
Traditional China Chair, U. Zurich. President, Europ. Ass. for Chinese Studies (EACS). Reweets are not necessarily endorsements; see also @behrwolf.bsky.social
Zurich, Switzerland
Joined January 2009
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Wolfgang Behr / 畢鶚 (氒/厥/攸) retweeted
a little over two weeks left to apply!!
🚨 Two PhD positions with me at the University of Zurich!
Join my new project “Governing the Party: How the Chinese Communist Party Holds Itself Together”.
4 years · Start: 1 March 2027
Apply by 22 November 2026
Please share widely! :-)
jobs.uzh.ch/job-vacancies/tw…
Wolfgang Behr / 畢鶚 (氒/厥/攸) retweeted
Assistant professor job: Thomas and Evelyn Rawski Endowed Chair in East Asian Studies.
cfopitt.taleo.net/careersect…
Wolfgang Behr / 畢鶚 (氒/厥/攸) retweeted
New research reveals women helped make the Terracotta Army!
The Terracotta Army — thousands of life-sized clay warriors and horses buried with China’s first emperor Qin Shi Huang more than 2,200 years ago — has long been imagined as the work of adult male craftsmen alone.
A research team from the Emperor Qinshihuang’s Mausoleum Site Museum (working with Shandong University) analyzed 79 independent fingerprints recovered from 23 terracotta figures. The results: about 45.0% from adult men, 32.7% from adult women, and 22.3% from youths under 15.
This is the first quantitative biological evidence showing that while adult men dominated production, women and juveniles also participated in shaping the figures, transporting parts, or assembling them. The fingerprints, preserved in the clay for over two millennia, rewrite our picture of who built this extraordinary underground army.
Wolfgang Behr / 畢鶚 (氒/厥/攸) retweeted
Some brief insights into the conference @make_boluo_ and I participated in this week. The scholars, topics, venue, and food - everything was so well organized, and the university and 簡逸光 were truly generous! Looking forward to the publication of our papers #ChinesePhilosophy
On October 13–14, 2026, the Forum on Textual Studies of The Analects and Western Sinology was held at Zhengyi Academy in Fuzhou. Co-hosted by the College of Liberal Arts at Fujian Normal University and the Department of Sinology at LMU Munich, and organized by the Institute for the Study of Confucian Classics at Fujian Normal University, the forum brought together 17 scholars of Chinese studies from China and abroad for an academic dialogue across civilizations centered on The Analects. #TheAnalects #Sinology #Confucian
Wolfgang Behr / 畢鶚 (氒/厥/攸) retweeted
Next week, we kick off our interdisciplinary Lecture Series "Philology: Method and/or Historical Object?". Listeners welcome!
en.idk-philologie.uni-muench…
Wolfgang Behr / 畢鶚 (氒/厥/攸) retweeted
We mourn the passing of Albert E. Dien (1927-2026), a pioneering scholar of early medieval Chinese history and archaeology and a founding member of the Group. His scholarship, generosity, and lifelong dedication to the field have left an enduring legacy. He will be dearly missed.
Wolfgang Behr / 畢鶚 (氒/厥/攸) retweeted
「劉釗先生著《發現“昆侖石刻”》出版」
fdgwz.org.cn/Web/Show/13379
いわゆる「尕日塘(ガンリタン)秦刻石」の専著。豊富な資料と高精細カラー写真あり。近年まで未発表だった里耶秦簡「琅邪獻昆陯五杏藥・秋鰝及它……」の写真も掲載。
Wolfgang Behr / 畢鶚 (氒/厥/攸) retweeted
Job Alert: Assistant Professor in the anthropology of China at MIT
careercenter.americananthro.…
Wolfgang Behr / 畢鶚 (氒/厥/攸) retweeted
2026年出土文獻與古文字相關專業碩博論文一覽
mp.weixin.qq.com/s/t2oNXNaZS…
Wolfgang Behr / 畢鶚 (氒/厥/攸) retweeted
Litterae Synonimae, sed infra sunt breviatae.
Some pretty astonishing matches for modern standard 简体字.
Wolfgang Behr / 畢鶚 (氒/厥/攸) retweeted
MIT published a brutally honest report on what AI is doing to students.
A committee of professors and students spent five months studying how AI changed learning on campus, and the findings read like a warning to every university on the planet.
Study groups are disappearing. Office hours are emptying out. Problem sets and take-home exams no longer prove anything, because AI can produce credible solutions to almost any written assignment in the undergraduate curriculum. Students who lean on chatbots lose mastery and confidence, and some slip into what the report calls cognitive surrender, reaching for AI at the first hint of struggle.
The numbers are rough. 46 percent of surveyed MIT undergrads use LLMs daily. 90 percent worry about their own overreliance. Undergrads who feel AI makes them replaceable now outnumber those who feel it makes them capable.
The committee's answer surprised me. They refused to fight AI with surveillance. The report calls AI detectors unreliable, says lockdown browsers feel like spying, and warns that policing students builds a classroom atmosphere of mutual distrust.
Instead, MIT wants to rebuild education around the things AI can't replace. That means oral exams, semester portfolios, in-person project work, and a required social component in every subject. The report even floats the idea of rethinking grades entirely, since without a GPA to optimize, much of the incentive to cheat with AI evaporates.
The committee warns professors against replacing undergrad research assistants with AI agents just because they're cheaper, because a university exists to grow people, not output.
The most famous tech school on earth admitted the machines broke its way of teaching. Its answer is more humans, not more software.
Wolfgang Behr / 畢鶚 (氒/厥/攸) retweeted
#newbook on early medieval China:
Traité juridique du livre des Jin 晉書 « 刑法志 ». Texte presenté, traduit et annoté par Frédéric Constant. Les belles lettres, 2025. lesbelleslettres.com/livre/9…
#medieval #china #history #law #chinesehistory
Wolfgang Behr / 畢鶚 (氒/厥/攸) retweeted
Wang, Bo, Tianqi Ma, and Yuanyi Ma. 2026. Introducing Wang Li: The Life and Works of a Chinese Linguist. London, England: Routledge.
routledge.com/p/book/9781032…
> 本書は、現代中国言語学の創始者の一人である王力の生涯と業績に焦点を当て、その学問的成果を包括的に紹介するものである。
Wolfgang Behr / 畢鶚 (氒/厥/攸) retweeted
Beautiful clay moulds used for bronze casting in Bronze Age China.
Decorated in the style of the Shang capital of Anyang, they were found at Zhaigou in Shaanxi Province, indicating cultural interaction between the Central Plain and highlands.
🆓 doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2026.10…
Wolfgang Behr / 畢鶚 (氒/厥/攸) retweeted
When the IHP relocated to Lizhuang, Sichuan, in 1940, an expense list shows a large black “library cat” was purchased to catch rats as an early form of biological pest control. It is the most expensive item listed!
Wolfgang Behr / 畢鶚 (氒/厥/攸) retweeted
New preprint! Japanese has effectively only two accent patterns: A quantitative and information-theoretic approach to lexical predictability osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/4u…
Wolfgang Behr / 畢鶚 (氒/厥/攸) retweeted
Applications are now open for FY2027 Postdoctoral Fellowships (Short-term(PE)(1st)). Please submit your application forms via Japanese host institutions to the JSPS Electronic Application System.
🕔Deadline: Sep. 25, 5 p.m. (JST)
🔗jsps.go.jp/english/e-fellow/…
#fellowship #postdocs

































