Robert Campany

Robert Ford Campany (PhD University of Chicago, 1988) is Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair of Humanities and Professor of Asian Studies at Vanderbilt University. He has taught undergraduate and graduate courses in the areas of Chinese religious history and comparative religious studies for the past 38 years. He has co-edited three collections of essays and has written and published eight monographs, including The Chinese Dreamscape, 300 BCE-800 CE (Harvard University Asia Center Publications, 2020), which won the Médaille Stanislas Julien de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres and the Joseph Levenson Prize of the Association for Asian Studies. Among his current research projects are a study of what Traditions of Exemplary Transcendents (Liexian zhuan 列仙傳) tells us about the quest for transcendence prior to the turn of the first millennium and a monograph tentatively called A Cosmos of Self-Cultivators, which will be an aspectual study of the variegated relationships among human and other types of selves (animal, plant, mineral, etc.) in ancient and medieval China.