From Tang to Song: Transmissions and Inventions in China's Middle Period, Volume 1

Robert Hymes is H.W. Carpentier Professor of Chinese History at Columbia University. His work has focused on the social and cultural history of middle period China, studying elite culture, family and kinship, religion, and medicine among other topics. He is currently pursuing two projects, on the East Asian origins of the Black Death and on the problem of "belief" in the middle period. His monographs Statesmen and Gentlemen (1986) and Way and Byway (2002) won the Joseph Levenson Prize of the Association for Asian Studies.

Anna M. Shields is Gordon Wu '58 Professor of Chinese Studies at Princeton University, and her work focuses on Tang, tenth century, and Song literature and literary history. Recent publications include the co- edited volume Religion and Literature in Medieval China: The Way and the Words (with Gil Raz, 2023), and "Avatars of Li Bai: Producing Tang Poets in the Northern Song Dynasty," forthcoming in Imperial Authority and Cultures of Learning in Byzantium and Tang and Song China.