Michael A. Fuller

Michael A. Fuller is Professor Emeritus at the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of California, Irvine. He began studying modern Chinese after entering Yale in 1972. He spent the summers of 1973 and 1974 learning Mandarin in Taiwan and then entered the graduate program in classical Chinese literature in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale. After spending the year 1980 in Taiwan, where he continued advanced studies of modern and classical Chinese, he returned to finish his Ph.D. on the poetry of the Song dynasty polymath Su Shi (1037-1101) in 1983. In 1984 he started his appointment as an assistant professor at Harvard in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations. After leaving Harvard in 1990, he became a software programmer (Copan Software), working primarily on database applications. In 1992 he was hired by the University of California, Irvine, as an assistant professor of Chinese literature and thought, where he remained until his retirement in 2021. His most recent books are Drifting among Rivers and Lakes: Southern Song Poetry and the Problem of Literary History (2013) and An Introduction to Chinese Poetry (2017).