Gian Rominger is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian Languages & Literature, specializing in early Chinese literary and intellectual history, especially from the Warring States period to the Han dynasty. His current book project examines how linguistic form mediates arguments in Classical Chinese texts, in particular how sound-based patterning is used to mime meaning in a variety of extant ancient texts. Relying on linguistic reconstructions of Old Chinese phonology (applied at scale to a corpus of early Chinese texts through computational means), his work treats rhetorical and poetic dimensions of early Chinese writing as integral to texts’ argumentative structures. 

Beyond his work in early Chinese literature and intellectual history, his research and teaching engage broader questions of data-driven approaches in the humanities, especially in non-Anglophone contexts. In this vein, he explores how computational approaches, especially computational text analysis, can be adapted to languages and writing systems that defy the assumptions built into English-language digital infrastructures, while also reflecting critically on the epistemological implications of quantification for humanistic inquiry.