Victor Mair

Victor Henry Mair is Full Professor and a Consulting Scholar at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. After graduating from Dartmouth College, Mair entered the United States Peace Corps in 1965 and served as a volunteer in Nepal for two years. In the fall of 1967, Mair entered a program of Buddhist Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle, where he studied Indian Buddhism, Chinese and Japanese Buddhism, Tibetan, and Sanskrit.

In 1968, Mair went to England as a Marshall Fellow to study Sanskrit at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, from which he received an Honorary B.A. (1972) and his M. Phil. (1984), both in Chinese. Mair received his Ph.D. in Chinese literature from the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1976.

Mair taught as an assistant professor in the department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations and in the Religious Studies Program at Harvard for three years. In 1979, he moved to the Department of Oriental Studies (now the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies) at the University of Pennsylvania.

In 1995-1996, Mair was a Fellow at the Institute for Research in Humanities (Jinbun Kagaku Kenkyujo) of Kyoto University in Japan. Since 1997, Mair has also been a Concurrent Professor in the Department of Chinese at Sichuan University (Chengdu, China).

Mair is married to Li-ching Chang (Zhang Liqing, born in Changyi, outside Qingdao, Shandong) and has one son, Thomas Krishna Mair.

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