Dr Michael Schimmelpfennig

Michael Schimmelpfennig worked as coordinator of the Graduate school for the Study of Religion and Normativity while completing his PhD at the University of Heidelberg. He moved on to work as coordinator and lecturer of the Graduate School for Chinese and Japanese postgraduates' research on "Knowledge Transfer between Europe and China" at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg before taking up a position as lecturer at the Chair of Chinese studies at Erlangen, offering courses in Literary Chinese and graduate seminars on various topics in Chinese literature, history, society, and research methodology. Before joining the ANU in 2013, he served as interim professor of Chinese studies at the University of Frankfurt.

Michael Schimmelpfennig regards himself as a sinologist in a traditional sense. He studied Chinese archeaology before he developed a keen interest in early traditional Chinese literature and poetry, specialising in the history of textual reception and commentarial interpretation. In more recent work he engages with the history of meaning of Chinese terms for certain conceptual ideas, in particular those concerning human relations in and beyond the family in China's past and present. He also engages with Digital Humanities in Chinese Studies, focussing on the possibilities of computational analysis of large corpora of traditional Chinese texts, in particular  multilayered texts, i. e. text with multiple commentaries.