the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania, where he has remained ever since. 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 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.
In 1969, Mair married Chang Li-ch'ing, a Chinese-Taiwanese scholar who taught Mandarin Chinese at the University of Washington, Tunghai University, Bryn Mawr College, Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Swarthmore College. Together they had one son, Thomas Krishna Mair.
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.

Mair is a contributor to the linguistics blog Language Log.

Pinyin advocacy

Mair is a long-time advocate for writing Mandarin Chinese in an alphabetic script, which he considers advantageous for Chinese education, computerization, and lexicography.
In the , he suggested the publication of a Chinese dictionary arranged in the same familiar way as English, French, or Korean dictionaries: "single-sort alphabetical arrangement" purely based on the alphabetic spelling of a word, regardless of its morphological structure. Most Chinese words are multisyllabic compounds, where each syllable or morpheme is written with a single Chinese character. Following a two-millennia tradition, Chinese dictionaries – even modern pinyin-based ones like the Xinhua Zidian – are regularly ordered in "sorted-morpheme arrangement" based on the first morpheme in a word. For instance, a Chinese dictionary user who wanted to look up the word Bābāduōsī 巴巴多斯 "" could find it under ba in traditional sorted- morpheme ordering or under baba in single-sort alphabetic ordering.
In 1990, after unsuccessfully trying to obtain financial support for an alphabetically collated Chinese-English dictionary, Mair organized an international team of linguists and lexicographers who were willing to work as part-time volunteers. Under the editorial leadership of John DeFrancis, they published the first general Chinese-English single-sort dictionary in 1996. According to the "Acknowledgments", "This dictionary owes its genesis to the initiative of Victor H. Mair of Pennsylvania." A revised and expanded edition was published in 2000.

Selected works

Works listed in Library of Congress