Graham Chamness

Your academic background spans Classics, Chinese, and East Asian studies. How did that pathway shape the way you think and teach?

My interest in culture, interdisciplinarity, and these different academic disciplines began with a year-long study abroad program I completed in high school. Living in China, where there is still often a deeper sense of connection to a cultural past, made me aware of how little I had thought about culture and history outside of China. That led me to study Latin and Greek and to reflect more on what is called “the West,” although we should be suspicious of that term. But what brought me back to Chinese and East Asian Studies was the appeal of Tang poetry, which I studied in graduate school. I was fascinated by the way in which reading a Tang poem fixes your attention to a particular moment or scene that brings together different aspects of a culture that existed in a different time and space. Religious ideas, botany, place names, traditional textual knowledge, nuances of language—all these things converge in a short poem of maybe just eight or ten lines, and so these texts were, for me, ways of getting beyond disciplines and arriving at a certain understanding of something someone created a long time ago. Doing so helps us imagine ourselves seeing through others’ points of view, and that’s part of what I think the humanities are all about. In my teaching now, I try to bring out the inherent interdisciplinarity of texts and other sources for students, who are mostly not going to become experts in this or that discipline but who will, hopefully, be inspired by what it feels like to uncover, appreciate, and critically engage with works of literature and art that others have created.

Looking back, are there particular influences or experiences that have played a key role in shaping your scholarly interests and approach?

I’ve already mentioned my experience living in China at a young age and taking graduate seminars on Tang poetry. One other experience stands out. I had an extension on a paper in graduate school while I was traveling in south China over the summer. My paper was on Chinese Buddhist art, and I was reading an obscure collection of poems and a preface written by a group of monks after they had explored a forested mountain in Zhejiang not far from where I was staying. I think that experience has followed me around, because I was struck by the way the physical environment I was seeing and reading about had a certain agency in what the monks were writing, even though we don’t usually think of the environment in those terms. But in truth, I think my approach to scholarship is most influenced by mentors and colleagues than anything else.

Much of your research explores religion, literature, and the environment in medieval China. What originally sparked your interest in this intersection?

One work that sparked this interest was The Buddhist Conquest of China, by Eric Zurcher, which examines how Buddhism was adapted to fit “native” Chinese culture. It is more of an extensive survey of a massive range of Buddhist, Daoist, and Confucian writings than a tightly argued thesis. The interaction of religion, literature, environment, and migration in the period when Buddhism entered China is very pronounced. Since Zurcher covers so much ground, I often find myself going back and picking up a thread of his work and developing it further for my own purposes.

For students considering HON 104: Identity, Choice, and Individuality, what do you hope they take away from the course and their experience working with you?

As in all my courses, I hope students will take away practical skills in reading, thinking, speaking, and writing. But in this course specifically, one of my big learning goals is for students to reflect on what it means to be an individual. We will be using primarily Chinese and Chinese American sources to think about this question, and I want to challenge the naïve assumption that individuality—whatever that word means—is somehow a uniquely “American” idea, while other cultures always place value on society over the individual. I don’t expect students to necessarily remember the names of all the people and texts we encounter in the course, but I hope the experience of reflecting on and challenging our assumptions through exposure to unfamiliar points of view will be memorable and useful.

As a new member of the DePaul Honors Program, what are you most excited to contribute, and what are you most looking forward to learning from honors students?

I am most excited to simply contribute my enthusiasm for learning. I am already learning a lot from my honors students, who bring a diversity of perspectives every day. I often want to hear from them about what they think matters to them now. Generations change, and I want to understand what challenges this generation thinks about and faces in today’s world and how I can help them meet those challenges. I look forward to continuing to learn from and with them.