Lu Kou

As a medievalist and a scholar of premodern Chinese literature, Lu Kou’s research interests include medieval Chinese literature and culture, poetry and poetics, historiography, and comparative studies of China’s Middle Period and medieval Europe. He is currently at work on two book projects: War of Words: Courtly Exchange, Rhetoric, and Political Culture in Early Medieval China, which examines the “discursive battles” fought among rival states in China’s early medieval period and investigates how rhetoric constructed and contested political legitimacy in this age of multipolarity; and (tentatively titled) Locked Seal, Heart of Poetry: Bureaucracy and the Representation of Work in Medieval Chinese Poetry, 400-900 CE, which studies the dialectic between poetry and bureaucratic systems, between the lyrical and quotidian renderings of “work” in medieval poetry. Before joining the faculty at Columbia, he was Assistant Professor of Chinese at Bard College (2019-2022) and Visiting Assistant Professor at Williams College (2018-2019).