Gian Rominger studies early Chinese intellectual history and literature. He is particularly interested in the function and performativity of puns, word plays, and poetic sections within argumentative texts from the late Warring States and Western Han period. His dissertation focuses on such poetic devices within texts such the Lüshi chunqiu 呂氏春秋 and the Huainanzi 淮南子, and highlights the role of sound in the production of meaning and the codification of knowledge in ancient China.

Gian’s wider areas of interest include paleography and manuscript studies, philosophy of language, historical linguistics, and Digital Humanities. He is also working on DIRECT (“Digital Intertextual Resonances in Early Chinese Texts”), a project he launched at Princeton’s CDH in collaboration with Nick Budak and John O’Leary starting in 2018.

Before joining the Ph.D. program in East Asian Studies at Princeton University Gian earned, both his B.A. (2013) and M.A. (2016) in Sinology and also spent some time as an exchange student in Wuhan and Heidelberg.