Biography
Gian Rominger is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian Languages & Literature, specializing in early Chinese literary and intellectual history, especially from the Warring States to the Han dynasty. His other research interests include philology, historical linguistics, manuscript studies, digital humanities, and computational text analysis. His current book project examines how linguistic form mediates arguments in Classical Chinese texts, in particular how sound-based patterning is used to mime meaning in a variety of extant ancient texts. Relying on linguistic reconstructions of Old Chinese phonology, his work treats rhetorical and poetic dimensions of early Chinese writing (rhyme, parallelism, and phonological play) as integral to texts’ argumentative structures.
At the University of Washington, Rominger teaches courses on classical Chinese and digital humanities for Asian languages and literature. Prior to receiving his Ph.D. from Princeton University, he studied in Zürich, Heidelberg, and Wuhan. At Princeton, he was the inaugural recipient of the Digital Humanities Graduate Certificate, and his dissertation research was awarded both the Marjorie Chadwick Buchanan Dissertation Prize and the 2023 Dissertation Prize from Princeton’s Center for Digital Humanities.